Report on global warming: forget carbon emission, make people rich

The report, released on Wednesday by an international organisation called Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change (CSCCC), suggested Governments all over the world to remove subsidies and taxes on agriculture and forestry, and privatise Government-owned land and water. While terming the IPCC as “alarmist” and “heavily biased”, the report urged the administrations to lift restrictions on ownership of property and barriers to entrepreneurship such as licensing systems.

The organisation, that seeks to educate the public about the science and economics of climate change, was of the view that such steps would make people richer and therefore strengthen their capability to adapt to climate change.

Arguing strongly against any mitigation efforts, it said that “we might end up blowing a trillion dollars and still find ourselves without a planet.” The report asserts that “to the extent that global warming occurs gradually, the best strategy likely is adaptation”.

In rejecting mitigation strategies, the report banks on the ability of human beings to think and come out with intelligent solution to any problem. “When faced with a threat, humans are not generally passive. We react, identify the source of the threat and seek to address it. The more entrepreneurial among us convert the threat into opportunities,” it said.

The report rejected the theory that the observed global warming was a result of carbon emissions. “In his famous film on climate change An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore shows a graph depicting the correlation between earth’s temperature and carbon emissions. But correlation is not causation,” said Deepak Lal, a professor at the University of California, who was present at the function.

He said efforts were on to prove an alternative hypothesis which suggests that the warming was being caused by cosmic rays that keep bombarding the earth.

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