The pain caused by the global food crisis has led many people to belatedly realize that we have prioritized growing crops to feed cars instead of people. That is only a small part of the real problem. This crisis demonstrates what happens when we focus doggedly on one specific - and inefficient - solution to one particular global challenge. A reduction in carbon emissions has become an end in itself. The fortune spent on this exercise could achieve an astounding amount of good in areas that we hear a lot less about.

Research for the Copenhagen Consensus, in which Nobel laureate economists analyze new research about the costs and benefits of different solutions to world problems, shows that just $60 million spent on providing Vitamin A capsules and therapeutic Zinc supplements for under-2-year-olds would reach 80% of the infants in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with annual economic benefits (from lower mortality and improved health) of more than $1 billion. That means doing $17 worth of good for each dollar spent. Spending $1 billion on tuberculosis would avert an astonishing one million deaths, with annual benefits adding up to $30 billion. This gives $30 back on the dollar.

Heart disease represents more than a quarter of the death toll in poor countries. Developed nations treat acute heart attacks with inexpensive drugs. Spending $200 million getting these cheap drugs to poor countries would avert 300,000 deaths in a year. A dollar spent on heart disease in a developing nation will achieve $25 worth of good. Contrast that to Operation Enduring Freedom, which Copenhagen Consensus research found in the two years after 2001 returned 9 cents for each dollar spent. Or with the 90 cents Copenhagen Consensus research shows is returned for every $1 spent on carbon mitigation policies.

Next week, some of the world’s top economists, including five Nobel laureates, will consider new research outlining the costs and benefits of nearly 50 solutions to world problems - from building dams in Africa to providing micronutrient supplements to combating climate change. On May 30, the Copenhagen Consensus panel will produce a prioritized list showing the best and worst investments the world could make to tackle major challenges. Read more here.

When Senate Democrats tie one of President Bush’s nominees to the whipping post, they usually bother to invent some substantive objection. Apparently the new standard for rejection is merely that a White House nominee dares to support White House policy.

In March, the White House nominated David Hill as general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency. He ought to have zipped through the Senate. Over two decades in Washington, Mr. Hill has accumulated no partisan ballast; when he was nominated as the Energy Department’s general counsel three years ago, he was confirmed unanimously. He is roundly liked for his role in developing the Administration’s loan programs for clean tech.

But yesterday, Mr. Hill was rejected for the EPA post by the Senate Environment Committee during a routine business meeting, a highly unusual maneuver. The 10-9 vote had no relation at all to Mr. Hill’s qualifications to serve and everything to do with preventing any policy supervision at the EPA.

The committee is chaired by California’s Barbara Boxer, who is livid that the EPA has so far declined to rewrite existing environmental laws to regulate greenhouse gasses. At a confirmation hearing, Ms. Boxer told Mr. Hill that he was incapable of “independent thought” because he didn’t pay obeisance to her political agenda. Instead, Mr. Hill said he would only sign off on decisions that were “legally defensible.” Anything but that.

This blackmail is especially appalling because the EPA is being sued on dozens of fronts, and needs someone competent to head its legal office. But by Ms. Boxer’s standard no one who doesn’t bow to her policy could possibly be confirmed, ever. Remember all the partisan jabbering, not so long ago, about the Imperial Presidency?  See editorial here.

The state’s (California) costly, grandiose scheme to combat global warming is finding resistance from many of the same folks who approved it two years ago. Meanwhile, legislative opposition also is growing to the plan to create a global warming state think tank financed by a utility users’ surcharge. It appears that paying for saving mankind from a projected 1- or 2-degree increase in temperature over the next century already is proving too costly in today’s limited dollars.

“Powerful state senators from both parties are challenging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed spending spree on selected programs to address global warming,” the San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported. That news came on the heels of an opinion by the state Legislature’s attorneys that the Public Utilities Commission overstepped its authority by voting to force electricity and natural-gas customers to pay to create a $600-million global warming think tank.

Confronted with a current, undeniable $17-billion budget deficit, apparently even legislative Democrats are finding the price tag for long-term solutions to global warming’s alleged threat too big a price to pay, at least for now. We’re glad there are representatives in Sacramento who can distinguish between actual, existing problems and computer-generated future projections. We may be about to discover how committed legislators really are to the hyped concern over climate change, considering that the globe hasn’t warmed for about a decade and is projected to cool even more over the next decade, and no global warming-caused calamities yet have occurred outside of contrived computer models. Read more here.

A recent Lancet article argued that obesity is contributing to global warming because the obese consume more calories. Since making food releases carbon, that means an obese person, on average, is worse for global warming than a skinny person. (Not to mention the extra methane the obese might release, but that is my father’s area of expertise, not my own.)

There are about 300 million Americans who consume about 1,500 calories per day. If my calculations are correct, then the appropriate global warming tax would be about $1 for every ten thousand calories consumed. According to the Lancet article, the obese consume about 400 extra calories per day. So the appropriate tax on the obese to account for their extra global warming impact would be a little over $1 per month.

But as long as we are having the conversation, if we want to blame the obese for global warming, those who engage in recreational exercise like jogging or biking for pleasure should surely be discouraged from doing so because of global warming. Someone who jogs an hour per day burns an extra 1,000 calories daily, far more than an obese person. Such wasteful burning of calories must be discouraged if we are to save the planet. I hereby call for the next president of the United States to pass legislation imposing a carbon tax of 10 cents per hour on all recreational burning of calories. To save the planet, we must encourage people to sit at home and burn as few calories as possible.

Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

The U.S. Postal Service purchased more than 30,000 ethanol-capable trucks and minivans from 1999 to 2005, making it the biggest American buyer of alternative-fuel vehicles. Gasoline consumption jumped by more than 1.5 million gallons as a result. The trucks, derived from Ford Motor Co.’s Explorer sport- utility vehicle, had bigger engines than Jeeps from the former Chrysler Corp. they replaced. A Postal Service study found the new vehicles got as much as 29 percent fewer miles to the gallon. Mail carriers used the corn-based fuel in just 1,000 of them because there weren’t enough places to buy it.  “You’re getting fewer miles per gallon, and it’s costing us more,’’ Walt O’Tormey, the Postal Service’s Washington-based vice president of engineering, said in an interview. The agency may buy electric vehicles instead, he said.

The experience shows how the U.S. push for crop-based fuels, already contributing to the highest rate of food inflation in 17 years, may not be achieving its goal of reducing gasoline consumption. Lawmakers are seeking caps on the use of biofuels after last year’s 40 percent jump in world food prices, calling the U.S. policy flawed. “Using food for fuel has created some unintended consequences: food shortages, the high price of livestock feed,’” said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. “I think it’s leading a lot of people to wonder whether our corn-based ethanol goals need to be adjusted.”

Stimulating Demand Lost in the debate over the fuel’s contribution to food scarcity is the possibility that the ethanol policy itself isn’t working, said David Just, an associate professor of economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It may stimulate demand by making gas cheaper, he said, an argument supported by at least two U.S. government studies. The Postal Service bought the ethanol vehicles to meet alternative-fuel requirements. “Whether it was intended this way or not, the U.S. policy helps gasoline companies,” said Cornell’s Just. He and colleague Harry de Gorter estimated in a February paper that the credit may increase gasoline consumption by 628 million gallons to 156.6 billion gallons by 2015, compared with 155.9 billion without it. Read more here.

Global changes of Nature - even if they were man-made - usually take decades to make a visible impact on the society. On the other hand, social changes and new economic policies can lead to good or devastating results much faster. We should think at least twice which of these two classes of changes we should be more careful about.

What is really endangered: climate or freedom? What do you think? And what is worse for humans: 0.006C (or even the “catastrophic” IPCC’s figure of 0.03C) of predicted average man-made warming per year or a 10% jump of food prices per year? How many people have actually thought about these questions in quantitative rather than binary, dogmatic terms?

It is an interesting exercise to go through all the authors (in the stories or papers he discussed earlier in the blog) because many of them are rather typical authors of the IPCC reports. For example, the third author of the “proof” is Marta Vicarelli, a contributing author of the IPCC report. This is the kind of people who are often being presented as leading scientists. When you actually look who she is, you learn that she is not even a PhD - she is just a PhD candidate who doesn’t have a single citation - and the only thing she can apparently do is to co-write similarly irrational alarmist rants about risks. Many of these women and men are affiliated with NASA. Even if their work were science and not just the junk science we can read, we should ask: what the hell does their activity have to do with space research?

This is what political correctness is doing all the time. I find it outrageous that similar garbage is being printed in journals that used to be prestigious and that average or downright stupid women and men who can’t reach the ankles of people whom I consider scientists of global importance are being presented by dishonest journalists-activists as the world’s leading scientists. This proliferation of idiots and parasites in the name of political correctness is just disgraceful. And it is very dangerous, too. Read more here.

A shareholder revolt at ExxonMobil led by the billionaire Rockefeller family has won the support of four significant British institutional investors who will call on Monday for a shakeup in the governance of the world’s biggest oil company. Guardian.co.uk has learned that F&C Asset Management, Morley Fund Management, the Co-Operative Insurance Society and the West Midlands Pension Fund are throwing their weight behind a resolution demanding that ExxonMobil appoints an independent chairman to stimulate debate on the company’s board.

Exxon is facing a rebellion from its investors over its hardline approach to global warming. The firm has refused to follow rival oil companies in committing large-scale capital investment to environmentally friendly technology such as wind and solar power.

Exxon maintains that present green technologies are not financially viable. But critics on Wall Street and in the City fear that the company’s reluctance to explore alternative energy will prove to be bad business judgment in the long run as rivals such as BP seek to capture public affection by re-branding themselves as environmentally sensitive enterprises. Read more here.

And all this at precisely the moment that BP has finally backed away from its silly “Beyond Petroleum” boondoggle.

Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject. Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic. Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.

Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle. What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J. He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.” The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent. Read more here.

Read Anthony Watts comments on this story here.

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