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This has become an entrenched view amongst the wealthy. There is so much eco-doom we have started to believe the hype: wealth is 'bad'.

Witness the horrified reaction in some quarters that - heaven help us - there might be a middle class emerging in India. Won't that be awful?

No, not really. It's brilliant. The real environmental hazards of limited access to water, industrial pollution, poor air quality, cooking using poor fuels, use of traditional fuels (eg timber, dung), rapid population growth and 'unsustainable' resource pillage is FAR more of a problem in the poor world.

Smart greens know this, and have moved the focus to C02 emissions. They need another bad news story to sustain their argument: we are all doomed. The sooner we return to medieval squalor the better.

The poor world desperately needs to raise its economic growth rate. Solving poverty will go a long way to addressing our environmental challenges.

Stated simply: the huge costs of adapting to a greener lifestyle are a privileged option of the rich, not the poor. Ditch your Garden of Eden fantasy.

I don't think anyone would disagree that the poor should be helped and encouraged to improve their conditions.

But imagining that this is a choice between 'medieval squalor' and 'western values/standards' is a naively polarised view.

I think that point is that both sides should move:

The poor should have better education, better conditions, better health, better fuels, better lives, etc.

And we in the west should drop a whole range of decadent excesses that we seem to now believe are 'human rights'. These excesses include ...

cheap private car usage, cheap air travel, exotic air-freighted produce, endless electricity guzzling gadgets ... to name but a few.

And let's not forget that our consumer-comfort is built on a resource, oil, which has now peaked and will soon go into decline. This will cause crippling price increases and further wars to control this resource which means that our smug confidence that our way of life is the 'true path' is already well past its sell-by date and may soon come tumbling down around our ears.

So my suggestion would be that the poor should be helped and that the rich should give up as many of their most decadent, polluting habits as possible.

I don't think anyone would disagree that the poor should be helped and encouraged to improve their conditions.

But imagining that this is a choice between 'medieval squalor' and 'western values/standards' is a naively polarised view.

I think that point is that both sides should move:

The poor should have better education, better conditions, better health, better fuels, better lives, etc.

And we in the west should drop a whole range of decadent excesses that we seem to now believe are 'human rights'. These excesses include ...

cheap private car usage, cheap air travel, exotic air-freighted produce, endless electricity guzzling gadgets ... to name but a few.

And let's not forget that our consumer-comfort is built on a resource, oil, which has now peaked and will soon go into decline. This will cause crippling price increases and further wars to control this resource which means that our smug confidence that our way of life is the 'true path' is already well past its sell-by date and may soon come tumbling down around our ears.

So my suggestion would be that the poor should be helped and that the rich should give up as many of their most decadent, polluting habits as possible.

Yes we can. We can end poverty without destroying our planet. As a chemist and a vinyl campaigner of green chemistry I contend we can. The West must put forward genuine committment not just by swapping their SUVs for Toyota Yaris's but giving the developing world a fair chance in trade. Time and time again we have seen that Aid is not the solution. Please let the west let "us" live and not seek to control all the money and trade that we can benefit from.

There is only one problem in the world - human over population. Every other problem comes from that.

Reducing poverty is impossible if the target, the number of humans, keeps getting bigger year on year.

Davos is indeed about meeting people and I hope you get to meet the six teenagers at the session Thursday afternoon: Future Shifts.

A chance to listen first hand from those whose future the Davos leaders are debating.

The six are part of a British Council project with WEF to bring young people's views into the great debates.

If the population of the earth were to double every 100 years, in roughly 4000 years all the mass of the earth would be people.

It is physically impossible for this to happen.

Things will occur to prevent it.

That is certain.

The single and only cure for poverty and the environment is population reduction.

(Human nature)x(Population) = Size of the problem.

Only one factor on the left hand side of this equation can we have any chance of effecting.

Note to Tom:

With people around like you we'll all be kissing good bye to the Garden of Eden 'fantasy'. Peope like you will be forcing everyone else to trade it in for an underwater version.

Can we end poverty without wrecking our planet? Ending poverty is the ONLY way of saving our planet. No amount of energy efficient light bulbs and wind farms will do it.
When will the World wake up to the fact that the main problem is that there are too many of us? Population control is critical. The only way that will work in 3rd World countries is to try to erradicate poverty.
That way, even if the World is doomed, at least we can make it a better place for more of us during the time that is left.

Colin

spare us!

is hot air a greenhouse gas? someone should ban Bono and Al Gore - How much money do the 2 of them stand to make out of this one then?

There is a very simple premise running through what ails us all - be it global recession or global warming - no one can say with anything possessing even a passing acquaintance to confidence (certainty is a dark place in the corner of a distant galaxy)how any of this is going to pan out. It is as Donald Rumsfeld would say "a known unknown"

And unless there is some secret hidden part of the curriculum at rock star university, the average reader of this web site is "probably" ( I can say no more than that) more intelligent and better educated than either of these 2. SO........if you personally dont know the answer to global warming OR global recession ....then neither do they.

So to paraphrase Yogi.. Gore and Bono are completely lost but at least they are making great progress.

The problem is that "economic" theory is based on the idea of the accumulation and distribution of "wealth" -but there is no intelligent and useful definition of what "wealth" actually is.

Can, for example."wealth" be increased -or only be distributed?

If wealth can be increased then this would appear to be against the laws of physics -which say that matter and energy are interchangeable but cannot increase or decrease. If this is true, then only "notional" and not "real" wealth can increase or decrease. So iether "economics" must defy the laws of physics -or must admit that it is a "fantasy science" based on nothing but the imagination of the economists.

Historically, there is apparently evidence that the introduction of mixed farming did revolutionise the production of food (and presumably energy) under the medieval European population. So the whole Bono/Gore debate as framed above is clearly nothing but another innefective propaganda stunt.

In an "organic" system -one can have one's grain and eat (some of) it too..... So not only do we need to revise the laws of economics -but also, perhaps, the laws of physics too....

The problem is that "economic" theory is based on the idea of the accumulation and distribution of "wealth" -but there is no intelligent and useful definition of what "wealth" actually is.

Can, for example."wealth" be increased -or only be distributed?

If wealth can be increased then this would appear to be against the laws of physics -which say that matter and energy are interchangeable but cannot increase or decrease. If this is true, then only "notional" and not "real" wealth can increase or decrease. So iether "economics" must defy the laws of physics -or must admit that it is a "fantasy science" based on nothing but the imagination of the economists.

Historically, there is apparently evidence that the introduction of mixed farming did revolutionise the production of food (and presumably energy) under the medieval population. So the whole Bono/Gore debate as framed above is clearly nothing but another innefective propaganda stunt.

In an "organic" system -one can have one's grain and eat (some of) it too..... So not only doe need to revise the laws of economics -but perhaps the laws of physics too....