Will poor nations suffer greatly from climate change?
Cover Interview of November 17, 2011
I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could occur overnight.
Instead, there will be a predictable pattern of which land will be lost. The owners of this land will suffer an income shock. Where will the people go? In a world that allows for international migration, people from a Bangladesh could migrate to Western China or Eastern India.
In 30 years, India and China may have developed to the point where they may be seeking younger, low skill immigrants to take on service jobs similar to those immigrants take up in the U.S. today—a crucial role in the service industry.
Today there is great concern about the possibility of “environmental refugees” moving across borders. I think that the right way to think about this issue is gains to trade in the international labor market. Self-interested households will migrate to the areas that offer them jobs and decent wages, and where they will be welcome.
As long as there is sufficient adjustment time to trends induced by climate change (such as sea level rise), there is no reason to think that wars will break out as desperate refugees seek higher ground.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could occur overnight.
Instead, there will be a predictable pattern of which land will be lost. The owners of this land will suffer an income shock. Where will the people go? In a world that allows for international migration, people from a Bangladesh could migrate to Western China or Eastern India.
In 30 years, India and China may have developed to the point where they may be seeking younger, low skill immigrants to take on service jobs similar to those immigrants take up in the U.S. today—a crucial role in the service industry.
Today there is great concern about the possibility of “environmental refugees” moving across borders. I think that the right way to think about this issue is gains to trade in the international labor market. Self-interested households will migrate to the areas that offer them jobs and decent wages, and where they will be welcome.
As long as there is sufficient adjustment time to trends induced by climate change (such as sea level rise), there is no reason to think that wars will break out as desperate refugees seek higher ground.