This month, the United Nations fundamentally restructured the way it supervises and promotes human rights around the world. But to understand what the UN has and has not done on the reform front over the past year, let me begin with a story I heard along the Sudanese border in Uganda a few years ago.
Abstract: This paper reviews different approaches to the political and economic control of global public goods like global warming. It compares quantity-oriented control mechanisms like the Kyoto Protocol with price-type control mechanisms such as internationally harmonized carbon taxes. The pros and cons of the two approaches are compared, focusing on such issues as performance under conditions of uncertainty, volatility of the induced carbon prices, the excess burden of taxation and regulation, accounting finagling, corruption, and implementation. Although virtually all policies involving economic global public goods rely upon quantitative approaches, price-type approaches are likely to be more effective and more efficient.
It is customary early in the New Year to recommend good books to read. And the Tao Te Ching should be at the top of President Bush’s list. Careening from crisis to crisis with approval ratings drooping, the president should consider the opening lines of chapter 80. “If a country is governed wisely, its inhabitants will be content.”
“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
The Bush Administration will face a unique opportunity in February to end the genocide in Darfur when the United States takes over the presidency of the United Nations (UN) Security Council.
Headline news about the threat of nuclear terrorism and the concerns about the nuclear capabilities and ambitions of Iran and North Korea regimes has led some Washington policy makers and pundits to conclude that the nuclear nonproliferation system has failed. A new strategy, they say, must be developed to replace it, or, perhaps, we must even accept that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
Daryl Kimball contends that I and my former boss, Ted Galen Carpenter (vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute), are "like the Bush policy team" because we advanced "the proposition that aggressive and erratic regimes with nuclear weapons are a threat to their neighbors, while nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, U.S. allies are not."
A jury verdict in Memphis late last year caused little stir among the general public, but it may have caught the attention of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials of the Bush administration. The jury found Colonel Nicolas Carranza, former Vice Minister of Defense of El Salvador and now a U.S. citizen living in Memphis, responsible for overseeing the torture and killing in that country 25 years ago. 1 Could similar charges be brought against high U.S. officials for the actions of their subordinates in Abu Ghraib, Falluja, and Guantanamo?
There’s no escaping it. Changing monsoons, agriculture in crisis, environmental refugees—climate change is looming ever larger on the horizon of governments everywhere.
We stand, first, with the emerging scientific consensus, which tells us we have very little time to act if we honestly expect to avoid a global (as opposed to a “merely local”) climate catastrophe. Further, we insist, contrary to the pretended realism of those who seek to be “reasonable,” on a rather direct approach. We do not, for example, imagine that carbon concentrations that would quite probably yield 3ºC or 4ºC of warming can reasonably be considered “safe.” 1 Instead, we prefer to stay in the reality-based world of those (the E.U., the Climate Action Network) who draw the line at 2ºC maximum (which is itself not by any means safe) and who admit that avoiding a global climate catastrophe is going to be difficult indeed.