Charles Kenny

The Water Wars That Weren't

Technology and trade can ensure water scarcity is not a constraint on progress. In PERC Reports.

Climate Change May Have Only Small Effects on Long-Run Global GDP. So What?

A CGD note. The long run global estimates of climate impact on GDP are small. That hides the fact that there are big volatility shocks and impacts are concentrated in poorer countries.  And that matters a lot for policy response. 

Your World, Better

Your World, Better: Global Progress and What You Can Do About It is a book written for the smart and engaged middle school student.  It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader's parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and democracy, war and the environment, happiness and depression.   It talks about the things that have gotten better, the sometimes-intensifying challenges that remain, and what readers can do about them. 

Your World Better is optimistic, but it doesn’t shy away from the considerable problems we face: from inequality through discrimination and depression to climate change and infectious threats.  It is meant to encourage kids to help make the world better themselves: tip them from a sense of powerlessness toward action, not into complacency.

The pdf of Your World Better is available to download here for free.  Or you can buy a kindle version for 99 cents or a hard copy for $8.10 on Amazon (or six pounds on UK Amazon here).  Any author royalties from those sales will be donated to UNICEF (so far, a bit more than $800 has been donated, thanks!). I talk about the book to Marian Tupy for the Human Progress podcast and to two (fantastic) middle schoolers for NPR.  Then I did a Slack chat with five middle schoolers for Slate. A CGD discussion about the book and talking to children about progress is here. And here's a fifteen minute video about the book (or try it on Youtube).  I am happy for the *text* (not pictures) to be copied or redistributed in any medium, and/or remixed or transformed for any purpose, with attribution.

"Everyone, no matter how old, or how young, should read this. I’m sending to grandkids and their parents." --Nancy Birdsall

"Great read for middle school kids who want to understand how the world is getting better -- and can become even more so!" --Parag Khanna

"How can you pass up a free book?! And one that is so relevant for today? If you know a middle school student or teacher, pass this along! Incredibly fresh and honest." --Karen Schulte 

"Kids are taught that everything's getting worse and we're all doomed--factually incorrect, and a message that leads to cynicism & fatalism, not constructive action. An antidote: Charles Kenny's new Your World, Better..." --Steven Pinker

 

Principles for Paris-Alignment and Climate Finance in Development

A CGD note with Ian Mitchell and Atousa Tahmasebi. As ministers and officials meet in the coming year, they will make new financing commitments on climate and promise to ensure all of their activities are “Paris-compatible”—against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Any new commitments on climate finance will need to balance existing development challenges with the pressing need to tackle climate-related risks. This note outlines a set of principles to guide climate-related commitments so that they do more for both climate and development.

A Climate-Dedicated Capital Increase at the World Bank and IFC

A CGD note with Scott Morris. Rather than use aid to finance climate mitigation projects (it's the wrong instrument, mis-targeted and inadequate in scale), why not fund a World Bank and IFC capital increase: its cheaper, better targeted, more appropriate to the task, ensures common but differentiated financing, and gives the World Bank Group something useful to do in richer developing countries.

Speeding Sustainable Development: Integrating Economic, Social, and Environmental Development

A CGD Working Paper on policy coordination to help meet the SDGs.  TLDR: Important, but hard.  

This paper discusses the role for policy integration to speed progress towards delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is required because the goals set very ambitious targets for progress across a range of interlinked areas, encompassing both synergies and tradeoffs. Lessons of policy integration at the national level suggest that it is usually at best partially successful, requiring significant commitment from the highest levels of government. Policy integration regarding foreign affairs has proven even more challenging. This paper suggests a mechanism for prioritizing coordination and the use of coordination tools including regulation, safeguards, taxes, and subsidies. It also suggests re-orienting ministerial responsibilities where possible from input control to achievement of outcomes as well as tools to promote innovation by subnational governments and the private sector.

Meeting the Sustainable Development Goal Zero Targets: What Could We Do?

A working paper for CGD with Mallika Snyder.  The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Amongst the 169 targets are a number that call for universal access, universal coverage, or universal eradication. These include ending extreme poverty and malnutrition alongside preventable under-5 deaths, ending a number of epidemics, providing universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, primary and secondary education, a range of infrastructure services, and legal identification. These have often been labeled “zero targets.” A review of the literature on meeting these zero targets suggests very high costs compared to available resources, but also that in many cases there remains a considerable gap between financing known technical solutions and achieving the outcomes called for in the SDGs. In some cases, we (even) lack the technical solutions required to achieve the zero targets, suggesting the need for research and development of new approaches.

Time to Get Serious About Nuclear Power

The US should be investing more in nuclear power research --for Ozy.

If Everyone Gets Electricity, Can the Planet Survive?

The United Nations has set conflicting goals for 2030: combatting climate change while providing energy to all. It suggests they aren't by low-balling electricity demand. For the Atlantic.

After the U.S.-China Pact, Will the World Pick a Peak Carbon Date?

Maybe there's hope for Paris UNFCCC,  For @BW.

Poor Countries Shouldn’t Sacrifice Growth to Fight Climate Change

People who use less electricity than it takes to run your fridge need more power.  For @BW.

The Economic Case for Taxing Meat

Tasty, but bad for the environment and health.  In @BW.

Congress Wakes Up to the Bad News About Biofuels

A @BW column on ethanol mandates.

New Water Sources Won't Quench the World's Thirst

Yay!  Kenya's found more water.  Boo! the problem is getting it where its needed.

How Cleaning China’s Dirty Air Can Slow Climate Change

Local air pollution is the big killer in China.  In @BW.  Although maybe not as big as I suggest...

The Age of Scarcity

Climate, ethanol, carbon dioxide and the future of food --a column for @BW.  I talked about the issue on a New America Foundation podcast.

Everything You Know About Peak Oil is Wrong

A piece on how we aren't running out of natural resources --including oil-- for BusinessWeek.  Provoked some reaction.  I do think I could have better explained peak oil (a flow measure) versus reserves/resources.  But the point remains: bigger threat is consuming too much, not running out...

Forest Bump

Global deforestation has slowed --how do we keep it down as the economy recovers?  For FP.

Climate Change's Dead Letters

After the disappointment at Durban, this Businessweek article suggests that big, complex global problems like climate change can be tackled through other routes than a big, complex globally binding treaty like Kyoto.

Trickle-Down Economics

Why properly pricing water would be good for the environemnt and for poor people --this week's Optimist column.

From Dung Power to Solar Power

A piece for Slate suggesting developing countries might leapfrog from traditional energy sources straight to renewables.

Against Locavore-Organic Fetishism

Got Cheap Milk? calls for cosmovorism --eating as if the planet mattered.  I discussed the piece on the Kojo Nnamdi show.  Not popular with the Seattle Times, amongst others (and on reflection some of the language in the middle of the piece was unnecessarily inflamatory).  But the CattleNetwork liked it.

Weather and War

Cloudy with a Chance of Insurgency suggests that the link between climate change and global warfare might be overblown.

Greening it Alone

An FP column on the US getting left behind on climate change.

A Thousand Points of Light

No, not a column about George Bush Senior: instead, I'm suggesting donors focus more on small scale companies and less on big public utilities to get modern energy services to poor people.

A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review

A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review is an unpublished short paper.  The Stern Review adopts two interesting elements in its calculation of the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation.  First is a ‘global welfarist’ approach that values the utility of the World’s people (now and into the future) equally, and sets global utility maximization as the correct goal for policy.  Second is an assumption of a declining marginal utility to income.  Consistent application of the ‘global welfarist’ approach and the declining marginal utility of income together would demand an urgent process of global income redistribution.  Over the long term, this might see the richest ten percent of the World’s population facing an average redistributive tax rate in the region of 82 percent.  A version will be published in the Journal of Environment and Development.