---

Corruption costs $1.6tn, UN says
The United Nations (UN) has said political corruption costs governments about $1.6tn (£951bn) every year.

The money is lost in public assets moved across borders via money-laundering or undeclared holdings.

The figure comes as the UN, World Bank and other watchdog meet in Doha, Qatar, to try to give a four-year-old anti-corruption agreement some teeth.

But hopes are low of countries agreeing to independent reviews into countries' finances to look for missing money. ...

---

Climate bill's 'emergency provision' gives Obama strong-man powers
Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.

Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions...to address shortfalls" in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions....

---

Exclusive: Police Report on Gladney Beating by SEIU Thugs
It has been more than three months since Kenneth Gladney was viciously attacked by SEIU employees. The assault wasn’t an accident, but a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence tea party activists and town hall protesters. The morning of the Gladney assault, the White House presented to Senate Democrats a ‘battle plan’ to quell the protests. The White House advised Democrats “punch back twice as hard.” Gladney was the first casualty.

The Gladney beating took place at a forum on ‘Aging’, sponsored by Rep. Russ Carnahan. Carnahan had been caught flat-footed by earlier protests. This time he was more prepared; the day before the forum, Sara Howard took over as his communications director. Ms. Howard is a veteran leftist activist, holding senior positions with SEIU.

SEIU and partisan hacks like Media Matters have tried to spin away the Gladney beating. They would have you believe a 130 lb diabetic, recovering luekemia patient, picked a fight with men almost twice his size. The police report puts an end to that lie....

---

The next economic bubble?
When Nouriel Roubini talks, the world listens. Roubini is, of course, the once-obscure New York University economist whose dire warnings about a financial crisis proved depressingly prophetic. Last week, Roubini was shouting. Writing in the Financial Times, he warned that the Federal Reserve and other government central banks are fueling a massive new asset "bubble" that -- while not in imminent danger of bursting -- will someday do so with calamitous consequences.

Here is Roubini's argument: The Fed is holding short-term interest rates near zero. Investors and speculators borrow dollars cheaply and use them to buy various assets -- stocks, bonds, gold, oil, minerals, foreign currencies. Prices rise. Huge profits can be made.

But this can't last, Roubini warns. The Fed will eventually raise interest rates. Or outside events (a confrontation with Iran, fear of a double-dip recession) will change market psychology. Then investors will rush to lock in profits, and the sell-off will trigger a crash. Stock, bond and commodity prices will plunge. Losses will mount, confidence will fall and the real economy will suffer.

"The Fed and other policymakers seem unaware of the monster bubble they are creating," writes Roubini. "The longer they remain blind, the harder the markets will fall." Haven't we seen this movie before? Well, maybe.

Like home values a few years ago, asset prices have risen spectacularly. Since its March 9 low, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has gained more than 50 percent. An index of stocks for 22 "emerging-market" countries (including Brazil, China and India) has doubled from its recent low. Oil, now around $80 a barrel, has increased 150 percent from its recent low of $31. Gold is near an all-time high, around $1,090 an ounce. Meanwhile, the dollar has dropped against many currencies. Half of Roubini's story resonates. ...

---

Climate McCarthyism, Part I: Joe Romm's Intimidation Campaign
...These days especially, journalists are an easy mark. Journalists are perhaps the most insecure professionals in America. Reporters fear for their future, and with good reason. Bureaus are closing, journalists and editors are getting laid off, and whole newspapers and magazines are going under. Reporters who are insecure for their futures are easy prey for bullies like Romm, whose attacks are aimed at having a chilling effect on the entire national press corps.

What are the warning signs that one is dealing with a bully? Wiki names, "Quickness to anger and use of force, addiction to aggressive behaviors, mistaking others' actions as hostile, concern with preserving self image, and engaging in obsessive or rigid actions." Bullies, Wiki notes, "will even create blogs to intimidate victims worldwide."

The character assassination, the bullying, the psychological projection -- it all adds up to Climate McCarthyism, and Joe Romm is Climate McCarthyite-in-chief. Joe Romm's "Global Warming Deniers and Delayers" play the same role as Joe McCarthy's "Communists and Communist sympathizers." While Romm built a loyal liberal and environmentalist following for attacking right-wing "global warming deniers" -- a designation meant to invoke "Holocaust denier" -- he spends much of his time attacking well-meaning journalists (e.g. here, here, and here), academics (here and here) and activists (here, here and here) who take the issue of global warming seriously, accept climate science, and support immediate action to address it. His aim is to intimidate and prevent increasing numbers of people from questioning climate policy orthodoxy, and especially Democratic efforts to pass cap and trade climate legislation.

And make no mistake, Joe Romm's political agenda is as mainstream among liberals today as Joe McCarthy's was among conservatives in 1953. Romm is held up by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, UC Berkeley's Brad DeLong,The New Republic's Brad Plumer, Grist's Dave Roberts, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as an inspiration. He works for John Podesta, Obama's transition director and head of Center for American Progress. And he is the leading spokesperson for Waxman Markey climate legislation that passed the House, and Kerry-Boxer legislation in the Senate.

Think about it: If you're an ambitious young Democratic Hill staffer, a liberal policy analyst, or a struggling young reporter, why would you ever stand up to a guy who is famous for first trashing people to their editors, employers and funders in private emails, and then, if that doesn't work, in public blogs? Why would you challenge someone who seems to have so much of the liberal establishment on his side?...

...In the end, the purpose of bullying is not simply to victimize individuals, it's to intimidate the bystanders. What most bystanders want is to not be attacked by the bully. It ruins your day and threatens your career. So if you are a reporter you hew to the climate orthodoxy because, well, after all, look at what Romm did to Keith Kloor.

This is the state of liberal debate about climate change. Those who question apocalyptic predictions are treated as global warming deniers or traitors or worse. Those who advocate solutions other than cap-and-trade have their characters assassinated. Those who stand up to Joe Romm find themselves turned into projection screens by an angry and vindictive bully.

Joe McCarthy, like Romm, was compulsive in projecting his own dark side onto others. In 1943 McCarthy defeated Senator Robert LaFollette by claiming that LaFollette was a war profiteer because he had made $47,000 in stock market profits during the war; it turned out that McCarthy himself had made $42,000 doing the same thing. McCarthy also lied about his war record in order to construct an identify for himself as a war hero.

Joe Romm, like Joe McCarthy, is full of rage -- one of the most salient characteristics of bullies. McCarthy was defended in his day as being full of passion. Likewise, Romm's excesses are often excused by his admirers as well-intentioned and a reflection of his deep passion for his cause. Both defend their bullying as necessary. "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled," McCarthy said in 1952.

While McCarthy had a disturbingly long run, he was eventually challenged for his tactics, most famously by the Army's chief legal counsel who said, during Senate hearings, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" at which point the audience in the hearing room broke into applause.

Another key turning point was when CBS Newsman Edward Murrow directly challenged McCarthy in a series of nationwide television broadcasts. Some now point out that Murrow waited until the worm had already turned, with many smaller reporters doing the spadework exposing McCarthy's bad deeds. But what it finally took was establishment leaders standing up to the bully. ...

---

Three Decades of Subsidized Risk
I recently sat down with legendary investor Ted Forstmann to discuss why, on the one-year anniversary of the financial meltdown, the press has largely ignored the role of government in creating the meltdown—and possibly setting the stage for another one—by allowing Wall Street to borrow cheaply and easily during the past three decades.

"I guess reporters think writing about greedy investment bankers is more interesting," Mr. Forstmann laughed.

Mr. Forstmann knows a thing or two about greedy investment bankers: He's been calling them on the carpet for years, most famously during the 1980s when he fulminated against the excesses of the junk-bond era. He also knows that blaming banking greed alone can't by itself explain the financial tsunami that tore the markets apart last year and left the banking system and the economy in tatters.

The greed merchants needed a co-conspirator, Mr. Forstmann argues, and that co-conspirator is and was the United States government.

"They're always there waiting to hand out free money," he said. "They just throw money at the problem every time Wall Street gets in trouble. It starts out when they have a cold and it builds until the risk-taking leads to cancer."...

...The conventional wisdom as perpetuated in the media is that these bailout mechanisms are unique, designed to ameliorate a once-in-a-lifetime financial "perfect storm." They are unique, but only in size. A quick look back at the past three decades will demonstrate what Mr. Forstmann meant when he said the government has been ready to hand out free money nearly every time risk-taking led to losses.

The first mortgage market meltdown of the mid-1980s, spurred by the Fed's supply of easy money, was among the most painful market upheavals in the history of the bond market. The pioneers of the mortgage bond market, Lew Ranieri of Salomon Brothers and Larry Fink of First Boston (the same Larry Fink now considered a sage CEO at money management powerhouse BlackRock), lost what were then unheard-of sums of money. (Mr. Fink concedes to losses of over $100 million.)

"What happened then was a dry run of what was to come," Mr. Fink recently told me, as he looked back on the market he created, which would eventually lie at the heart of the most recent financial crisis. Wall Street took excessive risk in mortgage bonds amid the easy money supplied by the Fed—and lost. When the crisis began, the Fed under then Chairman Alan Greenspan slashed interest rates—as it would do after Orange County, Calif., declared bankruptcy in 1994 because of bad bets on complex bonds; and again in 1998 when the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) blew up; and of course in the bond-market crisis of 2007 and 2008. The lower rates each time lessened the pain of the risk-taking gone awry, and opened the door for increased risk down the line.

Easy money wasn't the only way government induced the bubble. The mortgage-bond market was the mechanism by which policy makers transformed home ownership into something that must be earned into something close to a civil right. The Community Reinvestment Act and projects by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, beginning in the Clinton years, couldn't have been accomplished without the mortgage bond—which allowed banks to offload the increasingly risky mortgages to Wall Street, which in turn securitized them into triple-A rated bonds thanks to compliant ratings agencies.

The perversity of these efforts wasn't merely that bonds packed with subprime loans received such high ratings. It was also that by inducing homeownership, the government was itself making homeownership less affordable. Because families without the real economic means to repay traditional 30-year mortgages were getting them, housing prices grew to artificially high levels.

This is where the real sin of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac comes into play. Both were created by Congress to make housing affordable to the middle class. But when they began guaranteeing subprime loans, they actually began pricing out the working class from the market until the banking business responded with ways to make repayment of mortgages allegedly easier through adjustable rates loans that start off with low payments. But these loans, fully sanctioned by the government, were a ticking time bomb, as we're all now so painfully aware....

---

PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail
Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years....

---

Shutting off the miracle-drug spigot
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right last week when she called her latest health-care-reform proposal a "his toric moment": After decades of life-saving and cost-cutting scientific innovations from drug and medical-device companies, the government is about to step in and stifle the R&D that is our best hope for improving health outcomes.

Pelosi's bill may cost pharmaceutical companies $150 billion over a decade -- nearly double the amount they conceded when they cut a White House-approved deal with Sen. Max Baucus this summer.

The Pelosi bill is a prescription for fewer new life-saving drugs. By stifling innovation, it would hurt not only industry, but also all of us who'd benefit from new-drug development. ...

...R&D investments per new-drug introduction nearly doubled between the early '80s and early '90s -- but government approvals have been dropping. Even after drugs are approved for marketing, only about three in 10 now recoup their development costs.

And now Congress is out to make the climate for new-drug development significantly worse. The president has bragged that he intends to eke out huge cost savings at drug companies' expense: "The pharmaceutical industry has already said they're willing to put $80 billion on the table," adding, "We might be able to get $100 billion out or more." The industry was willing to "give" back its profits because it was told it wouldn't have a seat at the negotiating table if it didn't go along.

But now Pelosi has set up her own "negotiating table" -- nearly doubling the amount Washington would confiscate from the industry and planning vast cuts in what Medicare would pay for drugs -- a provision that the industry was assured was off the other table. Give 'em a hand, they'll take an arm. ...

---

Nomura, Barclays Lure Bankers as Rivals Cut Jobs, Cap Bonuses
Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc and Nomura Holdings Inc., which never ranked among the top 10 merger advisers worldwide in the past decade, are luring hundreds of bankers as competitors cut jobs and cap bonuses under government pressure. ...

...“Banks that haven’t been bailed out by the government are in a very good position to hire the most talented bankers,” said Shaun Springer, chief executive officer of Square Mile Services Ltd., which advises London financial firms on pay. “They’re paying rates that state-funded banks are being pressured into not paying.” ...

---

Obama’s Shock Troops: SEIU and Political Intimidation in St. Louis
Yesterday, Pastor Himes provided powerful, and courageous, witness to the union violence he and his wife saw in St. Louis on August 6th. They provided strong testament to the union attack on Kenneth Gladney. But, his comments only dealt with the events of that day. Evidence is emerging that the events of that day went far beyond St. Louis and may have been part of a nationally orchestrated campaign to intimidate and silence dissent....

...Is it any surprise that on the specific day that Big Labor and the White House signaled a commitment to ‘punch back’ at the town hall protests, an innocent bystander, Kenneth Gladney, was brutally beaten?

Consider also that the individuals charged with the assault on Kenneth Gladney worked for SEIU. In the first six months of the Obama Administration, Andy Stern, head of SEIU visited the White House 22 times–more than any other private individual. The date stamps for his visits stop at the end of July, so we don’t fully know how much interaction he had with the White House during the ’summer of discontent.’ We do know that HHS Secretary Katherine Sibelius hosted a conference call with SEIU leadership the day after the Gladney beating.

SEIU attended the August 6th event in force. There are indications the union bused in members from Chicago and St. Louis. But, their presence wasn’t felt solely through their rank-and-file members. The day before the event, Rep. Russ Carnahan hired a new communications director, Sara Howard. Previously, Ms. Howard was a senior official with SEIU....

...Big Media and partisan hacks like Media Matters have tried to obscure the facts. They have used classic confusion and misdirection to turn the incident into a “he said, SEIU said” dust-up. But, they have relied more on spin than facts. You will soon see the full facts of the incident. You will wonder why the charges have been covered up. SEIU is picking up the legal bills of their members charged with assault. It has even arranged for high-powered, politically connected legal counsel. Yet, the union has denied its members’ workman’s comp claims for injuries they sustained in beating Kenneth Gladney. That’s more than a bit weird. Like they were kind of working for the union when they delivered the beating....

---

Work Boots Give the Economy a Kick
Last week the Obama administration issued a report that attributed 640,000 "saved or created" jobs to spending authorized by the $787 billion stimulus package that Congress approved in February. "Although President Obama initially said that 90 percent of the jobs created by the stimulus program would be in the private sector," The New York Times notes, "the data suggests that well over half of the jobs claimed so far have been in the public sector." Indeed, most of the jobs cited in the report are public school positions...

...# The report claims the purchase of a $1,000 lawn mower to cut grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas saved or created 50 jobs.
...# A sewer project in Douglas County, Wisconsin, somehow has created 100 jobs, even though it hasn't begun yet. ...

---

The Central-Planning Conceit
This weekend, House Democrats are planning to pass two health-care bills. One is a sweeping plan that would shift nearly all power over the organization of American health care to Washington, D.C. The other — a full repeal of the “sustainable growth rate” (SGR) formula governing Medicare physician fee payments — is proof positive that the first bill’s strategy of centralized planning is ill-conceived and dangerous to the quality of U.S. medical care.

To understand why, it is worth reviewing how the SGR came to be. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Medicare bureaucracy set out to reform the way physicians are reimbursed for providing services to the program’s enrollees. The idea was to shift more resources toward generalists, who were then thought to be undercompensated for spending time with patients, and to control overall costs by limiting the growth of aggregate payments to growth in the size of the U.S. economy. After several years of study, lengthy payment regulations were issued, including a predecessor to the SGR formula, which had immediate and profound financial consequences for nearly every practicing physician in the United States.

And so what happened? The exact opposite of what was intended. Instead of encouraging more physicians to enter into primary care, the Medicare physician-fee schedule has rewarded more specialization. The fee schedule only controls prices, not volume. As Medicare’s administrators have tried to hold down costs with fee cuts, specialists increased their share of the pie with more tests and procedures, at the expense of primary-care reimbursement rates....

---

Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel. ...

---

Haggard starting new church at his Springs home
Ted Haggard, who started New Life Church in his Colorado Springs basement and built it into a megachurch with thousands of worshippers, said Wednesday that he is starting a church at his home....

...Haggard started New Life Church in 1985 with 25 people meeting in his basement. He soon became a rising star in evangelical circles. In 1996, Christianity Today magazine named him one of 50 up-and-coming evangelical leaders younger than 40. He later became head of the National Association of Evangelicals, as his church grew to a membership of 14,000.

But that ended when a male prostitute in Denver broke the news that Haggard had been one of his clients and used methamphetamine. Haggard denied the story, then acknowledged it was true.

He resigned from New Life on Nov. 5, 2006, and was given a 13-month severance package with conditions that included not starting a church near Colorado Springs and meeting with overseers in a restoration program.

Haggard has tried to support himself and his family as an insurance salesman, but for the past year, he has been giving talks on weekends with his wife, Gayle, at evangelical churches across the nation. The church talks have become the Haggards’ primary income.

Several people who have worked with Haggard said it’s premature for him to be leading a church. C. Peter Wagner, who co-founded New Life’s World Prayer Center with Haggard, said the former pastor should first seek approval from the overseers before leading people in prayer and worship. Haggard quit the five-year restoration program in February 2008....

---

Media Criticism, Chicago-Style
Who is a journalist? Ordinarily, that's something for readers and viewers to decide. But recently in Chicago and in Washington, we've seen attempts by the powerful to dictate who is—and who is not—a "real" journalist.

For the past several months, students at The Innocence Project, a program at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, have come under fire from Cook County, Ill. Prosecutors aren't happy with their habit of turning up evidence demonstrating that defendants have been wrongly convicted. They've allegedly exposed the wrongful conviction of Anthony McKinney, a Chicago man jailed for 31 years on a false confession.

Discomfited prosecutors have responded by subpoenaing everything related to the students' investigation about the McKinney case: notes, interview records and even classroom grades. According to the prosecutors, the students aren't journalists, but an "investigative agency." This is a distinction that has legal bite because journalists' notes are protected under an Illinois journalist shield law. ...

...Bert Gall and Robert Frommer of the Institute for Justice have made a compelling case that the Obama administration's word choice is quite significant. They think that by branding Fox as something other than a "legitimate news organization," the White House is actually setting up a more brutal attack using campaign finance laws. News media organizations are exempt from campaign-finance laws' speech regulations. But if Fox is not a "legitimate news organization," then federal election authorities might be able to argue that its political speech can be regulated like that of any other non-news corporation.

The implications would be far-reaching. Messrs. Gall and Frommer write on PajamasMedia.com: "Of course, if the media's speech becomes illegitimate—and thus subject to restriction—when it turns critical, then the same is true for everyone else, including ordinary citizens." Imagine if the administration applied disclosure laws not just to Fox, but to groups like the tea-party protestors. Faced with this restrictive bureaucracy, such groups would probably be paralyzed....

---

ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to Obama
Big Hollywood has already posted a couple disturbing videos of young school children singing/speaking praises to President Obama, but when eleven more dropped in our email box it came as quite a shock. What seemed like an aberration now appears to be a troubling pattern.

Maybe “epidemic” is a better word.

Each one of the videos below is creepier than the last because the further down you go, the younger the children — brace yourself for kindergartners – except for the last and most disturbing video, which you have to see to believe....

...If you think the Nobel committee jumped the gun… Days after the 2008 presidential election Ludlum Elementary in Long Island petitioned and won the right to have the name of their school changed to Barack Obama Elementary. Watch this and ask yourself if the Nobel committee’s rationale couldn’t be that much different than the students questioned in the news report.

The video below isn’t of students singing but of a woman named Janelle Kirton performing the school song. The song doesn’t mention Obama, it just relies heavily on his platitudes, but pay special attention to the school decorations inter-cut throughout the video....

---

STIMULUS WATCH: Salary raise counted as saved job
President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there....

---

Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM) ...

---

Obama’s Hidden Fees
President Obama’s promise to raise taxes only on the wealthy was easy to make and easy to break. He broke it barely two weeks after taking office, and he will break it again if Congress passes the health care legislation he wants. But Obama has come up with a strategy to avoid the fate of George H.W. Bush: Although he will raise your taxes, he will never admit he is raising your taxes.

Campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire, in September 2008, Obama declared: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Five months later, Obama signed a bill that more than doubled the federal cigarette tax, which falls especially heavily on the poor. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs argued that it didn’t really count, because “people make a decision to smoke.” Similarly, White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass says financial penalties for failing to obtain medical coverage are not taxes because “a fee would only be imposed on those few who could afford to purchase insurance but refuse to do so.”

Yet the fact that you can avoid a tax by changing your behavior does not mean it isn’t a tax. You don’t pay gasoline taxes if you don’t drive, you don’t pay property taxes if you don’t own real estate, and you don’t pay income taxes if you don’t earn income. ...

...“If you put something in the Internal Revenue Code and you tell the IRS to collect it,” a tax expert told the Associated Press in September, “I think that’s a tax.” ...

---

Climate Change and Malaria in Africa
...Ask what he wants to see foreign donors' money spent on, and he is quick to answer: better health care. When he is asked about global warming, Mr. Samson responds: "I have heard about it, but I don't even know how it would affect me. If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?"

In the West, campaigners for carbon regulations point out that global warming will increase the number of malaria victims. This is often used as an argument for drastic, immediate carbon cuts.

Warmer, wetter weather will improve conditions for the malaria parasite. Most estimates suggest that global warming will put 3% more of the Earth's population at risk of catching malaria by 2100. If we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts—designed to keep temperature rises under two degrees Celsius—we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100. In the best case scenario, we would reduce the at-risk population by only 3%.

In comparison, research commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center shows that spending $3 billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for effective new combination therapies could halve the number of those infected with malaria within one decade. For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. Mr. Samson has not done these calculations, but for him it is simple: "First things first," he says. Malaria "is here right now and it kills a lot of people every day."

Malaria is only weakly related to temperature; it is strongly related to poverty. It has risen in sub-Saharan Africa over the past 20 years not because of global warming, but because of failing medical response. ...