One of the crucial issues the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen must agree on is how much the rich countries will contribute to the climate-change fund for poor countries.

The rich countries are morally obliged to help finance the poor’s programs and projects against global warming and other harmful climate change effects.

If the theory is correct that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are the biggest cause, then the primary culprits are the rich countries. They contribute the most to GHG emissions while poor countries contribute very little to total man-made GHG pollution. The Philippines, for example, emits less than 1 percent of the world’s total GHG emissions. Yet poor countries—and poor people—are the most vulnerable to global warming: diseases, deep floods and disappearance of coastal lands submerged by rising seas.

Sadly, whatever agreement is reached in Copenhagen on the amount of funding the rich will pledge to give as aid to the poor will all end up being hot air. And risibly contribute to global warming.

In Kyoto on December 11, 1997 the nations adopted the so-called Kyoto Protocol. That document serves as a kind of concrete “enabling law” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or just FCCC). The aim of the FCC and the Kyoto Protocol is to arrest and combat global warming by united global action. The entire UN membership subscribed to the UNFCCC. But it took long for all the party-countries to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And one country, the United States, is in fact not a signatory to it.

President Obama’s decision to attend the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (which President Arroyo is also attending) marks a dramatic change in the USA’s position. He has actually announced the USA’s willingness to help in the global GHG stabilization effort by cutting American emissions by 17 percent to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. And the US government would also contribute a hefty sums to fund poor countries’ climate change projects. But this can only happen if the US Congress passes the necessary laws. And there is no guarantee that it will. So that President Obama’s pledges in Copenhagen today and tomorrow could count for nothing in the end.

EU’s $150 billion pledge

China, the world’s biggest GHG emitter (the USA is only No. 2), the European Union and most other countries richer than the Philippines have pledged to make substantial moves to cut their emissions and contribute huge sums to the poor developing countries. The EU has pledged to give $150 billion a year up to 2020. But how each European country will find the money to contribute to the EU kitty is a big question mark.

Our pessimism has a good basis. Most rich countries have been laggards on their commitment to increase their development and anti-poverty aid to poor countries.

In 2005 the Group of 8 and later the Group of 20 promised to increase their development aid by US$30 billion a year up to 2010. This has not happened.

If all the climate-change doomsayers are right, we Filipinos must strive to be more self-reliant than we have ever been.

Paul A. Samuelson
By Gonzalo M. Jurado PhD.

In remembering Paul A. Samuelson (May 15, 1915 to December 13, 2009), we quote three sources: The Royal Swedish Academy in awarding him the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1970: Samuelson “has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory.” The economic historian Randall E. Parker: Samuelson is the “Father of Modern Economics.” And the New York Times: Samuelson is the “foremost academic economist of the 20th century.”

To economists in the Philippines, as well as probably to all economists in the rest of the world, Samuelson is well-known for his textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, the largest selling book of all time, first published in 1948, now in its 19th edition, having sold nearly four million copies in 40 languages.

Far from being an introductory book in the usual sense, this Samuelson textbook includes explanations of the most advanced and abstruse topics in economics in the simplest, clearest, and sometimes unavoidably mathematical, language possible. But Samuelson’s contributions to economics are far more fundamental and far ranging than can be summed up in a word or two. They include mathematical economics, revealed preference theory, international trade theory, economic growth theory, public goods theory, welfare economics, and, in their totality, what is now known as the neoclassical synthesis.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Chicago in 1935, Samuelson proceeded to Harvard University where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1936 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941. The story is told that after explaining his doctoral dissertation, which was a formulation of economic theory in mathematics, to his dissertation committee, the committee chairman, Joseph Schumpeter, addressed his members thus: “Gentlemen, did we pass?”

Years later, in 1947, an offshoot of this dissertation would be published in the magnum opus Foundations of Economic Analysis.

In the Philippines, much of our knowledge and understanding of development economics spring from Samuelson’s contributions. The blending of Keynesian theory, which is mainly macroeconomics, with neoclassical theory, which is mainly microeconomics, done masterfully by Samuelson, enables us to build macro-models with micro-sub-models that give us, with Tinbergen’s contributions as well, policy handles for dealing with issues in domestic production, international trade, public finance and consumer welfare.

Most readers would remember Samuelson as one of two academic authors, the other being Milton Friedman, who wrote a weekly column for Newsweek Magazine in the 1970s. Academic opposites, Samuelson took the liberal, Keynesian perspective and Friedman the conservative, libertarian perspective.

The economics profession in the Philippines and their students and friends join colleagues all over the world in mourning the passing of a great economist, a seminal contributor to economic science, a teacher to our teachers.

(Much of the information comes from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dated December 15, 2009.)