Al-Hayat’s Morkos on the global economy, inequality, and the environment

I have long thought that al-Hayat’s English-language web presence is one the saddest wasted opportunities in the whole global discourse. However, recently I discovered some very thoughtful writing in an unexpected portion of the site: it is on their business pages.
Going there today, I found two generally very intelligent pieces written by their Business Editor, Michel Morkos: Inequality and Environment Challenge the World Economy, published December 18; and The Price of Environmental Change in the Economic Formula, published December 31.
The first of these pieces identifies a recent significant reduction in the dependence of the world economy on the US economy, and explores the implications of this de-coupling (which Morkos judges, imho correctly, is by no means complete.)
He writes:

For the first time, the growth of the world economy is allowed to be separated from the US economy. This is considered a good step because it shows that the world is less liable to comply with the US demand and debt. It wasn’t logical, or fair, that most countries, especially underdeveloped countries, should totally yield to the economic fate of the richest economy worldwide and the most spendthrift on the planet.
This separation of the US and world economies will pave the way for the countries of the world to witness a better distribution of the growth returns…

Towards the end of this piece, Morkos moves towards considering equality issues in the global economy, an issue on which he expresses justifiable concern. Then he has a short consideration of the impact of environmentally motivated changes on the prospects for growth, and here he seems to buy into the distinctly questionable argument that environmental constraints will necessarily hamper economic growth.
In the second of these pieces, however, Morkos delves with more intelligence into the economic and other effects of global climate change, and does a much better job of considering its impact. He cites obert Costanza’s 1997 attempt to put a dollar figure on the value of the contribution that the world’s biosphere itself makes to the global economy. He cites the IMF’s and the ICRC’s noticeably differing estimates for the numbers of “environmental refugees” worldwide (25 million, vs. 500 million), but concludes rightly that this is a phenomenon deserving of our great attention… Then he cites what I think was the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 on the accelerating degradation of the biosphere– though the double translation involved has this body referred to there as the “group of intergovernmental experts on climate” rather than the “intergovernmental panel on climate change.” And then he moves on to the Stern Review of late 2006 on the economic consequences of climate change, and Stern’s estimates of the economic costs of either fixing or not fixing the problem.
Still referring to Stern, he concludes his piece thus:

The planet is facing the risks of a “major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.” However, the planet can be saved by reducing gas emissions that cause global warming and seeing the earth avoid even worse consequence; the cost won’t be more than 1% of the annual world GDP.
Can we preserve a clean planet and a good economic environment?

Not a bad place at all to launch his next column from!
In fact, if urgent measures are not taken to preserve the biosphere on which all of humanity depends, the world’s economy, society, and perhaps all of human life itself will anyway be going into a tailspin within the next 100 years, as Stern clearly indicated… And meanwhile, the experiences of farsighted entrepreneurs in many countries, especially Germany, have already shown that a coordinated shift towards the use of ever-greener technology can be good for both the economy and the environment. The idea that this is a zero-sum game and that there always has to be a tradeoff between the two interests is just plain false.
Anyway, I’ve been happy to draw attention to Morkos’s writings on this issue for a couple of reasons. It has been good to find the business editor of a major international daily newspaper starting to grapple seriously– even if, imho, still somewhat imperfectly– with the whole climate change issue.
And then: look at who publishes and reads Al-Hayat! It is published by weighty, ruling-family-related interests in Saudi Arabia, and it is read very widely by well-connected persons in the Kingdom and other Gulf oil-producing states. How excellent to get these circles starting to think seriously about climate change, and by implication about the role their own countries can play in starting to deal with this issue.
In the first of his december articles, Morkos writes,

Only Saudi Arabia launched a fund at the beginning of this month to protect the environment and impede the dissemination of gazes that cause heating. But the conflict is ongoing about the methods…

I don’t actually think that statement as written (which may have been a mis-translation from the Arabic original?) is correct. Many other countries and intergovernmental bodies have launched funds aimed at helping to support pro-green economic transformations. Though of course, all these efforts are still horrendously under-funded; and the World Bank and many other major development-funding bodies continue to pour huge amounts of money into building infrastructure systems around the world that are heavily gasoline-dependent.
And Saudi Arabia’s own rate of per-capita greenhouse gas emissions is horrendously high, and definitely needs to be considerably reduced. Al-Hayat’s business editor should turn his attention to that huge challenge, too.
But all in all, I was pleased to find those two pieces on the English-language Hayat website. The site’s Business section also carries some interesting writings by the veteran oil-affairs expert Walid Khadduri.
But in general, Hayat’s English-language website still remains a wasteland of missed (or shirked) opportunity. It carries very little material at all; and the choice of which of the paper’s Arabic-language articles do get translated and published on it seems almost completely random. There is no RSS feed or use of hyperlinks. Its Search function has never worked for me. The organization of the site, such as it is, is abysmal.