Opinion: In today’s pages: Global warming, hunger, wiretapping
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The Times editorial board continues its series on food diplomacy, asking what the price of neglecting hunger might be:
Until now, it was the rural poor who often died of hunger or related disease, and they died quietly. But changing demographics are making this hunger crisis more visible. For the first time in history, according to a new U.N. report, half of the Earth’s population now lives in urban areas. When the urban poor cannot afford to buy food, they don’t starve silently. Since 2007, food prices have triggered unrest in 30 countries and brought down the government of Haiti. As food and energy prices continue to rise, hunger is likely to foment more political instability, more resentment of Americans’ burning food calories as biofuel, more babies stunted for life, more radical Islamism and probably more wars.
The board also supports the House-approved bill on warrantless wiretaps, even though it has some flaws.
On the Op-Ed page, Samuel Thernstrom of the American Enterprise Institute has a new strategy to combat global warming: geo-engineering. The Century Foundation’s Morton Abramowitz says the U.S. has shortchanged Iraqi refugees. And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes a look at a new exhibit of Los Angeles photographs that avoids the pitfalls of depicting L.A. as a sun-soaked paradise or a noir underbelly.
On the letters page, readers discuss suing OPEC. Tarzana’s Richard I. Fine was part of the last lawsuit against it, and says, ‘Oil politics ruled over law.’
*Photograph of Hollywood and Vine, 1969, by Garry Winogrand, courtesy of The Estate of Garry Winogrand.