Greg Mortenson in Person

Thursday night I went to hear Greg Mortenson speak. I was moved by his book, "Three Cups of Tea" and I luckily got tickets before they sold out. He shared many great thoughts, which I should probably share, but I've been a little obsessed by Global Warming (trying to understand it) and Greg mentioned something that started me thinking.

I will point out one thing: Greg is passionate that educating girls is the key to bringing peace to the world. It makes sense. There are many reasons and statistics to back up his stance. I agree with him 100%.

Greg said “In the holy Koran when a young man goes on a jihad he first has to get permission and blessing from his mother. If a woman has an education she is much less likely to condone her son to get into violence or to terrorism.”

This is the point I want to focus on. He said that Islamic extremists (Taliban, Al Queda) are going into the illiterate, uneducated villages to recruit since mothers elsewhere are getting too smart to give their sons permission to become terrorist.

So what could this possibly have to do with Global Warming?

First start by looking at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen where they are proposing that wealthy countries send billions of dollars to poor countries to help them deal with the effects of climate change.

While it seems like the right thing to do to follow this solution, I believe the backers of this solution are worst then the terrorist recruiters. It is becoming more and more difficult to squeeze money out of our prosperous country, because we are getting too smart. So "they" get smarter and design a plan to send wealth to impoverished countries. These countries are like the illiterate villages, where it will be easy to siphon off some of the GW reparation money.

I know it sounds a little like a wacko conspiracy idea, but who honestly thinks that billions of dollars will in any way be effectively spent to deal with climate change?

Here's my question to anyone that thinks a lot of money can do any good:

If I gave you $1 million, could you do something good for your community, without wasting a penny? (Most people answer yes or probably).
How about if I gave you $10 million? (Most people realize that it's a little harder to track this much money)
How about if I gave you $1 billion? (There are plenty of examples of how hard it is to insert this much money into a community to help them. Usually it results in unintended consequences like what happens to lottery winners).

Oh, and here's an interesting report from Copenhagen