| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
02 Jul 2006 10:20:31 PM |
| Object: |
Climate change can wait. World health can't |
Climate change can wait. World health can't
With $50bn, we could make the planet a better place but money spent on
global warming would be wasted
Bjorn Lomborg
Sunday July 2, 2006
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1810738,00.html
A city council has a £10m surplus, which it wants to allocate to a
good cause. Ten groups clamour for the cash. One wants to buy new
computers for an inner-city school. Another hopes to beautify a park.
Each puts a persuasive case for the benefits they could achieve. What
should the councillors do? The straightforward answer might seem to be
to divide the cash into 10. But the obvious answer is wrong.
Some options will always be better than others. If we know which
causes produce the greatest social benefits, then it is reasonable to
propose the money goes to those causes.
On a larger scale, governments and United Nations agencies have
massive - but finite - budgets to reduce suffering in the world. They,
too, tend to distribute money thinly across different causes, often
following the media's roving attention. A little extra is spent
battling HIV/Aids, malaria and malnutrition. Some more is devoted to
stamping out corruption and conflict. Other cash is set aside to
holding back climate change and warding off avian flu.
After all, if politicians give everyone something, nobody complains.
But like the council with a surplus, they, too, would do better with a
rational framework which would help determine explicit priorities. For
policy-makers, the list of spending possibilities is like a huge menu
at a restaurant. But it is a menu without prices or serving sizes.
Currently, there is considerable momentum to ensure governments commit
to combating climate change. Former US Vice-President Al Gore has
turned movie-maker, creating a documentary called The Inconvenient
Truth
Yet the really inconvenient truth, demonstrated by a group of
economists who gathered in Denmark in 2004, is that combating climate
change through the Kyoto Protocol has a social value of less than a
dollar for each dollar spent. These economists, who included four
Nobel laureates, took part in a project called the Copenhagen
Consensus which compared the social value of solutions to different
challenges facing humankind. The question that they strove to answer
was: 'How could you spend $50bn to achieve the most good possible?'
The costs and benefits of different ways of combating HIV/Aids,
starvation, global conflict, climate change, corruption and other
challenges were studied in detail. With access to specially
commissioned research, the team came up with a concrete, prioritised
'to do' list that outlined how policy-makers could achieve the most
good possible.
The economists found that spending $27bn on an HIV/Aids prevention
programme would be the best possible investment for humanity. It would
save more than 28 million lives within six years and have massive
flow-on effects, including increased productivity.
Providing micronutrient-rich dietary supplements to the malnourished
was their second-highest priority. More than half the world suffers
from deficiencies of iron, iodine, zinc or vitamin A, so cheap
solutions such as nutrient fortification have an exceptionally high
ratio of benefits to costs.
Third on the list was trade liberalisation. Although this would
require politically difficult decisions, it would be remarkably cheap
and would benefit the entire world, not least the developing world. A
staggering GDP increase of $2,400bn annually would accrue equally to
developed and developing countries with free trade.
The economists would then focus on the huge benefits possible from
controlling malaria with chemically treated mosquito nets. Next on
their list would be agricultural research and improving sanitation and
water quality for a billion of the world's poorest people. The
benefits of these ventures far outweigh the costs.
Forty dollars of good would be achieved for every dollar spent on
HIV/Aids prevention. In other words, a dollar's worth of condoms in
the right place would bring benefits an Aids-affected community would
value at $40.
Some will ask why, then, that community doesn't spend the dollar
itself? Typically, the answer is because the spending power lies
elsewhere, in wealthier nations or with the UN. Information about
risks are often hard to come by. Also, the effects of HIV/Aids are
far-reaching. One infection today will cause more infections in the
future and devastate families and communities. Yet the individual
investment in prevention rarely takes these downstream costs into
consideration.
The panel examined proposals relating to climate change, including
implementing the Kyoto Protocol and taxing carbon dioxide emissions.
All ranked badly. Spending the world's limited resources combating
climate change would achieve good, but would cost more than it would
achieve. That money could be better spent elsewhere.
That's why the Copenhagen Consensus economists crossed drastic climate
change measures off the list of things that the world needs to do
right now.
The prioritising exercise undertaken by these economists must go
beyond being an academic exercise. It has to become part of the
political discourse if decisions about reducing suffering are to have
greater transparency and legitimacy.
Last month, at Georgetown University, a distinguished group of UN
ambassadors gathered to come up with its own 'to do' list. The
occasion brought together representatives from countries which
collectively represent about half of humanity, including the US,
China, India and Pakistan.
Their choice? They came out with a list of priorities surprisingly
close to the Copenhagen Consensus economists. They agreed that the
world's top spending priorities should be around the areas of health,
water, education and hunger. And, perhaps more courageously, they also
said what should not come at the top - financial instability and
climate change ranked at the bottom of the list.
The project was a significant step towards putting the concept of
prioritisation on the agenda for global decision-makers. And they were
all keen on taking the exercise further, hoping to have 40 or 50 UN
ambassadors participate in a similar exercise in New York in the
autumn. But, at the end of the day, priorities are not the ones Nobel
economists or UN ambassadors set; they are something societies debate
and democracies decide.
In a world where politicians and voters are faced with ever-increasing
and competing demands for time and money, the Copenhagen Consensus
process can help decision-makers focus on those initiatives with the
greatest benefits, rather than just the ones with the most vocal
advocates.
The provision of a principled framework for decisions could ultimately
ensure that the world's limited resources are spent doing the most for
humanity. And that option is very hard to ignore.
--
"Science is the record of dead religions." -- Oscar Wilde
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilization is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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