Posted on 07/02/2006 7:27:19 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1810738,00.html
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
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
Well, we know what the UN does with its money. It takes it and puts it into its own very capacious pockets.
The UN apparently spent $400 million on refurbishing HQ and hasn't even got the specs done yet... according to some threads on FR
This is good stuff. It makes the moonbats think in terms of "opportunity costs". Some "environmentalists" actually want to see the most people die off. Socialists want people to have "more" (at the expense of "the rich"). This type of thinking can drive a wedge between the two sides of moonbatism. So long as it's just "money from rich people"; the greens and pinkos agree. When it's a matter of having to chose between giving social welfare programs vs. global warming -- the pinkos will oppose the "greens".
If Global Warming is sooooooooo bad, then why isn't WARREN BUFFET and BILL GATES spending all their money on it!!
(The Palestinian terrorist regime is the crisis and Israel's fist is the answer.)
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.
Or as Rona Ambrose, Canada's Environment Minister observed, the consequence of Kyoto in real world terms would be to shut down her country's entire economy. So the social value of fighting global warming is far less than a dollar for each dollar spent. It is in fact close to zero.
(The Palestinian terrorist regime is the crisis and Israel's fist is the answer.)
Lomberg, being a good little socialist at heart, can't bring himself to recommend returning the surplus to the taxpayers.
It is a curious question with no answer. We can point to Al Gore who is shoveling his cash toward some type of training program related to global warming. But beyond that...no one in the US, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, all of Europe and even Saudi Arabia...amongst the top 500 millionares in the world...are tossing a dime at global warming. The next time that NPR has a science Friday episode with a global warmist...we should sneak a call in and ask when the fotune 500 are going to step up to the plate? The answer will be silence. And that answer is right in more than one respect.
As I said, Warren Buffet and Bill gates HAVE $50 BILLION to spend on Global Warming and yet they aren't!!!
(The Palestinian terrorist regime is the crisis and Israel's fist is the answer.)
That's how Monica loses weight, Gore just burns it off!
Great job.
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