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Wising up on spending could help millions of people
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DESPITE gains in life expectancy, expanded access to education and lower rates of poverty and hunger, the world has a long way to go to improve the quality of people’s lives.
Almost a billion people still go to bed hungry, 1.2 billion live in extreme poverty, 2.6 billion lack access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and almost 3 billion burn harmful materials inside their homes to keep warm.
Poverty is one of the main killers. But some of the most lethal problems are environmental. According to the World Health Organization, about 7 million deaths each year are caused by air pollution, with the majority a result of burning twigs and dung indoors.
Here, too, poverty plays a disproportionate role. No one lights a fire every night inside their house for fun; they do so because they lack the electricity needed to stay warm and to cook. While outdoor air pollution is partly caused by incipient industrialization, this represents a temporary tradeoff for the poor — escaping hunger, infectious disease, and indoor air pollution to be better able to afford food, health care and education.
One of the best anti-poverty tools is trade. China has lifted 680 million people out of poverty over the past three decades through a strategy of rapid integration into the global economy.
Extending free trade, especially for agriculture, throughout the developing world is likely the single most important anti-poverty measure that policymakers could implement this decade.
Wrong priorities
There’s no doubt that global warming is a problem that we should tackle smartly). But doing so requires cheap green energy, especially in the developed world, not spending aid money to reduce developing countries’ emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.
Indeed, there is something fundamentally immoral about the way we set our priorities.
The OECD estimates that the world spends at least US$11 billion of total development money just to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. A large part of this is through renewable power like wind, hydro and solar. For example, Japan recently granted US$300 million of its development aid to subsidize solar and wind power in India.
If all US$11 billion were spent on solar and wind in the same proportion as current global spending, global CO2 emissions would fall by about 50 million tons each year.
Run on a standard climate model, this would reduce temperatures so trivially — about 0.00002 degrees Celsius in the year 2100.
That it is the equivalent of postponing global warming by the end of the century by a bit more than seven hours.
But if that same money were used for gas electrification, we could lift almost 100 million people out of darkness and poverty. Moreover, that US$11 billion could be used to address even more pressing issues.
Calculations from the Copenhagen Consensus show that it could save almost 3 million lives each year if directed toward preventing malaria and tuberculosis and increasing childhood immunization.
Is it really better to postpone global warming by seven hours?
Even if we continue spending US$11 billion to avoid an increase in greenhouse gases for a hundred years, we would postpone global warming by less than one month by the end of the century — an achievement with no practical impact for anyone on the planet.
Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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