If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity? (Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008). Here's my answer. I'd give $1 million of it to Bjorn Lomborg to go away.
If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?
Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008
Here's my answer. I'd give $1 million of it to Bjorn Lomborg to go away. Lomborg might not take a powder so cheap, but he ought to if he's really concerned with humanity, because his noise is delaying progress on climate action.
It would actually be hard to prove he's doing a million dollars worth of damage, and equally hard to quantify the benefit of the expense, but let's just consider it a rounding error and move on, Bjornless. Besides, there'd still be $9,999,000,000 left.
Anyway, his question is fundamentally silly. It stems from a consumer mentality -- as if you can "spend" $10 billion to buy solutions to immense geo-political and structural problems such as global hunger, disease, terrorism, or climate change. Maybe you can in a Copenhagen conference center, but not in the real world.
His question sets up false choices that are unavailable -- as if the money spent by a coal plant to reduce its emissions could instead be deployed to fight AIDS in Africa. Sure, the latter choice might generate more bang for the buck, but I don't recall the coal lobby recently atwitter about shifting its spending to AIDS research instead of carbon sequestration.
Instead of examining what an imaginary $10 billion could buy in an imaginary world, Lomborg would be more credible if he'd ask real life questions.
Like what the $600 billion (or more) spent on the Iraq oil war could have done for global renewable energy development. How many human lives -- both US and Iraqi -- would have been saved in the bargain? That would make for a shocking quantification that could help turn swords into ploughshares.
That would be putting his star power to good use. Heck, I'd even give him $2 million of the $10 billion for that.
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Source: How to Get the Biggest Bang for 10 Billion Bucks, Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008