For my new video, I asked people on the street, “If you could spend $30 billion trying to solve the world’s problems, how would you spend it?”
“Build houses … address homelessness,” said a few. “Spend on health care,” “redistribution.” The most common answer was “fight climate change.”
Really? Climate change is the world’s most important problem? [emphasis, links added]
“It’s not surprising if you live in the rich world,” says Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Lomborg has spent the last 20 years consulting with experts from the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and 60 teams of economists seeking consensus on how to address the world’s biggest problems.
“The point is not that climate change is not an issue,” says Lomborg, “but we just need to have a sense of proportion.”
He says that while climate change may cause problems someday, “if you live [in] most other places on the planet, you’re worried that your kids might die from easily curable diseases tonight.”
That’s why, he says, it’s important to ask ourselves, “Where can we spend dollars and do a lot of good versus … just a little good?”
Twenty years ago, the United Nations issued development goals. Surprisingly, Lomberg says they actually helped people.
“They basically said, let’s get people out of poverty, out of hunger, get kids into school, stop moms and kids from dying.”
That effort, plus global capitalism, lifted millions out of poverty.
Unfortunately, now the UN pushes “sustainable” goals that promise everything to everyone.
“Get rid of poverty, hunger, disease, fix war, corruption, climate change,” says an exasperated Lomborg.
But a Bank of America report estimates that fighting climate change alone would cost trillions. Even that might not affect the climate very much.
“If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate,” Lomborg points out, “not only are we not fixing the climate, but we’re also wasting an enormous amount of money that could have been spent on other things.” Better things.
Lomborg’s new book, “Best Things First,” says “$35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world each and every year.”
For example, screening people for tuberculosis, giving medicine to people who have it, and making sure they complete their treatment would save up to a million lives a year.
“Nobody in rich world countries dies from tuberculosis, but in poor countries, they still do,” says Lomborg. “Spend about $5.5 billion, you could save most of those people.”
Hundreds of thousands more die from malaria. Buying bed nets with insecticides that kill mosquitoes would save lots of lives. So would spending on basic vaccines for kids.
These ideas are common sense. They cost much less than what we spend now pretending to manage the climate.
“You want to help people,” I say to Lomborg, “yet people hate you.”
“Well, some people hate me,” he laughs.
One shoved a pie in his face. Others call him “the devil incarnate,” a “traitor” who “needs to be taken down.” All because he points out that the world has bigger problems than climate change.
“Climate change might kill poor people, too,” I point out.
“It certainly will. And climate change is more damaging for poor people!” Lomborg replies. “But remember, everything is worse for poor people — because they’re poor.”
“Unmitigated scaremongering leads to ineffective political action,” says Lomborg. “We need to have a conversation about where we spend money well, compared to where we just spend money to feel virtuous about ourselves.”
Read more at Townhall
They who think that Fossil fuels are heating up the Earth is a total moron who believes Gore and DiCaprio and the Hogwash from the Eco-Freaks and M.S. Media
Feds estimate $200 BILLION of covid funds were stolen! Throwing money at problems without oversight guarantees fraud. To accommodate net zero governments are limiting fertilizer use, reducing cattle and dairy herds and simply generating a blizzard of new regulations. Trillions of dollars will be spent on climate change projects with no measurable effect if this idiocy is allowed to continue. Since government makes the laws and funds these worthless climate change projects it’s nothing but a huge money laundering system!
We can’t spend money to fix climate any more than we have done anything to disturb it which is essentially undetectable. It is a well established fact that cold conditions are more harmful than warm. Perhaps we can think more about clean water supplies all over the world
We humans can’t “fix” the climate because we have no control over it, whether the changes are caused by humans burning fossil fuels (it isn’t) or just natural changes in the climate. All we can do is adapt to changes in the climate and the best way to do that is to make use of our resources so that we have the wealth to do so. What the left is doing is making us poorer with their “green energy” nonsense so that if there actually is a turn in our climate (the most likely one that will be a problem is it getting colder) we won’t have the resources to adapt.
We have better things to worry about this a fake crisis like Climate Change