Wall Street Journal: Does Helping the Planet Hurt the Poor? Bjorn Lomborg
(I missed this one from a couple of weeks ago. Better late than never.)
Yes, if We Listen to Green Extremists.
Peter Singer poses an interesting and important question: Can we afford to both reduce poverty and clean up the environment? From an empirical standpoint, the answer is definitely yes. The developed world is sufficiently rich that doing both should be well within our means.
The key, of course, is being smart about how we tackle these big problems. Right now, the only legally binding climate policy, the European Union's 20-20 policy, will cost its members $250 billion in lost economic growth every year over the next century (according to research by the noted climate economist Richard Tol). Yet the net effect will be an almost immeasurable reduction in global temperatures of just 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. If spent smartly, the same resources really could fix both global warming and poverty.
In a curious way, Mr. Singer's essay is an example of one of the stumbling blocks to making smarter policy decisions. He starts out saying we want to do a variety of good things, but almost reflexively he ends up focusing on green issues—and doing so in a very predictable way: The developed world has sinned and needs to atone. ...
Read the whole article. It's excellent. Here are a few more excerpts:
... This was what the economist Nicholas Stern concluded in the controversial 2006 review of climate change that he conducted for the British government. Mr. Stern said, in effect, that we should be saving 97.5% of all our wealth for future generations. The silliness of this view becomes apparent when we realize that, by this logic, our children and grandchildren also would be expected to continue the cycle of bowing to future generations, leaving almost everything to their progeny and pushing forward an ever larger mountain of resources that are never to be consumed.
We don't behave this way. Partly because we are selfish and partly because we expect that future generations are likely to be much better off than we are. Compared with the future, we are the poor generation, and it is hardly moral to have the poor generation pay the most. Rather, it makes sense to leave generalized assets, such as knowledge and technology, to future generations. This gives them a much greater capacity to tackle problems that come their way. Our actual financial savings for the future tend to be about 15% of income. We could debate whether the number should be 10% or 20%, but it is far-fetched to suggest that it should be 97.5%. We all recognize that we should care for the future, but at the same time we should care for ourselves.
Mr. Singer falls into the trap of saying that global warming is so terrible that dealing with it should take priority over all other concerns. This is simply wrong. Global warming is a problem that we must confront, but according to economic modeling by Carlo Carraro of the University of Venice, its damage is likely to cost something on the order of 2% to 5% of GDP by the end of the century.
At the same time, it is helpful to recall that our fossil-fuel economy has created amazing opportunities for almost everyone in the world, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The United Nations climate panel estimates that economic growth will enable an increase per capita GDP in developing countries by some 2,400% over the course of the century. ...
And ...
Fortunately, there is a more sensible way forward that could use the same $250 billion that the European Union is expecting to waste annually on ineffective global warming policies. First, we should spend about $100 billion a year on research and development to make green energy cheaper and more widely available. Mr. Singer argues that it is not ethically defensible just to hope for a "technological miracle" that will allow us to end our reliance on fossil fuels. He is right. We must invest much more in green energy research and development, and it is the most politically realistic and economically efficient way to combat global warming.
This would leave $50 billion a year to develop adaptations for dealing with the impact of global warming and $100 billion a year for the world's poor, a sum that, according to the U.N., would go a long way toward providing them with clean drinking water, sanitation, food, health and education.
We are perfectly capable today of tackling the problems of both poverty and environmental pollution. But to do so, we must think clearly and rationally, and we must carefully weigh the costs and benefits of the approaches available to us.
In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley makes an important point about warming and the poor. The IPCC models link global economic growth with greater temperature increases over the next century. The high end of temperature change means that poor nations today will have undergone massive economic growth. The average sub-Saharan African in 2100 will be at least on par with the Dutch person living in 2011. That means they will no longer be poor and have the resources to adapt to changes. However, low economic growth, according to the IPCC model, means less temperature change and leaving people in poverty. So, what is the greater threat to the poor ... stopping economic growth or climate change?
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