Global warming... boy are we hearing a lot about that these days. After dire predictions that last year would be the warmest on record as that was what was required to make the models work, 2007 turned out to be the coldest in over a decade. But Jupiter did have yet another record warm year, a trend that follows the Earth model in near-perfect unison. Is it cosmic or is it human-caused? I wonder... I guess I'm just always a skeptic, especially when geologic time is involved.
But that's just the prologue to this post. An interesting confluence of thought has happened in Copenhagen over the past few months.
Even as the U.S. Senate debates a vast new tax and spend regime in the name of fighting climate change, a more instructive argument was taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the world's leading economists met last week to decide how to do the most good in a world of finite resources.
The question addressed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center is what investments would do the most good for the most people. The center's blue-ribbon panel of economists, including five Nobel laureates, weighed more than 40 proposals to improve the world by spending a total of $75 billion over the next four years.
The result?
What would do the most good most economically? Supplements of vitamin A and zinc for malnourished children.
Number two? A successful outcome to the Doha Round of global free-trade talks. (Someone please tell Barack Obama.)
Global warming mitigation? It ranked 30th, or last, right behind global warming mitigation research and development. (Someone please tell John McCain.)
Vitamin supplements?
Providing vitamin A and zinc would help some 112 million children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for merely $60 million a year. The minerals would help prevent blindness and stunted growth – increasing lifetime productivity by an estimated $1 billion.
The fact the free trade was number two is important.
"It's true that trade doesn't immediately save lives," explains Bjorn Lomborg, the political scientist who heads the Copenhagen Consensus Center. "But it's proven that when people have more money" – as tends to be the case when trade barriers fall – "they improve their health, their education and so on." The resulting prosperity reduces such problems as malnutrition and disease, while improving education. All three of those ranked high on the priority list.
The benefits of freer trade were estimated in a paper presented by Professors Kym Anderson and Alan Winters. They found that a successful Doha Round could generate up to $113 trillion in new wealth during the 21st century, at a cost of $420 billion or less from inefficient industries going bust. If you like ratios, that's a return of $269 for every $1 of cost. A less conservative projection puts the gains three times higher. More than 80% of this global windfall would go to the world's poorest countries.
Of course that doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem. Perhaps. And it definitely doesn't mean we should ignore that fact that humans pollute and regardless of whether that contributes to global warming we should still work to minimize it. We should. But let's go about using our limited resources in the most effective way.