Right Pulse

The Spectator has an article that highlights the over blown nonsense surrounding the ‘climate change’ agenda. Bjørn Lomborg with his Copenhagen Consensus, includes some of the best economists in the world, states that climate change is not the number one challenge facing the world. In fact, it does not even make a top ten list of challenges. Instead, as Lomborg would argue:

Far better to spend our limited pool of development aid money, say the economists, on schemes like micronutrient supplements (vitamin A and zinc) for malnourished children. For an annual outlay of only $60 million this would result in yearly benefits (through improved health, fewer deaths, increased earnings) worth more than $1 billion.

And:

What non-economists tend to have difficulty understanding, says Lomborg, is the concept of marginal benefit. ‘We tend to think in terms of absolute magnitude, so people will say, “Global warming is overall a bigger problem than micronutrition so we should deal with that first.” But what economists say is, “No. If you can spend a billion dollars and save 600,000 kids from dying and save about two billion people from being malnourished, that’s a lot better than spending the same amount to postpone global warming by about two minutes at the end of the century.”’

So while here in Australia we have an entire Ministry devoted to ‘climate change’, if you wanted to save the world, according to Lomborg, the Government should focus on the following top 5 issues:

1. Micronutrient supplements for children (vitamin A and zinc);

2. The Doha development agenda;

3. Micronutrient fortification (iron and salt iodization);

4. Expanded immunization coverage for children; and

5. Biofortification Malnutrition.