In We can do immense good, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg explains the tradeoffs we make in deciding to do good:
[G]lobal warming really has become the predominant concern of our time. It has become the thing that you care for if you are a good person.
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I come from Denmark, and there it’s pretty cold. The environmental assessment of the impact of global warming in Denmark is that overall it will be slightly positive. We’ll have better agricultural production. We’ll probably have better forestry. We will, however, also have more flash rain. That will be a negative.One of the most typical examples we’re told is that people will die from heat waves from global warming. That’s true. People will die from heat waves. What you really seem to forget is in most advanced countries, the cold deaths outweigh heat deaths two-to-one.
And of course while you will get more heat deaths, you will also get many fewer cold deaths, and actually a research team looking at the cold and heat deaths around Europe estimated that for Britain global warming will mean 18,000 fewer deaths.
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We can do fairly little about global warming at a fairly high cost. Maybe there are other things we’d like to be spending our money on doing first.The top four priorities we identified are doing something about HIV/AIDS, doing something about malnutrition, doing something about free trade and doing something about malaria.
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Doing Kyoto will probably cost about $150 billion a year, for the rest of the century. That’s not a trivial amount of money.But the United Nations estimates that for half that amount we could solve all major basic problems, we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, education and basic health care to every single human being on the face of the planet.
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If you want to get involved and not just show that you care, but actually make an impact, then choose the things you worry about well. The thing I try to point out is that particulate air pollution kills 120,000 people a year in the United States. That’s many more people than die in car accidents. That’s a huge problem.Compare this to pesticide residues, which a lot of people worry about. It’s sort of a foundation of the environmental movement all the way from Rachel Carson, our worry that we’re going to get cancer from this kind of thing.
Pesticide residue probably kills about 20 people a year in the U.S. In an ideal world, we will tackle both problems, but clearly we should deal with the big problem first.
(Hat tip to Reaon‘s Hit and Run.)