Forget Global Warming and Terrorism: Fight Disease and Hunger

A certain contingent of the Right shouts that global warming is a trick promoted by hysteria-mongering environmental fascists. A certain contingent of left like throwing that same F-bomb at the Bush Administration for its own hysteria-mongering in the War on Terror.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Bjørn Lomborg offers a pleasantly rational, non-radical critique of both sides. He doesn't claim global warming is a myth: "There is unequivocal evidence," says the Danish economist, "that humans are changing the planet's climate." Nor does he claim that al-Qaida is a figment of the conspiratorial Right's imagination: he recognizes that "transnational terrorists take, on average, 420 lives each year."

Instead, Lomborg looks at global warming and transnational terrorism and says, with the cool calculation that only an economist could love (but that more of us should embrace), "Don't bother." Based on research by eight of the best economists in the world, Lomborg argues that efforts to reduce carbon emissions and fight terrorists won't produce a sufficient return on investment:

[On reducing carbon emissions] ...Spending $800 billion (in total present-day terms) over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would reduce temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century.

When you add up the benefits of that spending -- from the slightly lower temperatures -- the returns are only $685 billion. For each extra dollar spent, we would get 90 cents of benefits -- and this is even when things like environmental damage are taken into account....

[On fighting terrorism] Increasing defensive measures world-wide by 25% would cost at least $75 billion over five years. In the extremely unlikely scenario that attacks dropped by 25%, the world would save about $21 billion. That figure is reached by adding up the economic damage caused by terrorists, and by putting a high economic value on the lives lost.

But even in this best-case scenario, the costs will be at least three times higher than the benefits. Put another way, each extra dollar spent increasing defensive measures will generate -- at most -- about 30 cents of return.

We could save about 105 lives a year, globally. There are few areas where we would consider spending so much to do so little. To put this into context, 30,000 lives are lost annually on U.S. highways. [emphasis mine, article by Bjørn Lomborg, "How to Get the Biggest Bang for 10 Billion bucks," Wall Street Journal, 2008.07.28].

So where should we spend our money? Lomborg says we get a better return on investment fighting disease and hunger. Putting $500 million a year toward simple malaria prevention measures like bed nets and subsidies for new treatments "would save 500,000 lives a year—most of them children." In economic terms, Lomborg sees a twenty-fold return on investment from disease prevention (people contribute more to the economy when they don't die at age 2).

Fighting hunger also reduces disease and increases productivity. Lomborg recommends investing a mere $60 million in providing micronutrients like vitamin A and zinc to hungry kids worldwide. That investment would produce over a billion dollars in health savings and productivity gains, a return on investment of 17 to 1. Another $60 million added to ag research (yup, that includes genetic engineering) would produce an ROI of $16 on the dollar.

Lomborg has made arguments about priorities like this before. I heard him on PBS once argue that for the cost of enacting the Kyoto Protocols, we could build water purification plants for all of Africa. His book The Skeptical Environmentalist is a splendid read, complete with 2900+ footnotes (and even some online errors, fully 'fessed up by Lomborg).

Lomborg now heads the Copenhagen Consensus Center to promote the rational prioritization of global problems and sensible policy solutions that do the most good with the resources available. You can read the group's ranked list of solutions for global problems (funny, no mention of abortion bans as a way to save lives).

So how about a deal: let's drop the War on Terror and global warming as rhetorical bludgeons. Better yet, let's cut funding funding for both issues by half and dedicate that money to fighting disease and hunger. Any takers?