Bjorn Lomborg :The decision by the Conservative government to spend 50% more on so-called “climate aid” is a feel-good policy that does little for the world’s poorest or the planet. It is part of an indefensible international movement towards ever greater chunk of aid going towards climate.The money – £5.8 billion – is to be diverted from the United Kingdom’s overseas aid budget to its International Climate Fund over the next five years.In a world where malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, diverting scarce resources from aid that address these obvious challenges to climate policies is not only wasteful; it is immoral.When we think of aid, we picture taxpayer funds being used to help battle malnutrition or poverty, or perhaps respond to HIV or build schools. Of the aid that the OECD analyses – about 60% of total global bilateral development – more than one in every four pounds goes to climate aid and cutting greenhouse gases like CO2.According to Cameron, this money helps “the poorest and most vulnerable”.But they don’t want climate aid. The UN has asked more than 8 million people across the world what they want. Both for the entire world and those living in the poorest countries, climate comes 16th out of 16, after 15 other priorities.Instead they clearly tell us their top priorities: Education is the top demand for the world’s most disadvantaged, followed by better healthcare, better job opportunities, an honest and responsive government and affordable, nutritious food.Climate campaigners often point out that that these other problems will be made worse by climate change. Malaria will become more endemic; food will become scarcer; weather disasters will become worse.This can be true, but the same argument goes for almost all problems: More malaria not only kills, but reduces school attendance, depletes health systems, erodes economies and make everyone more vulnerable to most other problems.Moreover, climate aid is one of the least effective ways of helping. The Kyoto Protocol’s carbon cuts could save 1,400 malaria deaths for about $180 billion a year. Just half a billion dollars on direct malaria policies like mosquito nets could save 300,000 lives. Investing directly in agricultural research and better farming technologies will help agriculture much, much more than any carbon cuts. Extreme weather mostly hurts the poor because they’re poor: the same level hurricane can claim many lives in Honduras yet leave somewhere like Florida relatively unscathed. Helping people out of poverty is thousands of times more effective than relying on carbon cuts.Cameron’s announcement focused on UK support for green energy to developing countries. According to Cameron, “That energy not only keeps the lights on, it also improves health and education, spurs economic growth and creates jobs.”Solar panels may be good to keep on a single light and to charge a cell phone. But they are useless for tackling the main power challenges for the world’s poor. Three billion people suffer terrible indoor air pollution because they burn wood and dung to cook, but solar panels cannot power clean cook stoves. Likewise, they can’t power the refrigerators that will keep the vaccines and food from spoiling, and they cannot power the machinery for agriculture and factories.Moreover, they are intermittent and need heavy subsidies, creating few useful jobs. Indeed, a study from the Center for Global Development shows that if we instead of spending money on renewables used it on gas electrification we could lift four times more people out of darkness and poverty.The truth is that not all aid spending is equal. Donors like the United Kingdom have a moral imperative to focus first on the areas where each pound will achieve the most good.We know those investments. Last week in New York, Cameron joined other world leaders in endorsing the Global Goals – a bewildering set of 169 targets that will replace the Millennium Development Goals.Copenhagen Consensus, the think tank that I am president of, asked expert economists to analyze the targets and found a huge variation in impact. A panel of top economists including Nobel laureates identified19 phenomenal areas – including boosting pre-school access in sub-Saharan Africa, providing universal access to contraception, improving girls’ schooling, and stepping up the fight against malaria and tuberculosis – where scarce development funds should be allocated first, as every pound spent would return tens or hundreds of pounds of social value.In comparison, each pound trying to drastically increase the global share of renewable energy would return less than a pound of good to society because of issues with intermittency and storage.This doesn’t mean that we should ignore the environment.The World Health Organization estimates that the effects of climate change are responsible for 141,000 deaths annually. Looking far ahead to 2050, that death toll is expected to climb to 250,000. By contrast, some 4.3 million people will die this year from the environmental problem of indoor air pollution-the direct result of people using dung as fuel for heating and cooking in cramped spaces. This can be easily solved by providing more efficient cooking stoves and electrification.When it comes to the climate, eliminating fossil fuel subsidies would free up inefficiently-used resources for better uses like education and health, as well as having a climate dividend. The benefits would be worth more than £15 for every pound spent.Addressing global warming effectively will require long-term innovation that will make green energy affordable for everyone, rather than our current obsession with subsiding inefficient solar panels and wind turbines.But when it comes to helping the world’s poor with our development aid, we have little moral standing when we give them climate help – it is not what they want and it is often among the least effective aid to be found.There is something profoundly iniquitous about us meeting the world’s poor and hungry, whose kids lack good schools and are dying from easily curable diseases, in neighborhoods without clean water and sanitation – and we then give them a solar panel. We have a responsibility to focus aid on the phenomenal investments in health, education and poverty reduction, which are wanted by the world’s poorest people – and which would achieve the most good.-The Telegraph
