Thursday 25 December 2008

The Cost of Clean Water

World leaders are using interesting language to stress how important and urgent they feel human-induced climate change is. Words such as "morality" are being used now in the climate-change vocabulary. Interestingly, some Christian thinkers, such Jay Wesley Richards, are raising some reasonable questions about this language and alleged importance. He questions the priorities of world leaders who ignore very resolvable issues such as making drinkable water available to those who currently have undrinkable water supplies. He says that at an estimated cost to the global economy of $T700 to implement the Kyoto Protocols, the other costs (economic, social) would be enormous while the benefits would only be around a fraction of a degree in cooling global temperatures.
For less than 1% of the cost of implementing Kyoto the entire world could have clean drinking water.

1 comment:

  1. Some questions to ponder:

    - how much excess working capital does the Vatican have?
    - how much excess working capital does the various humanitarian aid organisations have?
    - how many intractable problems could be addressed by taking this funds pool and applying it in a focussed, coordinated and accountable manner?

    Clean drinking water would have to be one of these.

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