‘Immoral’ Environmentalism
BY JAMES FREEMAN
“Climate aid” is the latest fad among rich countries as they shift billions of dollars of foreign assistance away from health and nutrition programs and into carbon reduction. “In a world in which malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives each year, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral,” writes Bjorn Lomborg in today’s Journal.
Not surprisingly, the people who need help didn’t ask for this change. Mr. Lomborg notes that “in an online U.N. survey of more than eight million people from around the globe, respondents from the world’s poorest countries rank ‘action taken on climate change’ dead last out of 16 categories when asked ‘What matters most to you?’” Better health is a higher priority and Mr. Lomborg adds that “just $570 million a year—or 0.57% of the $100 billion climate-finance goal—spent on direct malaria-prevention policies like mosquito nets would reduce malaria deaths by 50% by 2025, saving an estimated 300,000 lives a year.”
(...)
This Child Doesn’t Need a Solar Panel
Spending billions of dollars on climate-related aid in countries that need help with tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.
(para ler a íntegra, só com assinatura do jornal, o que eu não tenho. Mas quem tiver acesso, agradeceria receber o artigo completo...)
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário