[MPWG] FW: Water and Food research: investment priorities for governments

[Cafesombra at aol.com]

Dear MPWG members, please excuse an off-topic counter-posting to an off-topic 
posting.  Just offering a credible alternative viewpoint, in the spirit of 
Duggan's Law, "for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD..." 
J. Chesworth

Science, Vol 304, Issue 5676, 1429 , 4 June 2004
Economists Rate Greenhouse Gas Curbs a Poor Investment       

<snip>...The stated premise was that the industrialized world has limited 
funds--about $50 billion a year--for aid to developing countries and no objective 
way to set priorities. According to Lomborg, author of The Skeptical 
Environmentalist--a 2001 book that sought to discredit a host of environmental 
concerns (Science, 2 January, p. 28 
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/303/5654/28b>)--"eco-myths" such as global warming "prevent us from acting 
rationally" when committing resources to improving the world. It would be better, he 
argues, to base spending on cost-benefit ratios. Measures to stem climate 
change should compete for development aid, Lomborg suggests, because according to 
predictions "the developing world will suffer most of the damage from climate 
change." 
With backing from the prime minister of the right-leaning Danish government, 
Lomborg invited the nine economists who attended --including Nobelists Robert 
Fogel of the University of Chicago, Douglas North of Washington University in 
St. Louis, Misouri, and Vernon Smith of George Mason University in Fairfax, 
Virginia--to rank solutions to pressing problems according to their likely 
return on investment. Experts, chosen by Lomborg, argued for and against each of 10 
"challenges".... 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/mpwg_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20040607/7f39a8c6/attachment.html>