Will the World Bank Choose Climate Change Over Poverty?

A new G-20 report calls for raising $3 trillion and spending only a fraction of it to help the poor.

By Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"across poorer countries five million children die each year before their fifth birthdays and almost a billion people don’t get enough to eat. More than two billion have to cook and keep warm with polluting fuels such as dung and wood, which shortens their lifespans. Although most young kids are in school, education is so dismal that most children in low- and lower-middle-income countries will remain functionally illiterate. 

"Opportunity is restricted in particular by a lack of the cheap and plentiful energy that allowed rich nations to develop. In Africa, electricity is so rare that total monthly consumption per person is often less than what a single refrigerator uses during that time. This absence of energy access hampers industrialization and growth. Case in point: The rich world on average has 530 tractors per 10,000 acres, while the impoverished parts of Africa have fewer than one."

"a new Group of 20 report urges the World Bank and other development organizations to push for an additional $3 trillion annual spending and direct most of it to climate policy."  

"United Nations climate panel scenarios predict the world will dramatically improve over the next century. Climate change will merely slow that progress slightly. Hunger will fall dramatically over the coming decades, but with climate change it will decline a smidgen slower. Likewise, the panel expects global average income to increase 3½-fold by 2100 absent climate change. If climate change continues undeterred, William Nordhaus, the only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize, estimates that this would mean income would still rise by 3.34 times."

"Climate activists try to paper over these realities by arguing that poverty and climate change are inextricably linked. Yet research repeatedly shows that spending on core development priorities would help much more and much faster per dollar spent than putting funds toward climate. That is because real development investments can dramatically change lives for the better right now and make poorer countries more resilient against climate-related problems such as diseases and natural disasters. By contrast, even drastic emission reductions won’t deliver noticeably different outcomes for a generation or more."

"high-income countries still get almost 80% of their energy from fossil fuels. This is in large part because solar and wind power remain intermittent."

"It’s no wonder then that the World Bank’s own polling shows that climate ranks far down the priority list of people living in poorer countries. Another large 2021 survey of leaders in low- and middle-income countries similarly found education, employment, peace and health at the top of development priorities, with climate coming 12th out of 16 issues."