Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirty Dane
http://copenhagenconsensus.com
It's economic research at the Copenhagen Business School. I do not think there will be any video versions. Not like Al Gore 
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most of the projects they promote as good - that is, under welfare economics, as having the most benefit per dollar spent - seem to focus on increasing the health of the third world.
That seems empathic but possibly misguided - if the health of the thord world is increased without pressing them into the modern form of society, the birth rate will just crush their economies all the faster.
The stuff they label "good" - new appropriate ag tech for the 3rd world, new water tech, sanitation tech, and aid starting new businesses, all sound fine to me, but way touchy feely cruchy granola for the rightwingers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus
Quote:
Very Good
The highest priority was assigned to implementing certain new measures to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. The economists estimated that an investment of $27 billion could avert nearly 30 million new infections by 2010.
Policies to reduce malnutrition and hunger were chosen as the second priority. Increasing the availability of micronutrients, particularly reducing iron deficiency anemia through dietary supplements, was judged to have an exceptionally high ratio of benefits to costs, which were estimated at $12 billion.
Third on the list was trade liberalization; the experts agreed that modest costs could yield large benefits for the world as a whole and for developing nations.
The fourth priority identified was controlling and treating malaria; $13 billion costs were judged to produce very good benefits, particularly if applied toward chemically-treated mosquito netting for beds[4].
Good
The fifth priority identified was increased spending on research into new agricultural technologies appropriate for developing nations. Three proposals for improving sanitation and water quality for a billion of the world?s poorest followed in priority (ranked sixth to eighth: small-scale water technology for livelihoods, community-managed water supply and sanitation, and research on water productivity in food production). Completing this group was the 'government' project concerned with lowering the cost of starting new businesses.
[edit] Fair
Ranked tenth was the project on lowering barriers to migration for skilled workers. Eleventh and twelfth on the list were malnutrition projects - improving infant and child nutrition and reducing the prevalence of low birth weight. Ranked thirteenth was the plan for scaled-up basic health services to fight diseases.
[edit] Poor
Ranked fourteenth to seventeenth were: a migration project (guest-worker programmes for the unskilled), which was deemed to discourage integration; and three projects addressing climate change (optimal carbon tax, the Kyoto protocol and value-at-risk carbon tax), which the panel judged to be least cost-efficient of the proposals.
[edit] Global warming
The panel found that all three climate policies have "costs that were likely to exceed the benefits". It further stated "global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive." [5]
In regard to the science of global warming, the paper presented by Cline relied primarily on the framework set by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and accepted the consensus view on global warming that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the primary cause of the global warming. Cline relies on various research studies published in the field of economics and attempted to compare the estimated cost of mitigation policies against the expected reduction in the damage of the global warming.
Cline used a discount rate of 1.5%. (Cline's summary is on the project webpage [6]) He justified his choice of discount rate on the ground of "utility-based discounting", that is there is zero bias in terms of preference between the present and the future generation (see time preference). Moreover, Cline extended the time frame of the analysis to three hundred years in the future. Because the expected net damage of the global warming becomes more apparent beyond the present generation(s), this choice had the effect of increasing the present-value cost of the damage of global warming as well as the benefit of abatement policies.
Members of the panel including Thomas Schelling and one of the two perspective paper writers Robert O. Mendelsohn (both opponents of the Kyoto protocol) criticised Cline, mainly on the issue of discount rates. (See "The opponent notes to the paper on Climate Change" [6]) Mendelsohn, in particular, characterizing Cline's position, said that "[i]f we use a large discount rate, they will be judged to be small effects" and called it "circular reasoning, not a justification". Cline responded to this by arguing that there is no obvious reason to use a large discount rate just because this is what is usually done in economic analysis. In other words climate change ought to be treated differently than other, more imminent problems. The Economist quoted Mendelsohn as worrying that "climate change was set up to fail".[7].
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