Climate Change vs The Poor

They've written best things first, the 12 most efficient solutions.

The world is wasting money on inefficient solutions.

The world spends a lot of money on a lot of different things.

Look, again, we're rich, and so a lot of people feel like

you can spend money on many different things, and that's true.

What I'm making the argument for in this book is

for fairly little money, we could do amazing good.

So why do we spend so much more on things like climate change

that will barely make a difference?

Because this is the conversation that we have when we're rich.

Look, if you are already safe, your kids are not in danger of

dying from curable infectious diseases or all these other problems,

then you can worry about fractions of degree in 100 years.

I got that.

And I'm glad that we're rich and we can afford to think about that.

But we also need to remember, and I think we have a more

of responsibility to remember that there are lots and lots of people.

So mostly about six billion people out there who don't have this

luxury of being able to think 100 years ahead and think about a little bit

of a fraction of a degree who wants to make sure that their kids are safe.

We could do that very, very cheaply.

And so the next money we spend should probably be on these very simple

and cheap policies.

Your chart showing costs versus benefits is impressive.

What you're saying is what we've been doing is about the opposites?

Well, it's more that if you're a politician and you look at 10 different

problems, your sort of natural inclination is to say,

let's give one tenth to each one of them.

An economist would tend to say, no, let's give all of the money to the most

efficient problem first and then to the second most efficient problem and so on.

I'm simply suggesting there's a way that we could do much better with much less.

That ought to be something that everybody would love.

But of course, it also means that a lot of people's favorite thing might

not be the first thing that gets funded.

Lamberg explains more practical ideas for saving more lives than our full video.

You can find that at johnstossil.com.