Clean water or rising waters

A number of things have started me thinking again about global warming and the analysis of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish "skeptical environmentalist," that if we're going to address the world's ills, it makes sense to choose the ones with the greatest possible benefit for the least cost.

So despite Al Gore, I don't see anybody being swamped by rising oceans. Subsiding land is a problem, especially in deltas, but this has nothing to do with global warming. Stopping the rise in CO2, which thus far actually hasn't had a measurable effect on the rate of rise, would cost trillions, if it were possible at all. Moving people out of the fringe regions would cost a fraction. Having fewer people there in the first place, by producing and distributing a trillion condoms, is probably more economical yet.

Contrast this with clean water. There are definitely people dying, millions of them every year, because they don't have access to clean water. I don't know how much it cost per thousand people now, but putting this problem on a high priority list and developing high volume technologies would make the solution a lot cheaper. Certainly not more than a few hundred dollars per person.

So we might redirect the money we spend on Iraq and Afghanistan, provide clean water to a half billion people in the Third World and save a couple million lives annually. Or we could try to reduce CO2 emissions, or at least make them stop rising quite as fast, and delay but not stop global warming. And the consequent rise in ocean levels which have cost the lives to date, rounded off to the nearest whole person, of nobody.

Pick one.