to all the 2 billion people that don’t have it at the moment? Could you please back up your claim, and give your thoughts on “how long” will htese ppl have access to clean water?
Sure. The statement was made by Bjorn Lomborg in his the book, The Skeptical Enironmentalists. If you interested, I suggest checking out the book itself. However, the statement has been used in other articles as Time and National Geographic. For the gist of it, for the cost of complying with the Kyoto Protocol will be U.S. $150 billion to $350 billion annually (compared to $50 billion in global annual development aid). With global warming hurting primarily Third World countries, we have to ask if the Kyoto treaty is the best way to help them. The answer is no. The cost of meeting the Kyoto treaty for just one year would be enough to solve the biggest problem in the world—we could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every person on the globe. This would save two million lives each year and prevent half a billion people from contracting a severe disease. In fact, for the same amount the Kyoto Protocol would have cost just the U.S. every year, the UN estimates that we could provide every person in the world with access to basic health, education, family planning, and water and sanitation services. Wouldn’t this be a better way of serving the world?
We need to focus more on development than on sustainability. Development not only possesses intrinsic value but in the long run it will lead the Third World to become more concerned about the environment. Only when people are rich enough to feed themselves do they worry about the environment and future generations. Focusing more on sustainability can easily result in prioritizing future generations at the expense of current generations, which is a backward way of solving our problems. In contrast, focusing on development has the advantage of both helping people today and creating the foundation for a better tomorrow.
Also, that numbr is 2.4 billion - damned that Ecological Axis of Evil!
So that is more that (4.6 + 6.4) billions plus at least one for fusion tech…
that’s at least 11 billions for that. Can you give a benchmark of other spendings by the US gov?
Oh please, all powerful German Government, we don’t know what to do! Please save us from becoming the Ecological Axis of Evil. Please, tell us how much your government spends on alternative energy in relation to total spending! Please, tell how much we should spent without significantly hurting the economy! Oh the terrible life of the Axis of Ecological Evil…
How many wind turbines are there in the US? How much power do you get out of renewable sources? (In absolute numbers (Watts), relative to the total production and per capita please).
Nearly 1,700 megawatts was from wind farms built across the U.S.
Wind energy output has increased a 66% last year with an additional $3 billion in windpower projects at work. Of course the wind production is relative from each year. Relative to total production, wind energy in California is about 1.27 percent of the state’s production of electricity in 2000, including imports from Southwest United States and the Pacific Northwest. Over 13,000 wind turbines in California alone. Relative to per capita, new, utility-scale, wind projects are being built all around the United States today with energy costs ranging from 3.9 cents per kilowatt-hour (at very windy sites in Texas) to 5 cents or more (in the Pacific Northwest). This is to compete at $0.015 to $0.03 per kilowatt-hour against for current generators, but government hopes to slash price of wind at $0.025 per kilowatt-hour as stated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Additionally, U.S. Department of Energy recently announced the Wind Powering America initiative with goals to power at least 5% of the nation’s electricity with wind by 2020, increase the number of states with more than 20 megawatts of wind to 16 by 2005 and 24 by 2010, and increase federal use of wind energy to 5% by 2010. But behind this is the secret Ecological Axis of Evil AKA the United States ready to destroy the ecological world. Save us!