Sept. 7, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
04:55
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| Yes, a lot of people have disagreed and a lot of people have said nasty things about me and thrown cakes in my face and stuff like that. | |
| But honestly, I think it's a much, much more important conversation about how do we spend trillions of dollars to do the most good for the world. | |
| And if that pisses off a few people, well, so be it. | |
| I'm really trying, to the best of my abilities, to make an argument that will help mankind do better. | |
| This is the area where you and I totally agree on the concept of cost benefit analysis, which is so very much missing from most environmental policy, isn't it? | |
| It's missing from environmental policy, but it's missing from most policies, honestly. | |
| For instance, in road safety, there's a lot of cost-benefit analysis. | |
| Most road offices around the world realize, look, we don't have infinite resources, so where should we make extra care of the design of the road so that fewer people will be killed? | |
| Should we have dividers down the line? | |
| What kind of dividers? | |
| Should we have better signage? | |
| All these kinds of things. | |
| Should we have a roundabout? | |
| Making a roundabout costs money. | |
| It also costs time because it takes more time to go through it. | |
| It reduces number of death. | |
| So if there's a lot of death, you put in a roundabout. | |
| If there's not so many deaths, you don't. | |
| These are very, very simple things, and people know this, and to most people, it makes a lot of sense. | |
| We can't build everything to 100% safety, so we build it smartly with the available resources. | |
| There's also some bits of this in the healthcare sector. | |
| Very clearly, we can't afford To save every life, everywhere, all the time. | |
| There are some diseases that are just too expensive, there are some medications that are too expensive, and so we make collective decisions on saying, look, given that we can only spend about 8-10% of our GDP, unless you're US, on healthcare, How much healthcare can we get? | |
| And we try to get the most healthcare we can for those 8 to 10%. | |
| To me, that makes perfect sense. | |
| We save more people rather than fewer people. | |
| We do more good rather than less good. | |
| We should have that same conversation in every other sphere of life. | |
| And one of the places, as you point out, it misses is an environmental conversation where we very often focus on Ineffective policies rather than effective policies. | |
| Perhaps the most egregious one that has been quite apparent in Europe for at least a couple of decades is, if you look at what the EU has focused on most of its environmental policy, it has been on water quality. | |
| So, in water quality, we actually have a decree that says we should have water quality around Europe that is as if no living people actually lived here. | |
| Like, you know, it was in pre-human beings' time. | |
| Now, that's a very, very beautiful thought, of course, and it's wonderful for the lobsters who will live better lives, but it always strikes me as odd that we would focus on water first. | |
| When so few people live in water, whereas, of course, most of our kids live exposed to deadly air pollution in inner cities. | |
| Those are the places where people really do die and where a much greater amount of focus on air quality would have been much, much greater. | |
| Now, the EU has focused on both things, but we have much less rapid environmental restrictions on air pollution than we have on water pollution. | |
| One of the reasons is That water pollution reasonably can be said to be the fault of other people. | |
| It's mostly farmers. | |
| In rich countries, most of us are not farmers. | |
| So it's easy to point at those farmers and say, you've got to do better. | |
| Stop polluting the waterways. | |
| Stop polluting our coastal areas. | |
| Make the water clean. | |
| Whereas air pollution, of course, It's all of our fault. | |
| It's all of our cars. | |
| It's the fact that we have all these factories, all this other stuff. | |
| So it's much harder to regulate. | |
| Now, I get that politically, but at the end of the day, don't we want to realize when we can't do everything, should we be focusing on water or air first? | |
| There is a very, very ample argument that we should be focusing on air because that kills literally hundreds of thousands of people in the European Union every year, whereas water probably kills very close to zero. | |
| It's not the same thing as saying we don't want also to have clean water, but if you have to choose and we do because we don't have enough resources, where should you focus first? | |
| Air pollution. | |
| We haven't done that and that's the conversation I think we need to have also for climate. | |
| Yes, it's interesting isn't it that given that the environmental movement is so obsessed with the concept of scarce resources, they haven't yet twigged that Governments also have scarce resources, |
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