Readers reply: what would be the most socially useful way to spend a billion dollars?
So?
A few years ago I wrote a book taking this idea and running with it. In How to Spend a Trillion Dollars I end up using most of the money on transitioning to a net zero society, and in restoring nature globally. With a billion dollars, I would set up a progressive thinktank funding climate-positive and nature-positive lobbyists to counter the malign, fossil-fuel funded influence of Tufton Street and the Heritage Foundation. Rowan Hooper, podcast editor, New Scientist
Every action creates its own reaction, so £1 billion into the lefit notthinkosphere means more money into the right think tank o’sphere. Thus my pay goes up.
Cool!
I’d buy a little turnip of my own…
Imagine being that stupid.
Yup. I knew the “New Scientist” was no longer scientific (and hasn’t been for a long time), but that they’re so brainwashed to think that nonsense, and then to think that it is so unarguable that they are happy to have it published with their publication’s name on it, shows a complete lack of understanding of scientific truth.
I think it was my physics teacher showed me his contempt for New Scientist back in the early 1980s. There was a discussion in class, something like:
* If somebody was doing scientific research how would they tell other scientists about it?
* Errr… write something in New Scientist?
* That rag!?
Why does this bloke do work for a travel company as their Japan expert, if he cares so much about the planet? Surely he should be encouraging people to go to the Loire and use less fuel?
WB:
Or Sussex.
Or even stay at home in their 15 minute cities which provide all they need, wants not allowed.
Or just take a walk 15 minutes down the road, where he will find all he needs.
A billion would buy three wind turbines.
I thinka billion is what Ed makes me give you if you own three wind turbines…
I’d give it to Mr Foo Yung, the bloke I gave my old E-type to, to make sure he took it…
Surely a prize for the first new antibiotic would be a good use?
Or for the first working thorium reactor?
Although both might need more money.
Aye, but they don’t require a tax-funded Commissioner for State Intervention.
No although it needs is 1 billion plus a small amount for legal fees. (Although a working thorium reactor might need more money).
A corps of machine-gunners and their ammunition, Socialists for the elimination of.
Good socialist verb, “to eliminate”.
Cue Bjorn Lomborg, one of the founders of Greenpeace, helped author a book, “Best Things First”.
Spoiler Alert, Global Warming isn’t top of the list
Ah, no. Bjorn’s a good lad etc, but you’re thinking of Patrick Moore as the Greenpace laddie, even as Bjorn has indeed written the book.
Oops, don’t know where I got the Green Peas connection from. Well, that’s one mistake, I’m done for 2026.
Not withstanding Tim’s correction giving to his Copenhagen Consensus is probably the best thing that could be done with it if you want good causes with a calculated CBA.
His being Bjorn not Tim, obviously.
A billion dollars for a think tank to manufacture propaganda? I’d think we’d get more benefit from telephone sanitisers. Still, the attitude neatly sums up why I stopped subscribing to New Scientist.
Build a mile of HS2?
And a bit.
It always cracks me up when people talk like there’s some highly successful car/flight lobby, while we’re pissing away money on HS2, East-West Rail and about £10bn a year on running trains that aren’t viable. Oh, and trains don’t pay the full tax on diesel like coaches do.
If you just went with a carbon tax, about 60-70% of the railways would be closed down. A lot of trains are worse for the environment than a car, let alone a coach (greenest form of transport in the UK).
An under-estimated point. I’ve travelled Durham to Reading by coach for £25, no railcard subsidy. Has any MP ever stood up in Parliament and said let’s hear it for the coach industry? No. But plenty of MPs have said “shout out to Okehampton, Horden or Ashington”
No-one is romantic about coaches, and trains have loads of unionised jobs.
But coaches work well. They’re not as fast, but sometimes speed doesn’t matter that much. Sometimes, you’re not in a hurry, or directness matters more. Swindon to Heathrow is about the same time by train as coach, because the coach goes direct and you have to change at Reading or London with the train.
And the train fare is a multiple of the coach fare.
I’m not quite sure why I should be forced to pay a production/consumption tax on a gas which is good for the planet.
Surely the climate-positive lobbyists have already spent that much, and more.
How many people can you kill with a billion dollars?
Betcha WEF knows.
Mountain of cocaine.
I’d build a “Scrooge McDuck” version of Disneyland and charge folks to come in and roll about in mountains of Dollar bills.
What is funny is that all they can think of spending money on is useless bloviating, lobbying, and grifting for more public money.
Amen. I quit donating to two cancer charities, whose names are well known, even though they personally helped me in the 1980s, because both sent me thank you letters that said my donations would be used to lobby the government.
Use 50-year-old Israeli technology to produce drinking/irrigation water all around the edges of the Sahara desert (Morocco already does it in places but the other Saharan countries do not seem to bother).
But then you’d need another £1bn next week after all the kit has been stolen.