Our Priorities for Saving the World

I must say that this TED talk from Bjorn Lomberg was rather disappointing. The beginning was very interested and he got my attention with the statistics on some one the problems that we are facing. Such as the 800 million who are starving, 1 billion are lacking in clean drinking water, 2 billion lack sanitation, 2 million dies each year from aids, 175 million international migrants, 940 million illiterate adults, and the several billion who are affected by global warming. Bjorn and the Copenhagen Consensus rank the top four challenges that we face are malaria, free trade, malnutrition and HIV/Aids at number one. All of the others were to costly and would take longer to make an impact than the ones suggested. Climate change was at the bottom of the list due to the high cost of money and the littlest impact it would have. Kyoto is an amendment to the international treaty on climate control. Personally I don't quite understand why this isn't among the top four problems that should be addressed first. They say that it is to costly yet why would we have to pay for it. It would be something to benefit everyone here on earth, who would not want to contribute to that. We could all pull together to help out with the environment. Bjorn also talked about how if we work on the four that are suggested it will save lives and the people in third world countries would eventually be making the amount of money that we do now as we would be making more too. I think that if we take the time to knock out one big problem the smaller ones will come easier. If global warming keeps up we will lose more and more resources till things become scarce. Why don't we feed the hungry? Why don't we lend a hand to those over seas in other countries with diseases? If we have the resources why are so many people doing without? Perhaps I'm being ignorant and things aren't as easy as that. However, I do know that money doesn't buy everything. Yet it seems to be what everyone is depending on to save the world. We need to look to people and ourselves to make a difference and not pieces of paper that we put face value on.