麻豆传媒

MOST of us have had that conversation: what would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off the mortgage, quit your job, maybe start a small business doing something you have always dreamed of. But what if you acquired a truly vast fortune 鈥� not just a few million but a trillion dollars? And what if you had to spend it on making the world a better place?

I know, a trillion dollars 鈥� a thousand billion dollars 鈥� sounds like a vast amount of money, especially during the twin crises of recession and pandemic. But in the grand scheme of things, it isn鈥檛. A trillion dollars is about 1 per cent of world GDP. It is what Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is on course to be worth by 2026. The world鈥檚 richest 1 per cent together own $162 trillion in assets. And it鈥檚 just one-twelfth of what governments around the world found in 2020 alone for economic stimulus packages in response to the new coronavirus.

What could you do with such a relatively modest sum, if charged to spend it on the world鈥檚 biggest challenges? This is the central question of my book, , in which I choose 10 megaprojects (all things scientists are working on now) and explore what could be achieved if we showered them with money. Here we examine three of the most urgent of those challenges: solving world poverty, halting runaway climate change and curing all disease.

Perhaps the most important thing we could do for human welfare would be to alleviate poverty. According to the World Bank, about 10 per cent of the planet鈥檚 population, or 760 million people, earn $1.90 or less per day. The hardship is such that the life expectancy of the world鈥檚 poorest people is nearly 15 years lower than that of the richest.

The widespread policy of easing taxes on business and wealth with the expectation that money will 鈥渢rickle down鈥� . So let鈥檚 try something else. We will give everyone in extreme poverty a lump sum of up to $1000, or equivalent assets. One objection often raised against such proposals is that people will waste such gifts. However, a 2014 review of cash handouts by the World Bank found that this is hardly ever the case. . Even one-off cash and asset transfers seem to genuinely change people鈥檚 lives.

In a trial in Bangladesh, for example, ultra-poor families were given assets in the form of livestock. Follow-ups showed that and put them on a new trajectory out of extreme poverty.

Similar asset-transfer programmes have been rolled out in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan and Peru, involving a total of more than 10,000 people. After the second year of this project, families enrolled in the treatment groups had more assets, better diets, better physical and mental health, higher political engagement and increased female empowerment compared with control groups.

The evidence could hardly be clearer: , very often permanently.

Most of the cash-transfer experiments done so far are on a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. We don鈥檛 know what might happen if we showered larger amounts on entire populations. Might people give up work? It is hard to say, but the little evidence that exists suggests not. In Alaska, for example, all residents receive a yearly dividend derived from oil revenue, and this has . , judging by a study in Kenya.

鈥淎 one-off payment gives ultra-poor people what they need to escape the poverty trap, often permanently鈥�

What we know for certain is that the benefits can be huge. In Brazil, a countrywide initiative called Bolsa Fam铆lia introduced in 2003 helped to reduce financial inequality by 15 per cent, and the proportion of the population in extreme poverty shrank from 9.7 to 4.3 per cent. Cases of infant mortality caused by malnourishment also halved. Payments from the programme aren鈥檛 universal: they are made only to families earning under a certain amount, but in 2015 that was still a quarter of the population, almost 52 million people.

Educational value

In Peru, there was a cash transfer scheme that came with conditions. In enrolled villages, the female head of households with children received the equivalent of $143 every two months if she had been sending the children to school, had obtained identity cards for them and had taken under 5s for health checks.

This hints at the kind of lasting change you can make if you simply give away money, albeit with the proviso that children are educated. The non-profit Brookings Institution in Washington DC discovered that . It also found that women who went to school earn more, are less likely to marry as children, are less likely to have HIV or malaria, and tend to farm more productive plots of land, which results in better nourished families.

The United Nations estimates that just an extra $39 billion per year could ensure universal education in low and lower-middle income countries. (The UN currently spends $13 billion a year on international aid projects for education.) Universal education, for just $39 billion a year. It is a shockingly small amount to ensure a basic human right.

So that is one way to spend a trillion dollars: $600 billion up front to raise hundreds of millions of people out of the poverty trap, which leaves us enough to pay for universal education in low and lower-middle income countries for 10 years.

Climate change is a global tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes. If we don鈥檛 keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5掳C above pre-industrial levels, we could be locked into devastating sea level rise, droughts, famines and conflict. We urgently need to cut emissions. That is the only way to stop the disaster getting worse. But we have available, right now, the means to cool the planet and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

We will want to invest in geoengineering, defined as any deliberate intervention of a nature and scale capable of counteracting human-made climate change and its knock-on effects. We will focus on one of the most promising ideas, solar geoengineering, comprising methods to screen out some of the sunlight reaching the surface of the planet and thereby cool global temperatures.

Let鈥檚 imagine we stump up a few hundred million dollars for testing one such approach, that of seeding the skies with sulphate particles, which are considered the most plausible planetary sunscreen. After extensive trials, we find that it doesn鈥檛 wreck the monsoon in South Asia, for example, and that

Let鈥檚 also imagine that our trials, scaling up each time, have garnered enough positive data and political and social support to drive the drawing up of a manifesto of responsibility and the agreement of an international treaty for a global solar geoengineering effort. We will need specially made aircraft that fly high in the stratosphere and release their sulphate payloads. Following by Wake Smith at Yale University and Gernot Wagner at New York University, we will commission a fleet of autonomous drones with giant wingspans, capable of cruising in the stratosphere, steadily releasing their sulphur payload.

鈥淲e need to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a massive scale鈥�

We will purchase an island, build a port to receive shipments of sulphur and a runway from which we can launch thousands of flights to seed the skies. We will allocate $6 billion for all this. That isn鈥檛 much. The trouble is that if we started it, we couldn鈥檛 stop. A sulphate shield only lasts a year or so because the particles drift slowly back to the surface. Only once we are capable of pulling huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere can we let the shield come down for good, which brings us to our next investment.

We have to remove a good chunk of the CO₂ we have released into the atmosphere. Here I would fund two different approaches: technologies designed to suck up CO₂ and good old-fashioned tree planting.

For all its world-changing power, CO₂ is a trace gas, making up just 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. That makes it difficult to extract. We can do it on a small-scale now but we need to do it on a planetary scale.

Carbon capture

Climeworks is a Swiss firm trialling a number of carbon-capture projects, the most ambitious of which is in Iceland. There, carbon-capture units running on the country鈥檚 geothermal energy collect 50 tonnes of CO₂ a year and pump it underground where it reacts with basalt and turns to stone. But 50 tonnes per year is nothing. In 2018 alone, humans emitted 37 gigatonnes of CO₂. Climeworks says it wants to capture 1 per cent of global CO₂ emissions by the mid-2020s, which would require gigantic and unprecedented growth. Other carbon-capture start-ups require similar expansion before we get to a capacity where it will make a global difference. So we will invest in this sector, let鈥檚 say $100 billion or so, but save most of our money for the organic approach.

A trillion trees?

The method can be summarised in three words: grow more trees. Trees draw down CO₂ and lock it up, at least for the lifetime of the tree. If you plant enough of them, you could suck out a lot of the CO₂ in the atmosphere. The problem is that we would need to do this on a gigantic scale, which brings multiple problems. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the question of where they will all go. A team at ETH Zurich in Switzerland used data on forest cover from Google Earth and a machine-learning algorithm to There is enough land, it seems, for 900 million hectares of forest, an area about the size of the US.

Let鈥檚 say we paid to plant around 500 billion new trees. According to the ETH Zurich analysis, once the trees are mature, that number might draw down and store 205 gigatonnes of CO₂. Given that each part per million (ppm) of CO₂ is equal to 2.13 gigatonnes, that would bring the ppm down to about 320, its level in the mid-1960s. Currently, we are at around 416 ppm.

This seems to be the best way to buy us some time at least. Of course, there are lots of details to work out. Simon Lewis at the University of Leeds, UK, who studies the interactions between forests and climate change, thinks the 205 gigatonnes is an overestimate. It is also fair to say that there are many demands on 鈥渟pare鈥� land, not least agriculture, housing and recreation. But there does seem to be a lot of currently wasted land that we could redevelop in a massive tree-planting scheme. Allowing land to regenerate on its own can also be hugely effective, as can forestry management incentives aimed at locking away more carbon.

This epic afforestation is going to be expensive at roughly $400 billion per year, yet it would surely be a sound investment. A 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that us below 1.5掳C of warming above pre-industrial levels would cost about $2.5 trillion per year until 2050 in investment in the energy sector, and $775 billion per year on measures to reduce energy demand. The financial cost of global warming above 1.5掳C is so diabolical that the economic benefits of staying below this threshold are four or five times the size of the investment.

In 2016, Priscilla Chan took to the stage at a meeting in San Francisco and announced that her foundation would work to ensure that an entire generation of people would never get seriously ill. 鈥淲e鈥檒l be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease,鈥� she said. To that end, Chan and her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, put $3 billion into research aimed at preventing, managing or curing all diseases by the end of the 21st century. That isn鈥檛 merely curing breast cancer or Alzheimer鈥檚 or diabetes or strokes, but curing all disease. Oh, and increasing global life expectancy to 100.

Even by Silicon Valley standards, it is an ambitious goal. Even if Chan and Zuckerberg end up investing their entire fortune, currently around $60 billion, it would be a drop in the bucket when it comes to what is required to free humanity of all disease and extend everyone鈥檚 lifespan. But what if we set our trillion dollars to the same goal? When I put this to Jeremy Farrar, head of Wellcome, one of the world鈥檚 largest medical research charities, with an endowment of around 拢30 billion, he laughed. A trillion dollars is nowhere near enough money, he said.

When you look into what needs to be done, you get a better idea of the scale of the task. Much of the research and spending on public health work is siloed as a result of being directed at specific diseases. Take the global effort to eliminate malaria, which kills about 400,000 people each year, most of them children under 5, and mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Around . But it is just one of dozens of infectious diseases. And as well as targeting those, we would also need to spend globally on the other three main disease categories: heart disease, neurological disease and cancer.

We would burn through our trillion dollars and only make a fleeting impact on health and lifespan. If you want to make immense gains in public health on a global scale, and make them equitable and sustainable, there is one thing that needs to be implemented. It is difficult, complex and expensive, which might be why it isn鈥檛 something that is much talked about or invested in by billionaires. It is universal healthcare (UHC): free healthcare, for everyone.

In 2013, an international Lancet commission put together an investment framework to achieve what it called a 鈥済rand convergence鈥� in health by 2035. By this they meant reducing deaths from infectious disease, as well as child and maternal mortality, in low and middle-income countries to the levels seen in the best-performing middle-income countries. This, the framework predicts,

The commission found that UHC isn鈥檛 only the most efficient, but also the only sustainable way to achieve a convergence in global health. Their framework was written before the coronavirus pandemic, but the response of countries like Singapore and South Korea, in contrast to that of the US, shows that UHC is a good protector for pandemics, too.

As Farrar says, a trillion dollars isn鈥檛 enough to change the world鈥檚 healthcare system, so here鈥檚 another idea. We allocate some of our money to building a universal healthcare system in one country, which becomes a flagship, an advert to other countries of the benefits of UHC investment.

鈥淯niversal health care is by far the best way to make immense gains on a global scale鈥�

Let鈥檚 choose Ethiopia. With a population of more than 100 million, it has a large economy, but only about three doctors per 100,000 people. The UK has almost three doctors per 1000 people. Maternal and child mortality in Ethiopia are relatively high, mainly because most births take place at home, without the presence of a trained modern midwife. Our investment would make Ethiopia more like Ghana, where there are around five midwives per 1000 births and much lower maternal mortality rates. Ghana operates a universal service through its National Health Insurance Scheme.

So a sizeable chunk of our trillion goes on a demonstration of UHC. Another should go on vaccines. The development, testing and equitable distribution of a vaccine is a huge and costly undertaking 鈥� but one that could save millions of lives.

We will fund the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a global partnership working on vaccines for many so-called emerging infectious diseases, including covid-19. We can help boost vaccination rates around the world, but we can also move the dial at the basic research level. As well as covid-19, effective vaccines against HIV, malaria and tuberculosis would be transformational. In all, 320 or so emerging infectious diseases have been identified since the 1940s. And if we can create a universal flu vaccine, we would be protected from what is still one of the greatest health threats to our species: a flu pandemic.

Jessica Metcalf, an infectious diseases biologist at Princeton University, has proposed a programme of sampling people鈥檚 immune systems that would allow scientists to pick up signs of new pathogens as they emerge. The coronavirus won鈥檛 be the last such threat. But Metcalf says her would help 鈥渞apidly detect, define and defeat future pandemics鈥�.

Again then, this is money that could hardly be better spent 鈥� a sentiment that came up time and again as I was researching the book. The lesson I learned along the way was clear. A trillion dollars might sound like an immense amount, but the benefits of spending such a sum on these projects would pay back handsomely, and often quite quickly.