Global Warming will end up being the biggest threat to Africa but it will be in 50 plus years. Malaria, AIDS and agriculture are its biggest threats right now. Malaria alone cost sub-Saharan countries 2 percent GDP growth a year and AIDS is not that far behind. Bill Gates is giving away more money than any individual in history but the amount he is giving way is still a drop in the bucket in the fight against Global Warming. But the money he does have can go a long way in fighting Malaria where 10 dollars can buy effective protection or in AIDS where the money can make a dent in either treatment or prevention education. It is Governments that need to spend money on fighting Global Warming as they are the only ones with deep enough pockets and law enforcement.

Surprised your the only one so far but how fucking original. Everyone that is not Mercedes Benz should stop producing cars since they "stole" that idea.

That is not my figure, I provided a link to the source. If the source is in dispute, take it up with the author. And provide your own counter evidence. My link is the number one google link for "pharmaceutical industry size". I realize that proves nothing. However, given the stakes, I'd imagine there would be plenty of people anxious to correct an error that large.

You don't get off that easy. When you link to a number that is larger than the worlds combined GDP a decade after the numbers you use it, it is you that should have checked the numbers a little more closely.

Big pharma makes so much money, that even _if_ the number is off by even a factor of a thousand, it does little to mitigate the main point: the pharmaceutical industry is ginormous. Such extreme concentrations of wealth do not benefit society; they cause great harm.

You do know that there a dozens of individual firms? Or that this industry demands large companies since the cost to take a drug to market runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is only the largest firms that can survive a single failed study.

If Gates and Buffet wanted to "fight global warming" they could easily back efforts to roll back the use of fossil fuels while at the same time investing in wind, solar and fossil fuel-free biofuel production

Wind and Solar are nice and should be used but they are not an answer. They both have huge drawbacks. Solar is only good during the day and its peak efficiency is during the afternoon and there is the problem of course of cloud cover. Also, to supply the US it would require a plant the size of Arizona. Wind has the problem that it is unpredictable. They should both be used but they are not a cure all. The best we have for the foreseeable future is Nukes but that has some problems in the US. Almost all of them are political but there is also we do not have enough young nuclear engineers or welders with the skills for the future.

Biofuel has the huge problem that there is yet to be a workable stock for widespread use. Corn Ethanol is a waste of money and does almost as much if not more harm than oil. Cane is not a real answer because they clear cut the Amazon for farming. Most of the rest of the promising plants are still a decade or more out.