Carl Pope vs Bjorn Lomborg

By Tim Worstall | 27 July 2005

An interesting piece in Foreign Policy magazine where Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club and Bjorn Lomborg (pictured) debate what should be done about the environment and, in general, try to sort out the problems of the world. The particular views are not that unusual, we would expect an environmentalist to be talking about the horrors of pollution and we are all aware of Lomborg's views, that yes there are problems but we can solve them, the first step being to prioritize and decide which we want to solve first. As he says:

We agree that wise investments will make the world better. But what proposals does that actually include? The question was answered last year by the Copenhagen Consensus project. Thirty specialists from a broad range of fields joined forces with eight top economists, including three Nobel laureates, to make a global priority list. Their top goals were to prevent HIV/AIDS, end agricultural subsidies, and fight malnutrition and malaria. That is where we can do the most good per dollar. The Copenhagen Consensus concluded that substantial responses to climate change (your favorite) would do little good at high cost.

The part that I think will be of interest to those here is what immediately follows:

Moreover, just as money is a scarce resource, so too is political will. Given the world's immense reluctance to enforce carbon taxes and trade liberalization, we should focus on getting the best one - trade - done first.

Quite. What will increase the general welfare of the human race the most? What, therefore, should we spend our political capital on, where should we focus our efforts? Trade benefits both the poor and the rich immediately, climate change, if it indeed happens, is at least some decades away. So let's concentrate on the trade issues, get the Doha round going, abolish the idiocies of CAP and the various other distortions in agriculture and when we've done that we can come back to the other issues.