Bjorn Lomborg has an interesting Washington Post piece on global warming and some sensible steps that can be taken to ameliorate its effects.

Proponents of pacts such as Kyoto want us to spend enormous sums of money doing very little good for the planet a hundred years from now. We need to find a smarter way. The first step is to start focusing our resources on making carbon emissions cuts much easier.

The typical cost of cutting a ton of CO2is currently about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. Spending $20 to do $2 worth of good is not smart policy. It may make you feel good, but it’s not going to stop global warming.

Lomborg’s whole point is that spending money to reduce the amount of warming in a hundred years will result in a poorer world and hardly help the negative effects of global warming. His solution is to spend money wisely and in areas where it will actually help, since a richer world will be more able to cope with the negative effects.

This logic doesn’t even take into account the advances in technology we are sure to see by the end of the century. As Michael Crichton once put it, if you asked people a hundred years ago what would be the biggest environmental crisis of the next hundred years, they’d have answered something about coping with all the horse manure that was sure to result by extrapolating the growth in population out a hundred years. Technology has a way of changing the rules completely.