"Climate Crisis Skeptic/Denialist" Lomborg Gets Tongue-laved By Steve Insqueak

Listen here to Insqueak's inept, and credulous, interview.

Then sashay on over to Bouophonia and read a PROPER reply to Lomborg's CorpoRatist codswallop.

The...article reiterates Lomborg's call for economic triage and care rationing; like shrewd investors, we should put our money where it'll earn the highest return good. This sounds reasonable enough, until you remember that a lot of the problems Lomborg's talking about are interrelated, or even synergistic; and that in addition, attempts to remedy them must take projected climate change into account.

As an example, Lomborg mentions the vast number of people who don't have clean drinking water. Water supply and climate, obviously, are pretty intimately connected. Also, improving water safety involves issues like drainage, land use, and the ability of infrastructure to withstand flooding; all these things are likely to be affected by climate change (and we should bear in mind, here, that Lomborg is not a denialist when it comes to AGW).

There's also a larger issue, which is that a good deal of poverty and immiseration in this world is caused, sustained, and sanctified by the free-market orthodoxy that Lomborg champions as Our Only Hope. I'm not exaggerating here; Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus identifies free trade as one of the humanity's four "top priority concerns"; the other three are hunger, AIDS, and malaria.

Free trade's right up there, I think, but perhaps not in the way Lomborg imagines. Like the other three, it is a world-class killer, the cure for which should be foremost in the minds of the worlds' peoples from now on.