As I mentioned in my previous post, Bjorn Lomborg’s favorite argument against Kyoto is that the money it would cost would be better spent helping poor countries. This is in keeping with his pose as a leftist greenie, reluctantly convinced of the truth of the arguments of people like Julian Simon.

So it would not be surprising to find Lomborg working for a Danish government that opposed Kyoto and spent more on foreign aid. The Rasmussen govt, for which Lomborg works, does indeed oppose Kyoto. But it has also repeatedly cut foreign aid.

Lomborg is a hypocrite and a fraud. It’s as simple as that

Update Various commentators have reacted on the apparent assumption that Lomborg is a civil servant, expressing his private views in his spare time. In fact, the Danish government created an Environmental Assessment Institute with a position as director specifically for Lomborg, whose only qualifications for such a post are the political views expressed in The Sceptical Environmentalist (he has never published a refereed article on any environmental issue). Given the frequency with which he pops up around the world, I assume that his tour to Australia is being carried out as part of his official duties.

Further update 5/10 Stentor Danielson has a good discussion of the issues raised by Lomborg’s actions, and concludes, that Lomborg doesn’t care too much about the foreign aid cuts because

really thinks that reducing spending on global warming is a good thing in and of itself (only a suspicion because I haven’t read his manifesto, The Skeptical Environmentalist)

I have read it, and I agree.

Bjorn Lomborg pushes his usual anti-Kyoto line in the Oz

will be extremely expensive and will have only a negligible effect. The global cost will be large: the estimates from all macro-economic models show a cost of $US150 billion ($224 billion) to $US350 billion every year. At the same time, the effect on extreme weather will be marginal: the climate models show that Kyoto will merely postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. Most global warming problems will occur in the Third World, yet these countries have many other, more serious, problems with which to contend. For the cost of Kyoto, in 2010, we could permanently solve the biggest problem in the world ö we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every person in the world. Should we not deal with the most pressing problems for real people first?

What Lomborg doesn’t say here is that these scary estimates refer only to the case when Kyoto is implemented without emissions trading. With emissions trading, the net cost to the world would be much smaller, but Lomborg says this is politically infeasible because it would require big transfers from rich to poor countries.

In other words, we can’t implement Kyoto efficiently because we would have to give lots of money to poor countries and that’s politically impossible. But, as an alternative to implementing inefficiently we should give lots of money to poor countries.

I’ve pointed out this contradiction ad nauseam, but consistency is not a major issue for Lomborg or for his right-wing employers (the nastiest government in recent Danish history) and promoters.