The point is that most of the impact that's going to come throughout the 21st century will come from emissions from third world countries like China and India. And the idea is to say, as long as it costs $30 to cut a ton of carbon dioxide, rich countries may do a little, but poor countries, like China and India, are not going to do anything. What we need to do is to cut the cost of cutting carbon emissions from $30 down to $3. If it costs $3, then maybe they would.
So this is about a long-term strategy. Instead of these, "Let's cut a lot now," that makes us feel good, but end up doing very little good, it's about making sure that we end up making much better technologies available to everyone in the world so that we can cut carbon emissions cheaply.
That's about investing in research and development, and that's why I'm suggesting spend perhaps $25 billion a year on research and development in low-carbon emitting energy technologies. That will likely do much more good than the Kyoto Protocol at a much lower cost.
The speaker here is Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. And not only does he make sense, he's cute (although this is really a crappy shot).
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