I generally agree with Sean-Paul Kelley (granted, with some reservations), but on this score I'm not going to. First off, he's misrepresenting Lomborg's argument, which has consistently been against large gestures with no payoff and in favor of smaller, achievable interim goals that are actually going to help matters.
There's also the fact, if you read Lomborg's article, that global warming is just one of the many, many crises we're facing. It's the one that's currently the most popular in some quarters, but you're not going to get people who can't feed their families all that worked up about greenhouse gasses. Sure, there's a cause and effect issue there, but that doesn't impact their immediate bottom line.
If you go back and look at some of the other comments Lomborg has made on this issue, what he's calling for is a focus on things we can do right now to help the problem. He's not saying forget the major effort. As far as I know, he never has even hinted at that. He's saying let's not focus on something that might help in a hundred years because there are things we can do right now and most people don't really give a damn what happens in a hundred years.
Kelley, unfortunately, has managed to mask this as a conservative ploy to avoid doing anything. We've already seen how the conservatives avoid doing anything -- they just don't do anything and actively block efforts to do something. In this instance, Kelley seems to be blinded by ideology and would rather dump on a source who is, by all the evidence, nonideological than actually give the question some serious consideration. He would, it appears, be willing to tell 15 milliion people to go ahead and die as long as he can tout Live Earth. That, it seems to me, is a very safe, popular, white-bread middle-class, celebrity-driven and terrifically shallow attitude. One can easily point to it as a liberal effort to focus on a big and somewhat remote "solution" as a means of avoiding any present inconvenience.
(I've already more or less stated my position on this whole question, if you want to refresh your memory.)
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