"Farm, baby, farm!"

Bjorn Lomborg writes:

On a family visit to Kenya long before he became president of the United States, Barack Obama declared that he wanted to go on safari. His Kenyan half sister, Auma, chided him for being a neocolonialist.

"Why should all that land be set aside for tourists," she asked, "when it could be used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children." Obama had no answer to her question, he would later write in Dreams from My Father. Why are rich countries more concerned about poor nations' nature reserves than about farms that would ward off starvation?

It would appear that this lesson learned by the President has not been implemented into action by his administration.

While nations, such as India which received a visit from Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is emerging from the backwaters of civilization, they look at our standard of living and say, “yeah, we want some of that”. So imagine the incredulity of India’s leaders and citizens when we tell them to ease up on that whole progress thing by urging them to reduce their carbon emissions.

There’s a reason Al Gore doesn’t go to India sermonizing town hall style. Tarring, feathering and run out of town on a rail all come to mind.

Desiring to see more land set aside for Western eco-tourists at the expense of arable land and requesting countries trying to lift themselves out of grinding poverty and into at least the 20th century to reduce their carbon footprint are birds of a feather and represents a form of high brow condescension under which developing nations chafe.

President Obama and other world leaders face a clear choice. They can continue on their current path — what we might call the "Gore solution" to climate change, given that the former vice-president is the fiercest advocate of cutting CO2 emissions, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme.

Or, here's the truth: There are better, more cost-effective ways to fight global warming. And if we want to fight the problems that will be made worse by global warming, the solutions have very little to do with cutting CO2 emissions.

Read more of Lomborg's piece, here.