The Journal’s “Cross Country” column is increasingly a must-read — even when Max Schulz writes it. (Heh heh. Hey there, Max.)

On today’s Journal editorial page, Bjørn Lomborg gives a nice rundown of the Copenhagen Consensus — on how best to maximize the return-on-investment of $10 billion in global aid.

The ROI for emissions reductions? Ninety cents on the dollar. [Of course, those bad-news numbers come from Big-Oil shill Gary Yohe, who works at that bastion of the VRWC, Wesleyan University.] Compare that with heart-disease prevention in the developing world: 25 bucks on the dollar.

Lomborg, then, is no Kyoto fan. But he does want to see investment in clean energy.

Although politicians base their decisions on the assumption that low-carbon energy technology is being rapidly developed, that is not the case. These technologies just do not exist. Wind and solar power are available — at a high expense — but suffer from intermittency. Researchers need to develop better ways to store electricity when those renewable sources are offline. If we took that $800 billion and spent it on research and development into clean energy, the results would be remarkably better. In comparison with the 90-cent return from investing solely in mitigation, each dollar spent on research and development would generate $11 of benefits.

You can imagine that not everyone agrees with that 11-to-1 ROI for clean energy.

Of course, Lomborg would admit that government agencies are not the ones to be picking winners and losers. He would urge prizes for major piece-of-the-puzzle technological breakthroughs, as we’ve previously discussed here and here.