Bjørn Lomborg got off some good lines in his Washington Post oped yesterday, “A Better Way Than Cap and Trade.”

On Lieberman-Warner:

Politicians favor the cap-and-trade system because it is an indirect tax that disguises the true costs of reducing carbon emissions. It also gives lawmakers an opportunity to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners.

On the emotional satisfactions of the environmentalist pose:

Many “green” approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can’t avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.

On the economic wrong-headedness of prioritizing CO2-emissions reductions:

Research for the [Copenhagen Consensus] project was done by a lead author of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the group that shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore — who noted that spending $800 billion over 100 years solely on mitigating emissions would reduce inevitable temperature increases by just 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. Even accounting for the key environmental damage from warming, we would lose money, with avoided damage of just $685 billion for our $800 billion investment.

Unfortunately, when the WaPo item suggests spending 0.05 percent of global GDP on low-carbon-energy R&D, it does little to distinguish that spending from the “subsidies and sweeteners” derided above.

The United States has an opportunity to lead the world on research and development, which would give it the moral authority to demand that everyone else do the same. The world’s sole superpower could finally provide the leadership on climate change that has been lacking in the White House.Even if every nation spent 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development of low-carbon energy, this would be only about one-tenth as costly as the Kyoto Protocol and would save dramatically more than any of Kyoto’s likely successors.
In the United States, this approach would open up new avenues for the nation’s creative, innovative spirit and leave behind the political mess of Kyoto-type negotiations.

Normally, Lomborg would insist that such spending would have the maximum effect if it were directed toward cash awards for significant piece-of-the-puzzle breakthroughs. It seems that point wound up on the cutting-room floor. Which is unfortunate, considering John McCain has recently suggested something similar.