In terms of looking at energy use and production, I cannot recommend David MacKay's excellent book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air highly enough (http:

In terms of looking at energy use and production, I cannot recommend David MacKay's excellent book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air highly enough (http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/, also available in dead tree form.) It's not clear that Lomborg changed his mind; it seems like he fudged the process the Copenhagen Consensus was using to get a politically acceptable result - 'Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".' He's always advocated development spending should be cost-effective, which makes sense. To that end, he has always said we should ignore climate change for now and concentrate on things that are profitable now, then cut heavily latter if we need to. However, I think this is the wrong way to discount the far future. On the one hand, we have relatively little certainty about what our culture will be like in a hundred years. On the other, we are fairly certain man-made climate change is happening now and will have increasingly damaging effects. To wait for some point in the future where research and development will make the problem go away cheaply is irresponsible and naive - '"This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."' Clever solutions appeal to clever people, and no-one wants to wear a hair-shirt, but that's not an argument against actually making some compromises. Or, to put it another way, he got five economists to make long-term predictions about sustainability and they said "increase energy efficiency, do some R&D spending, business as usual." How surprising.