Graham Readfearn at DeSmogBlog has a great new piece dealing with the Gates Foundation's recent embrace of contrarian Bjorn Lomborg. (Though Graham did somehow neglect to mention that Lomborg gets paid $775k a year to run his Copenhagen Consensus Center out of a shipping center in a run-down looking part of Massachusetts).
In his piece, Graham explains how Lomborg misrepresents the problem of indoor air pollution in a video that Gates featured in his 'GatesNotes' blog. Lomborg says indoor air pollution is a big killer (it is) and claims that using more fossil fuels, which would allow more people to have access to electricity, is the solution. What he neglects to mention is that a fossil fuel (coal) is a big part of that indoor air pollution problem!
Readfearn goes on to explain how Lomborg's schtick—that we shouldn't worry about climate and should instead focus on energy poverty—is one developed by Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant, on behalf of coal giant Peabody Energy. In fact, Lomborg will be appearing at a Peabody event just days before the G20 summit, likely to deliver Peabody's message that the poor need coal.
Ironically, this story about how Lomborg and his ilk are championing coal for the developing world came out at the same time as a Bloomberg analysis showing that developing nations are pursuing renewables at twice the rate of rich countries.