An Environmentalist Exchange

There's an interesting exchange between environmentalists Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist), and Carl Pope (executive director of the Sierra Club), on environmentalism. Lomborg argues for realism and prioritization. Pope resists both, but can't help but acknowledge some of Lomborg's points, responding quite lamely to perhaps the most important one:

[Lomborg:] You return to the 1,300 scientists and their report on the world’s ecosystems. What their results show is that when people are starving, lacking clean drinking water, getting poisoned from indoor air pollution, and dying from easily curable communicable diseases, they let the environment get ravaged, too. Your solution is to deal with the environment first. But shouldn’t we, morally and practically, help them gain wealth first, so they can take care of the environment too?

[Sand:]Bad human decisions, not inescapable reality, make the environment appear to be a “trade–off” with prosperity.

It's a bad human decision to be born in a poor country!