Congratulations to Al Gore on winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. Mr. Gore asserts climate change is a moral and spiritual issue. In order to make responsible decisions on these dimensions, Mr. Gore’s next mission should be to focus on the tradeoffs his policy choices necessarily imply.

I suggest when flying to Stockholm, he prepare by reading an important book by the late Reverend Paul Heyne. Paul was an unusual economist, an ordained Lutheran minister with a Ph.D. in ethics and social thought from the University of Chicago. He spoke at several FREE programs on environmental policy and we use selections from his book, The Economic Way of Thinking, in FREE’s conferences.

Paul explained that all policy questions require choosing among competing values. Good intentions alone will not suffice. Global warming is no exception. Does climate change demand drastic and dramatic action now? If so, at what cost? For example, will we accept a $6.00 per gallon tax on gas? Such questions are also the message of another book Mr. Gore might consider, Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It.

I believe Paul would be comfortable with the main theme in Cool It. We have limited resources and face many opportunities to use them productively, for ourselves and for others. Here’s a simple truth: The resources expended to combat climate change are not available for other beneficial projects, such as eradicating malaria, killer of 2 million people each year, 90 percent of whom are children under 5. Those who believe climate change trumps all else ignore tradeoffs among competing values. This is irresponsible on many dimensions, ethical, environmental, and economic.

Lomborg emerged in 2001 after he published The Skeptical Environmentalist. Time magazine later named him one of the world’s most 100 influential people. In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg examined the “Litany,” i.e., persistent claims of pending eco-catastrophes. Here’s a sample of the “Litany” from a 1997 article in Wired magazine: “Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. … We're trashing the planet. … The limits to growth are…upon us. … Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.”

These views (circa 1970) still underpin much of modern environmentalism, a movement that perfected crisis entrepreneurship. Lomborg’s book was a direct assault on their carefully crafted narrative; nurtured over decades, abetted by a complaint media, and digested by a largely scientifically illiterate public.

Cool It, a tightly written and highly readable book, is an extension of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus project. The project asked some of the world's leading economists, individuals who specialize in evaluating tradeoffs, “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?”

They ranked the world’s ten biggest problems as identified by the United Nations. These challenges are: civil conflicts, climate change, communicable diseases, education, financial stability, governance, hunger and malnutrition, migration, trade reform, and water and sanitation.

Climate change received the lowest ranking. Why? It takes enormous expenditures to achieve very small reductions in greenhouse gases—and the benefits are far distant in time and highly uncertain.

Just as a church must choose between energy conservation and sending funds to its foreign missions, societies must choose among competing goods and values, such as more health care or safer roads. It is intellectually and morally irresponsible to deny the logic of opportunities foregone. This is the take home message in Cool It.

Eradicating malaria, providing access to clean drinking water, reducing infant mortality, increasing female literacy, and access to primary education provide more immediate benefits to the world’s poorest than seeking to slow global warming by cutting CO2 emissions.

UN and World Bank data clearly show the world is becoming wealthier. Wealth dramatically increases resiliency to all sorts of stress, including climate change. Cool It proposes that the best climate change policy is to foster economic growth in the developing world. Any policy that retards this outcome is suspect at best. If Mr. Gore again runs for president, he will confront this inconvenient truth.