Improved technologies to combat air pollution

When famine strikes, governments and international donors step in with life-saving aid. And rich countries give more than $130 billion each year not only to feed the starving, but also to build crucial infrastructure and reduce gaps in access to education, health care, and clean water and sanitation worldwide.

All of this is vitally important. But one of the most powerful investments the development community could make is not in today’s problems, but in research that will address tomorrow’s challenges.

The Copenhagen protocol will not succeed unless China and India sign up, but bribing these nations to take part is counterproductive  Björn Lomborg, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 February 2009 This December, global leaders will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new climate change pact to reduce carbon emissions. Yet, the way that it has been set up, it will inevitably fail. The best hope is that we use this lesson finally to deal with this issue in a smarter fashion.

The restoration of the ozone layer proves that we can solve environmental problems when we have good replacements for pollutants. In an interview for America's Newsroom, Lomborg points out that the lesson for climate change is that we need to innovate cheap and reliable energy that can truly outcompete fossil fuels.