Instapundit linked to a piece on Bjorn Lomberg in Newsweek. I found the following contradiction interesting..

Think of it this way: you spend bushels of R&D money to invent an efficient windmill and use it to cut, say, 100 tons of carbon per year. The cost per ton would be exorbitant. But once the blueprints exist, you can build many more windmills to cut carbon further, exploiting economies of scale. That is, siccing windmills on 10,000 tons of carbon does not cost 100 times as much; the up-front R&D costs swamp the cost of manufacturing windmills. Similarly, if the world moves beyond Kyoto to institute stricter greenhouse curbs, the cost of doing more will not scale up in a linear way; cuts will become cheaper. Lomborg doesn’t factor that in.

Okay, got that everyone? Lomborg is wrong because he doesn’t factor in the advances in technology that we will then leverage and gain economies of scale, which will cut greenhouse gases in time to avert global warming.

But then a mere two paragraphs later, the article concludes thusly:

Lomborg is quite right that we are not sitting ducks when it comes to rising seas, spreading malaria and other effects of climate change. But to blithely contend that we don’t have to do much to stave off global warming, because puny mankind can engineer its way out of its consequences, is the height of hubris.

Doesn’t this contradict the other excerpt? ‘Puny’ mankind can’t possibly engineer our way out of the consequences of global warming, but at the same time our genius R&D engineers will be able to grant us energy independence and avert global warming if we just shovel enough government money at them!