Britain's own Tony Blair writes that 2005 will be 'A year of challenges' in the 31 December edition of The Economist, an article about Britain's upcoming leadership of the G8. The story features a nice picture of the Prime Minister in front of subsistence farmers in Africa.

Indeed, Blair's two key causes for the G8 will be Africa and climate change. Without action to control emissions into the earth's climate, he says that it is Africa which will suffer most.

Some analysts, such as Copenhagen Consensus architect Bjorn Lomborg, have argued that the world must prioritize its scarce resources to help people of today - not people in 100 years - and the causes of Africa's problems are much more fundamental than the earth's climate.

Blair directly criticizes this idea - saying that it is flawed because "Without a stable climate, addressing other environmental threats will be impossible, ensuring a future of more degraded water and land". (Perhaps this is because Blair's own cabinet advisors and colleagues in 'humanitarian' British NGOs fail to understand the underlying causes of degraded water and land.)

Blair also provides a rather flaky justification -- "I have never believed that simple discounting can be an adequate tool for potentially catastrophic outcomes 50 or more years ahead" -- for rejecting Lomborg's rationale that policies which have costs today, and in the case of Kyoto, potentially few benefits in 50 or 100 years, are not a good investment for humanity.