SEE ALSO Overview The overcrowded ark TALKING POINT Sustainable development - are we doing enough?  WEBLINKS Bjorn Lomborg website The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

Preferred mode of transport:
Bicycle. I’ve never owned a car.

Greatest environmental vice:
I really behave fairly reasonably.

Most recent major consumer purchase:
A new bicycle.

What is most important about sustainable development?
Making sure our descendants get an even better life. Even the most pessimistic UN scenarios for 2100 expect the average person in the developing world to be as well off as people in the developed world are today. This doesn’t mean we can’t do even better, but it does mean we should be careful to worry about and fix the right things.

AUDIO "Kyoto will cost a fantastic amount of money"

Is there a conflict between reducing poverty and protecting the planet?
In the short term there is a trade-off between helping the poor and helping the environment. Simply put, you can choose to have 2% growth of the economy and 1% better environment, or 3% growth and 0% better environment. Choosing the 2% is still growth but it does mean that people are less well off than they could have been.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help the environment, only that we should realise it comes at a price. In the long run, there is no trade-off, since environmental concern is a luxury good only rich people can afford to care about - when you don’t know where your next meal comes from, you don’t care about the environment 100 years down the line.

Consumption: how much is too much?
When you get sufficiently rich, you pollute less. Air pollution has been declining dramatically in the developed world, but is increasing in much of the developing world. Thus, as we get richer, consumption increases but we also get ever better at handling pollution. Therefore it doesn’t seem that our consumption in the long run will go beyond what our planet can sustain.

Technology: threat or saviour?
It is good for us – this is what enables us to be richer and cleaner.

Inequality: an inevitable evil?
Inequality (measured by what an American can buy in America, and an Ethiopian in Ethiopia - so-called purchasing power parity) increased from 1820 to 1960 but has been decreasing slightly since then. By the UN’s scenarios it is poised to decline dramatically until 2100. So while it is definitely an evil, it is actually declining.

What should we do?

Despite the percentage of people starving having dropped dramatically, we still need to get it down further.

Despite the percentage of poor people having dropped since 1950, we still need to get that down further.

For just $75bn a year, the UN estimates that we could solve all major problems in the Third World, giving clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to everyone in developing world. This is less than half the projected annual cost of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change from 2010 onwards.