Forty years ago, a self-appointed panel of experts called the Club of Rome published a tract entitled the Limits to Growth, a massively influential report that showed how exponential growth in population and resource use, in a world of finite resources, would end very badly.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist, told the Today programme that the 1970s environmentalists were "spectacularly wrong" because they "fundamentally missed innovation".

"Technology can do amazing things," he said. "We have done a lot better than predicted".

"If we're going to tackle future problems such as global warming we need to focus on innovation," he believes.

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