Copenhagen Consensus
The Copenhagen Consensus was a project in which eight economists, four of them Nobel Prize winners, got together and asked the question, "Faced with all the world's problems, if we had $50 billion over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it?" They ended up putting climate change at the bottom of their list. The project was headed by economist Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Statements
"The panel looked at three proposals, including the Kyoto Protocol, for dealing with climate change by reducing emissions of carbon. The expert panel regarded all three proposals as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits. The panel recognised that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. The experts expressed an interest in an alternative, proposed in one of the opponent papers, that envisaged a carbon tax much lower in the first years of implementation than the figures called for in the challenge paper, rising gradually in later years. Such a proposal however was not examined in detail in the presentations put to the panel, and so was not ranked. The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies."
-- October 2004
References
Copenhagen Consensus 2004: Papers on Climate Change
Copenhagen Consensus 2004 Results [pdf]
Wikipedia Entry: Copenhagen Consensus