The Kyoto poll: sanitation beats warming.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Environmentalists survey of world's problems - Brief article

IN OCTOBER THE maverick environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg asked 24 ambassadors and high-level diplomats to answer everyone's favorite fantasy question: If you could spend $50 billion to better the world, what would your first priority be? In 2004 Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, made headlines asking the same question of celebrated economists. When they ranked global warming dead last on their list of cost-effective spending priorities, critics alleged that he had cherry-picked sympathetic thinkers. So Lomborg opened up the discussion to experts on international development and diplomacy.

The countries represented ranged from Australia to Zambia, covering 54 percent of the world's population. The results? Once again, sanitation, communicable...