Paul Collier's new book The Plundered Planet has been widely reviewed, albeit with less universal enthusiasm than his last one, the terrific The Bottom Billion.

Richard Girling in The Sunday Times is positive about the new book and concludes:

For finance ministers the
world over, it is a must-read. It is a must-read, too, for the peasant-in-aspic romantics and
ideologues who
block the road to a well-fed, more equitable and sustainable future.
Green
means nuclear power and genetically modified crops. It’s not a message
that
will be universally welcomed, but it is one that deserves to be
universally
understood.

But John Vidal in the Guardian thinks Collier is too much of an economist to be let loose on environmental policies. He says Collier sets out:

a set of neo-liberal economic proposals that seems to boil down to
the poorest countries having to open themselves up for exploitation
further and faster, and take responsibility for the climate change which
they did not cause…… What we get is a
regurgitation of the politically convenient opinions of rich governments
and institutions who fete him [ie Collier].

My guess is that many environmentalists will agree with the latter. Economists and environmentalists think in fundamentally different ways. Environmentalists extrapolate trends and urge us to change our behaviour. Economists consider that unsustainable trends will lead ot changes in behaviour because they won't be sustained, as their effects will create the incentives for change. Irreconcilable.