David Pilling interviews Bjorn Lomborg:

“I hope to provide a tailwind to good ideas and a headwind to bad ideas,” he says, advocating, for example, more spending on heart disease prevention, which is cheap, and less on curing cancer, which is expensive.

Not surprisingly, Lomborg stirs fierce emotions. He has been accused of cherry-picking data, flouting scientific methodology and of wearing T-shirts in inappropriate settings. He has been cast as a heartless rationer and a peddler of false dichotomies. At a book event in Oxford, someone shoved a baked Alaska pie in his “smug face”. A former head of the UN climate panel compared him to Hitler. Both incidentally ended up as his friends.

A blond pin-up for the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing think-tank, and admired by people like Joe Rogan, the Donald Trump-endorsing podcaster on whose show he recently appeared, Lomborg is hard to pigeonhole. Bill Gates consults him and Lomborg spends his time worrying about how to spend aid in poor countries. He is pro-trade and pro-immigration, not exactly typical rightwing positions.

So who is he, I wonder as I walk through the crisp blue light of London’s Docklands. He has chosen the Bonnane Restaurant & Pizzeria, a large glass and chrome affair with a view across the Thames of the spiky, hedgehog-reminiscent O2 Arena dome.

“I love pizza and we could incorporate this into the conversation,” he had written somewhat unpromisingly, though at least he’s entering into the spirit of Lunch with the FT.