One of the main points of The Skeptical Environmentalist, written in 2001 as I recall, was that helping the poor is more important than working on the environment, and that these goals are somewhat mutually exclusive. Concern for the world's poor was one of his primary motivations for downplaying environmental problems. Unfortunately, this seems to have largely been missed among all the accusations of Lomborg being an oil industry shill and such, which may explain why Applebaum hadn't heard of it.