Dissident from Denmark. - 'The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World' - book review

National Review, April 8, 2002 by Jonathan H. Adler

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, by Bjorn Lomborg (Cambridge, 515 pp., $28)

Bjorn Lomborg is the environmentalists' Enemy Number One. He isn't the CEO of a major oil company or an industry lobbyist; he doesn't lambaste "environmental wackos" on talk radio, nor, so far as we can tell, did he provide secret briefings to Vice President Cheney. Lomborg is an associate professor of statistics in the political-science department at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and all he did was write this book-which represents the most substantial challenge to the green orthodoxy that modern civilization is producing environmental ruin. On the basis of a mountain of statistical data-documented in over 500 pages, with almost 3,000 footnotes-Lomborg proclaims that "things are getting better," and that there is no reason that the good news can't continue.

Lomborg did not intend to report the good news about Planet Earth. He began his project as an attempt to debunk the late enviro-optimist Julian Simon, who infuriated modern-day Malthusians with his rosy assessments of global trends. In 1997, Lomborg happened across an interview with Simon in Wired magazine. Confronted with Simon's positive assessment of the planet's condition, he sought to prove that such views were the product of "American right-wing propaganda." He gathered ten of his best students and set about checking the data behind Simon's claims. "Contrary to our expectations," Lomborg reports in the preface, "it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of his points stood up to scrutiny." The doomsday visions offered up by most mainstream environmental groups did not. Lomborg expanded his research on environmental problems, eventually producing The Skeptical Environmentalist.

The focus of this book is "the Litany of our ever deteriorating environment" proclaimed by environmental activist groups and echoed throughout the media and popular culture. You've heard "the Litany" before: Resources are running out, population growth is outpacing food supplies, species and their habitats are disappearing, and pollution keeps getting worse. In sum, humanity is despoiling the planet and threatening human civilization in the process. "We know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring," Lomborg explains. "There is just one problem: It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

What follows is an encyclopedic assessment of environmental concerns, from population growth and food supplies to energy and global warming. On each subject, Lomborg compares the conventional environmental assessment with the publicly available data. Time and again, the most apocalyptic environmental claims come up short-far short. "Mankind's lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator," he explains. People are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. Food production continues to keep pace with population, while health threats are diminishing, along with most forms of pollution. Stresses on some natural resources are very real, Lomborg notes, as in the case of some fisheries and tropical forests, but the problems are not as severe as often depicted.

Even if professional doomsayers concede that things are getting better, they continue to charge that we are living on borrowed time: If population growth or chemical pollution will not do us in, then global warming will. Lomborg takes this charge seriously-he believes that human activity is measurably warming the earth-but he rejects the notion of a greenhouse apocalypse. Any temperature increase is likely to be modest, not catastrophic. While the costs of such a warming are real, "economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut [greenhouse gas] emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures." The Kyoto Protocol signed by the Clinton administration and championed by environmentalists is a bad deal. In the end, global warming is "a limited and manageable problem."

In many quarters, Lomborg's book has been greeted with horror and fury. Activist groups and environmental analysts have begun anti-Lomborg websites, published various critiques, and launched vicious ad hominem attacks. One "green" reviewer warns that Lomborg is a "junior" statistics professor and not an environmental expert-as if that would change the underlying data Lomborg cites. Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, wrote a letter to environmental journalists warning that the book is misleading and has been "heavily publicized and championed by conservatives." Another "researcher," less prone to reasoned discourse, assaulted Lomborg with a pie.

Perhaps the most notable attack so far has appeared in Scientific American. Under the headline "Science Defends Itself Against The Skeptical Environmentalist," the popular science magazine published four essays by activist researchers, including two whom Lomborg criticizes by name. As with most of the attacks, however, the essays decried Lomborg's theses without identifying significant substantive errors. Stanford's Stephen Schneider, for example, claimed Lomborg was selective in his presentation of economic studies on global warming, but in fact it was Schneider who misconstrued (or misrepresented) Lomborg's claims.