DISSIDENT
FROM DENMARK
Jonathan
H. Adler
Review
of The
Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, by Bjørn
Lomborg (Cambridge, 515 pp., $28) from the April 8, 2002 issue of National
Review.
Bjørn
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. Based on 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 why
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 they are often depicted.
Professional
doomsayers may concede that things are getting better, but 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 not been warmly accepted. Activist groups
and environmental analysts have launched 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” (gasp!). 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 from 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.
John
Holdren of Harvard University’s Kennedy School complained that Lomborg focused
on neo-Malthusian fears that we are running out of energy. Serious
environmentalists, Holdren counseled, have long abandoned such concerns. That
may have come as a surprise to Scientific
American’s readers, however, as the monthly has
recently published several articles and reviews suggesting that imminent
depletion of oil supplies could be around the corner. Challenged on this point, Scientific
American
editor-in-chief John Rennie scoffed that his magazine’s articles were about
the end of “cheap
oil,”
not the exhaustion of physical supplies. Not only is this a distinction
without a difference--as oil supplies dwindle, prices rise--but Lomborg makes
clear throughout his energy chapter that his target is the argument that we will
run out of affordable energy. As he explains, “Even if we were to run
out of oil, this would not mean that oil was unavailable, only that it would be
very, very expensive. If we want to examine whether oil is getting more and more
scarce we have to look at whether oil is getting more and more expensive.”
Lomborg then proceeds to show that oil has been getting cheaper as available
supplies increase. Should this trend reverse, price signals will encourage the
development of other energy sources.
While
Lomborg is an optimist, he is no Pollyanna. He regularly pauses to remind the
reader that environmental concerns are real. The claim that 40,000 species
disappear every year may have no empirical basis whatsoever, but Lomborg leaves
no doubt that extinction rates are on the rise, and human activity is largely to
blame. This, he says, is a “problem,” not a “catastrophe.” The record of
environmental progress is impressive, particularly in the developed world, but
substantial environmental concerns remain. The poorer nations of the developing
world still face substantial environmental concerns, including suffocating air
pollution and inadequate supplies of drinking water. Continued economic growth
may one day alleviate such concerns, but millions suffer from such pollution
today. Lomborg’s frank and repeated acknowledgements of the need for
environmental progress are hard to square with the caricature presented by his
critics.
Fears
of an environmental cataclysm have driven the growth of governmental power at
the local, national, and even international levels; hundreds of pages in the
U.S. Code are devoted to environmental concerns, as are dozens of international
treaties. A great portion of these measures seek to address the very problems
Lomborg identifies as overstated. Yet other than the Kyoto Protocol, Lomborg
critiques surprisingly few environmental initiatives. Beyond increases in
foreign aid and generic policies that promote economic growth, his most
substantial policy recommendation is to rely upon quantitative analysis to set
environmental priorities.
It’s
true that science-based risk prioritization is often lacking in environmental
policy, but it is insufficient as a policy agenda: “Sound science” is only
one piece of the puzzle. Accumulating statistics on environmental trends
provides a useful snapshot of the global condition, but it does not answer
pressing questions, such as how to address uncertainty in environmental risk, or
what obligations (if any) humanity has to future generations or to the rest of
nature. Once priorities are set,
substantial questions remain about how to achieve environmental goals.
While
environmental progress is indeed the norm today, it is not universal: Positive
global trends often mask local or regional regression. Buried in the data is a
pattern illustrating the nature of environmental problems--and their resolution.
Lomborg suggests economic growth is part of the answer: Wealthier societies are
healthier societies, and are more willing to devote resources to environmental
concerns. But this is only part of the picture. Equivalent wealth increases have
not always produced equivalent environmental results. Legal and economic
institutions play an essential role in facilitating environmental protection. In
his brief discussions of forests and fish, Lomborg hints at the role property
rights play in the stewardship of natural resources, but a fuller discussion of
this would have been helpful.
The
conventional wisdom holds that modern environmental regulation must take most of
the credit for positive environmental trends. Yet Lomborg suggests that the role
of regulation may be overstated. Key turning points in environmental
trends often predated federal environmental legislation. In the states,
airborne-particulate concentrations peaked in the 1950s, over a decade before
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Smoke and sulfur dioxide levels
peaked in London nearly a century ago. Here again, however, Lomborg is reluctant
to give the data much interpretation.
Despite
these minor flaws, his compilation of environmental data remains invaluable. The
Skeptical Environmentalist provides no
brief for environmental complacency, but it provides plenty of reasons to feel
good about the earth--which is in far better shape than green activists would
have us believe. Lomborg’s claims are supported by an arsenal of hard data,
and are easy to confirm. And that, in the final analysis, is probably what has
his critics so upset.
For more on The Skeptical Environmentalist check out the following:
Information at www.lomborg.com is here
Scientific American's "Skepticism toward The Skeptical Environmentalist" is here.