Bjorn Lomberg: The Skeptical Environmentalist. Measuring the Real State of the World.

A book review by Jim Peron

Over the last week I’ve been reading Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist with a sense of deja vu. Why?

As excellent a book as it is, what Lomborg has to say was said before— and ignored. It was ignored because it was said by a brilliant man who was considered politically incorrect. The late economist Julian Simon made almost all the same points as Lomborg. But Simon was never taken seriously by the political establishment.

Lomborg, on the other hand, has all the right (or in this case Left) credentials. It’s not that his education is better than Simon both held professorships. But Lomborg has the sense of life that the Left can love. He’s young and that helps. He’s not American and among the Left that is a plus in his favour. He’s gay--he should get at least two points for that. He’s a vegetarian bells are
ringing. His sympathies lie with the Left. He was a member of Greenpeace and one Danish political journal described him as a “sandal-wearing leftie.”

Lomborg himself noted that his book does not mean that he’s “a demonic little free market individualist.” Professor Dennis Dutton, in the Washington Post said that Lomborg “has the correct cultural aura: a young left-wing European with the looks of a movie star.”

Lomborg did not plagiarized Simon, he merely uses the same statistical methodology that Simon used to debunk the Green Left. So Lomborg’s not merely lifting the numbers. He actually went out and collected all the current statistics from politically correct sources like the United Nations. These were the same sources for Simon’s essays and books. And Lomborg admits that his book grew out of reading Simon. So he’s not failing to give the man credit where credit is due.

Lomborg says his book was born as an idea in February 1997 while visiting a Los Angeles bookstore. “I was standing leafing through Wired Magazine and read an interview with American economist Julian Simon... [who] maintained that much of our traditional knowledge about the environment is quite simply based on preconceptions and poor statistics. Our doomsday conceptions of the environment are not correct.”

Lomborg was surprised and thought that he could easily debunk Simon. Lomborg was a professor of statistics and “an old left-wing Greenpeace member” so “it should therefore be easy for me to check Simon’s sources”. Lomborg, who admits he had never challenged his own belief in the deteriorating environment, set out to prove Simon wrong. But in the process the debunker got debunked.

Now this is a good thing. After all The Skeptical Environmentalist has become a world wide best seller. It has gone through several print runs and copies are in high demand. But the question is why Lomborg and not Simon? What about Simon’s The Resourceful Earth, The Ultimate Resource, Population Matters, and The State of Humanity? All these books, and several others, made similar points and used the same official sources for statistics.

I suspect the reason Simon was ignored was that he, unlike Lomborg, was a demonic little free market individualist. I quickly learned as a journalism student at the University of Connecticut that being pro free market didn’t sit well with the predispositions of those in the profession. And with the advent of advocacy journalism the field was swamped with committed Leftists “wanting to make a difference” by using journalism as a means of promoting their world view. The media pundits knew Julian Simon was wrong because he wasn’t one of them.

Most studies show that journalists are predominantly of the Left. And in a free society there is
nothing wrong with that. But it’s the lack of balance that causes the problems. It’s not that journalists
reflect the spectrum of opinion but that they are weighted heavily on just one side of it.
When men like Julian Simon come along they are automatically dismissed while the press
releases of Greenpeace are treated like gospel.

But Bjorn Lomborg is not Julian Simon. He has the correct sentiments and he went into this study with the proper preconceptions of what he would find. Because Lomborg, and not Simon, was politically correct his book must have something to say. Hence it, and none by Simon, has been debated around the world. One other advantage for Lomborg is that after four decade of doomsday hype from the Greens the disasters simply haven’t appeared. Perhaps the dominant environmental paradigm is due to shift?

Of course sometimes those demonic free market individualists just happen to be right. When that happens they still get ignored The issue lies dormant until someone with the right credentials comes up with the same facts and suddenly journalists have a Damascus Road experience.

Of course they could have saved us all a lot of time simply by going into debates with open minds and reading the opposition. But that seems forbidden to those who preach multiculturialism, free speech and tolerance because the culture and speech that they are willing to tolerate is too often only their own.

It’s not that Lomborg is immediately gaining acceptance but his ideas are being debated and that is a luxury that Simon didn’t experience. Of course the Green Left is still trying to stop the debate. And one method of smearing they use is to associate Lomborg ideologically with Simon. Their argument is basically that Simon was one of those demonic free market individualists and Lomborg is now repeating what Simon said therefore Lomborg can simply be dismissed as well.

Mikael Skou Andersen, a professor of politician science in Lomborg’s Denmark, argued that Lomborg should be ignored because he was merely repeating Simon who, Andersen falsely accuses of being “a declared opponent of birth control.” Miranda Schreurs of the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland said that Lomborg was Simon’s “protege” —a word that implies a strong personal connection, in fact the two never met. Others referred to Simon as Lomborg’s “mentor” which again implies a strong relationship.

It seems that the Green Lobby is convinced that invoking Simon’s name is tantamount to proclaiming
Lomborg the anti-Christ. World Resources Institute, at their web site, includes an attack on Lomborg which, like most “rebuttals” to the man, is fundamentally an ad hominem diatribe. In it, Edward Flattau, a writer for an environmentalist publication, calls Lomborg’s massive book a “tract” that is just “a revival of the late Julian Simon’s discredited debunking of the environmental movement..” And he informs us that Simon’s view was nothing more than a “messianic rallying cry” for opponents of the Green agenda and was “misleading and/or deeply in scientific disrepute.” Lomborg, who gathers far more data in one place than dozens of Green books put together, is said to “regurgitate Simon’s simplistic contrarian views” and thus he “seems destined to experience the same widespread scientific repudiation of his predecessor.”

Flattau ignores the fact that many of Simon’s books were collections of essays by reputable scientists and academics. The Green Lobby has their Gospel and they simply pretend that it is the scientific consensus. They confuse political support for academic support. Flattau, in his attack, also says that “the environmental community is optimistic that a bright future in in the wings...” That may come as a surprise considering that Green Lobby fund appeals and presentations to governments are filled with dire warnings. In his response to Lomborg Green guru Lester Brown said that in looking over the dire predictions he has made he was “struck more by the issues that we understated or discovered after the fact than by those we overstate or issues that turned out to be unimportant after all.” So Brown, who said the world was about to collapse on several occasions, now says he was being moderate then. And, as expected, Brown’s reply invokes Julian Simon’s name as a smear tactic.

Flattau does reveal the new view that the Green Lobby is taking regarding the science of economics.
He has announced that the most basic of rules—that supply and demand determine price—is simply not true. This view became necessary when Paul Ehrlich made his famous bet with Julian Simon and lost. Simon argued resource prices would drop hence indicating greater supply. Ehrlich said the prices would rise. Ehrlich’s failure to be right is now explained by the  Green Lobby: “prices do not necessarily reflect the degree of abundance of a resource. The cost of resources that are dangerously winding down may remain stable or even decrease and availability may increase due to an artificial glut manipulated by suppliers trying to squeeze out the last ounce of profit from a situation about to implode.”

The Green Lobby now claims that the laws of supply and demand have been repealed by a conspiracy of greedy businessmen! I, for one, am baffled on why the “suppliers trying to squeeze out the last ounce of profit” don’t actually raise their prices under the scenario Flattau describes? Surely their greed, combined with the fact that the unnamed resource is spent, would mean they could charge whatever they liked? Paul Ehrlich has despised economists for decades and his writing rankles with attacks on economists and economics as a discipline. But since economic theory so often disputes Green theology there is no other option but to attack the entire science of economics as invalid.

The Left-of Centre theologian Martin Marty also dismissed Lomborg and did instant psychoanalysis on him as well. He said that Lomborg “is motivated by revenge on his own intellectual past as a self-described left-wing Greenpeacer.”

That’s mild compared to some Green mouthpieces. Jonathan Leake, Science Editor for the London Sunday Times, said “Nature magazine, likens [Lomborg] to apologists for the Nazis. He has been physically attacked and has had to employ bodyguards.” Leake noted that: “Even respectable scientific venues are not safe for Lomborg. When he recently gave a lecture at London’s Royal Institution he was protected by four bodyguards, and threats were made against him when he addressed the London School of Economics.”

Alex Kirby, the environmental correspondent for the British Broadcasting Company, uses a particularly “intellectual” logic for dismissing Lomborg. He dismisses him because “he reaches conclusions radically different from almost everybody else.” But what Kirby means is that Lomborg reached conclusions different from the everybody that the media considers to be everybody. He has another complaint: “What really riles me about his book is that it is so damnably reasonable... his separate snapshots of the world may be accurate. Taken together, they make a dangerously misleading picture.” It’s unwise to disagree with those Thomas Sowell calls the “anointed”— that clique of intellectuals who lay out the agenda of the Left. Lomborg is dangerous, not because he is unreasonable but because he reasonably counters the litany of problems that the Left has invented as an excuse for furthering the advancement of state control.

The president of the World Resources Institute, Jonathan Lash, went to the unusual extreme of sending letters to all the members of the Society of Environmental Journalists warning them to about Lomborg. He says that Lomborg “paints a caricature of the environmentalist agenda based on sometimes mistaken views widely held 30 years ago, but to which no serious environmental institution today subscribes.” This claim can easily be shown to be false.

Anyone who reads Lomborg’s book, and looks at the footnotes, will see that he quotes the Greens over a period of several decades, including recent doomsday material published by Lash’s own Institute. This is what has so riled the Green Lobby. Lomborg has taken them to task by showing that they distort the facts to promote their own agenda. For decades the Green Lobby have relied on the false assumption by the public that they have no agenda and are merely public-spirited individuals.

Prof. Dennis Dutton, accurately described what is happening to Lomborg. He writes that “an army of angry environmentalists has been crawling all over the book, trying to refute it. Lomborg’s claims have withstood the attack.”

What Greens find are minor errors which would be typical of a book this size. In a few places the translation from Lomborg’s Danish to English was imprecise and the meaning clouded or a bit confusing. But the fact remains that the book, with 2930 footnotes, has to be one of the most
meticulously researched volumes in history.

The World Resources Institute brushes aside the evidence and concentrates on Lomborg. Character
assassination is not beyond them. Lomborg, they say, is unqualified. On their web site they attack him because he “has no professional training—and has done no professional research—in ecology, climate science, resource economics, environmental policy, or other fields covered by his book.” Of course he is a statistician and his book was an attempt to prove that the statistics didn’t back up Dr. Simon. If a statistician isn’t qualified to judge statistics then who is?

Yet the Green Lobby is never concerned about the credentials of their own icons. Paul Ehrlich studied butterflies and then writes best selling books predicting famine and death in America due to over population. Ralph Nader, the Green candidate for President and a regular spokesman for environmental causes, is a lawyer. Dr. Helen Caldicott, who speaks out on nuclear power and environmentalism, is a pediatrician. Caldicott main credentials seem to be her fanatical hatred of capitalism and love for socialism. She has openly praised Castro and said “Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

When the National Resources Defense Council manufactured a scare about alar then set actress Glenn Close out as a speaker denouncing the preservative—both she and the NRDC kept erroneously referring to alar as a pesticide. And the great Green hope for some years was Al Gore. He wrote an entire book promoting the doomsday environmental position yet he learned his views on science in a theology course. He worked a short time as a journalist and then spent full time in politics. No one in the Green Lobby questioned his credentials.

The Union of Concerned Scientists joined the attack on Lomborg. Having made themselves famous as defenders for the Soviet Union during the Cold War the UCS has, like many on the Left, abandoned socialism and picked up the Green banner. They put together a panel of “scientists” —some of whom had been subjected to Lomborg’s investigation—and asked them to pronounce judgment on him. Of course he was found wanting.

Yet for some time the UCS had a former acquaintance of mine, Christine Riddiough, as their director of their Global Warming Program. While I have nothing personal against Christine, and sparred with her politically, her credentials are certainly below those of most climatologists. She was active in the lesbian rights movement and was a professional Marxist. She worked for the Democratic Socialists of America and wrote for a publication called EcoSocialism. She had taught high school science at one time and studied astronomy, none of which qualifies her as a climatologist. And this is the same Green Lobby that attacks Lomborg on the issue of credentials!

In reading Lomborg’s book one can easily see why the Green Lobby is in such a heated frenzy. He basically takes the claims they make and then asks if the accepted statistics support or refute the claims. Most of the time it appears the Green Lobby has intentionally twisted the facts to support their predicted disasters.

For instance, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, has claimed for decades that the food situation is about to get worse. In his writings the world has been about to turn the corner in food production, for the worse, continually for the last thirty years. Lomborg quotes one example from 1998. He shows that Brown selected two dates, 1994 to 1996, to show a decline in world wheat production. But he notes that any other two years in the last century would have shown that wheat production has continued to increase. Brown just happened to pick a short term anomaly over the long term trend.

Elsewhere Lomborg notes that Worldwatch claimed, in 1984, that international trade could not make things better since it was headed for a decline as well. Of course world trade escalated substantially. Once again they used a period that was an anomaly to predict the future trend. On another occasion Brown tried to dismiss World Bank projections on grain production. He claimed grain production had declined and he could prove it by showing that “from 1990 to 1993” it had declined. In fact it had. But once again it was the anomaly that he chose while ignoring the long-term trend. In 1982 Simon wrote that only this “pick-and-choose comparison is consistent with Brown’s gloomy assessment.”

Brown, it seems, has a tendency to pick precisely the years—and only those years that support doomsday.. He concentrates on the anomalies and ignores reams of data that disproves this scenario. Even the International Food Policy Research Institute noticed this. In 2001 they commissioned a study “Prospect for Global Food Security: A Critical Appraisal of Past Projections and Predictions” to investigate precisely who was right and who was wrong concerning food, population, and natural resource projections. Lester Brown did not do very well.

The professional environmentalists, in general, actually did rather poorly. Even in population predictions they have consistently overstated growth rates: “all global projections were systematically higher than the actual outcome.” And while the projections were “close” the closeness was only in total numbers. When broken down by regions they were dramatically incorrect. The only thing that made the projections look reasonable was that the errors often canceled each other out. The IFPRI report notes: “The errors offset each other so that, globally, the projection looks quite good. But is it? Should the global projections be trusted when in reality it is the result of being wrong twice, once in each direction?”

When IFPRI investigated projections regarding energy availability—a favourite topic of the Green Lobby— the results were equally bad. They singled out Lester Brown as an example: “Brown’s projections about oil underestimated future oil production. Thus, prices and per capita supplies have not responded as sharply as he suggests. This case is a good illustration of forecasting a long-term trend on a significant but short-term perturbation (Brown used oil prices in 1978-79) as opposed to using long-term trends.” While Brown was once again concentrating on the anomalies the IFPRI noted that “[Julian] Simon and [Herman] Kahn’s predictions about oil prices appear generally on track.”

When Brown predicted the stagnation and eventual collapse of the fishing industry Simon and Kahn rejected this (something Lomborg also covers in his book). Brown said the world fish harvest per capita would drop and prices skyrocket. Simon and Kahn, in 1984, said “Production will probably continue to grow for the next 20 years at close to the present rates...” Production to 2000, IFPRI says, “lends support to a more optimistic view”. In other words Simon was correct and Brown wrong once again.

Like Simon and Lomborg, the IFPRI found that the Green Lobby was horribly inaccurate when it came to food and resource projections. And regarding some of the projections they openly question whether they were legitimately made in the first place. “[I]t may be that these authors [such as Brown] are not making predictions but rather producing pessimistic scenarios with the explicit purpose of pushing the policy process in a specific direction.”

Brown has simply asserted that Lomborg has exaggerated the case for optimism by selectively picking areas of concern. Of course Lomborg’s book covers virtually every area you can imagine so his selectivity is extremely broad to say the least. Brown argues that Lomborg’s thesis (and Simon’s) could easily be tested. “A serious test of this hypothesis would require a systematic review of the research output of the leading environmental groups tabulating both the instances where they have overstated and where they have understated threats to the environment.”

Of course that is exactly what Lomborg has done. He has systematically shown the Green Lobby to distort to the facts. And before him Julian Simon did precisely the same thing. And if that isn’t enough the survey of the IFPRI specifically compared pessimists like Brown to optimists like Simon. Over and over the results have been the same. And it’s those results that really bother the Green Lobby. They indicate a ideological movement, not a scientific one, which pushes its agenda in the guise of science. Simon they demonized for his free market views and thus but with Lomborg that’s not so easy. This time the debate is taking place in public and that is reason for optimism.

BACK