The Optimistic Future: The Skeptical Environmentalist

By J. Lawrence Scholer | Monday, April 1, 2002

This past fall BjØrn Lomborg, author of the controversial and best-selling The Skeptical Environmentalist, witnessed the extremes of environmental activism. During a September 5 presentation at the Borders bookstore in Oxford, England, Mark Lynas hurled a baked Alaskan pie at Lomborg, covering the t-shirted Dane in whipped cream.

'I wanted to put a baked Alaskan pie on his smug face in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice, and worsening effects on animal and bird life,' said Lynas, busy working on a book refuting the claims of the The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lynas is a freelance environmental writer, who has contributed to various publications, primarily British.

While the only physical attack on Lomborg thus far, the pie incident has only been one of the many incidents showcasing the bitter resentment among left-wing environmentalists. Environmentalists from across the globe have lambasted Lomborg without restraint, criticizing his research and techniques—some simply calling him a liar. the Economist, which has enthusiastically praised Lomborg's book, recently reported, 'Mr. Lomborg is being called a liar, a fraud and worse. People are refusing to share a platform with him. Although dissenting scientists try to cloak their complaints in scientific rhetoric, their true feelings come across rather evidently: The Skeptical Environmentalist realized their worst fears—a detailed and deftly researched opus that tells the 'real state of the world.'' Lynas, no doubt disagrees: 'I don't see why the environment should suffer every time some bored, obscure academic fancies an ego trip. This book is full of dangerous nonsense.'

BjØrn Lomborg, former associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and now director of the Institute of Environmental Valuation in Denmark, has produced one of the more influential books on the environment since the heydays of Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson. The book is one of Amazon.com's most popular, ranking, at the time of this writing, number sixty-nine—it has been much higher.

Unlike previous works on the environment, The Skeptical Environmentalist promotes a very optimistic view of the world, debunking the doomsday claims that have come to define our status quo impression of the environment, which Lomborg dubs the Litany:

We are all familiar with the Litany: the environment is in poor shape. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers—we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying.

From the evidence that Lomborg collects, the claims of the Litany not only prove to be unfounded, but often the actual state of the world is opposite to the claims in the Litany. For instance, the Litany claims that as the population grows, food becomes more scarce—basic Malthusian thinking. In truth, calorie intake has increased by twenty-four percent across the globe and thirty-eight percent in developing nations. So, despite a doubling of the population since 1961, people across the world are eating more.

Nor is pollution of the air and water becoming a severe problem. The air in London 100 years ago was much filthier than it is now, Lomborg notes. Environmental protection measures and rising economic welfare have worked in concert to improve environmental standards—this is evident by the improvements in air and water quality. Often, Lomborg points out, human intervention does more damage than the pollutants themselves. The clean-up of the Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska cost billions of dollars and was not by any means the worst oil spill in recent history. While the images were striking—birds and other animals choking and suffocating in oil—much of worst the environmental damage was actually inflicted by the clean-up crews. The crews power-washed the beach to rid it of its oil coating. This led to the loss of valuable and necessary layers of sand—a problem much more severe than oil on the beach.

Biodiversity advocates have also been prone to some exaggeration. Species are not dying off at the rate of 40,000 each year. As scientists have no exact figure on the number of existing species, extinction, at best, can only be described as a relative rate. Extinction is not a recent phenomenon. Species have died off throughout history, and there is no proof that our modern world is accelerating extinction.

The Skeptical Environmentalist is immensely detailed, containing nearly three thousand endnotes and almost two hundred figures and tables. The book, however, remains accessible, a far cry from many of the pompously erudite scholarly works of today. Lomborg thoroughly examines all aspects of the environment: energy, rainforests, pollution, global warming, and chemical fears (like pesticides). In every case, even if he finds evidence supporting a claim—global warming, for instance—the effects and future of the problem are never as severe as the environmental science community has led the public to believe. And, because these problems are exaggerated, governments the world over have spent accordingly—on environmental research and remediation. In many cases, Lomborg argues, that money could be better spent otherwise.

The strength of the book, though, is in Lomborg's optimism. Left-wing environmentalists have explained for years that human beings endanger the Earth's health. Paul Ehrlich worried that population increase would turn the Earth into a 'giant human feedlot.' Al Gore, in Earth in the Balance, wrote, 'Modern industrial civilization as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet's ecological system.' Both assertions, according to Lomborg, are baseless. The world is improving and will continue to improve: 'Mankind's lot has vastly improved in every significant measurable field and it is likely to continue to do so.' And for those who disagree: 'When would you prefer to have been born?'

Many of the criticisms of Lomborg's work center on his training and profession—he is a statistician, not an environmental scientist. Lomborg admits this: 'I have let experts review the chapters of this book, but I am not myself an expert as regards environmental problems.' Critics have used this admission—often taking it out of context—to accuse Lomborg of subverting attempts to improve the environment. The website www.anti-lomborg.com blatantly propagates this myth: 'Lomborg's background is as a statistician, a training which has left him well-equipped to tell lies by manipulating figures in order to jump on the anti-environmentalist bandwagon.' However, if Lomborg's background and personal politics are considered, such claims are irresponsible—by his own admission Lomborg is not an anti-environmentalist. Lomborg is a former member of Greenpeace and a vegetarian; many of the types of environmental regulations he supports stray far from those proposed by, say, industry groups. Lomborg's impetus in writing The Skeptical Environmentalist was not to debunk the popular view of the environment, but to put these views to statistical scrutiny and see what resulted—and the results have sent waves of panic through the environmentalist community. Plus, the statistics which Lomborg used are not foreign to his critics—it is not as if Lomborg gathered his own data for manipulation. Lomborg used statistics from a number of reputable government organizations and even from environmental groups.

While the intentions of www.anti-lomborg.com are clear, most striking is the reception Lomborg has received in well-regarded mainstream journals. The January 22 issue of Scientific American ( titled 'Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist') loosed four very biased environmentalists on The Skeptical Environmentalist. Stephen Schneider, professor in the department of biological sciences at Stanford, picks apart the minutia of the book, but relies more on pompous ad hominem attacks on Lomborg. 'And who is Lomborg, I wondered, and why haven't I come across him at any of the meetings where the usual suspects debate costs, benefits, extinction rates, carrying capacity, or cloud feedback?' writes Schneider. 'I couldn't recall reading any scientific or policy contributions from him either.' Schneider goes on to suggest that the entirety of The Skeptical Environmentalist is false.

Schneider laments, though, that The Skeptical Environmentalist will be embraced by those not holding advanced degrees as he does. 'Worse still, many lay people and policymakers won't see the reviews and could well be tricked into thinking thousands of citations and hundreds of pages constitute balanced scholarship.' John Holdren, a Harvard professor, writing on Lomborg's pages concerning energy, takes more jabs at Lomborg. 'Lomborg is giving skepticism—and statisticians—a bad name,' he wrote.

Thomas Lovejoy, chief biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank, follows suit in his piece on extinction. 'Sadly, the author seems not to reciprocate the respect biologists have for statisticians.'

Lomborg, however, does not let these criticisms go unnoticed, and he has dedicated pages on his website to refuting them. In thirty-three pages of dense text, Lomborg defends himself against the Scientific American articles, scrutinizing everything from the title ('The discussion is whether the statements in my book are correct or not. The need to make it sound like a battle of science against my book seems entirely to misplace and bias the focus. Rather, the standpoint that might need to defend itself from my book would be the alarmist environmentalism, and that is perhaps the headline that would make more sense: Alarmist environmentalism defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist.') to the bias of the four contributors. The Economist weighed in too, commenting, 'Science needs no defending from Mr. Lomborg. It may very well need defending from champions like Mr. Schneider.'

The Skeptical Environmentalist has frightened the environmentalist community and left them scrambling for rebuttals. For now, they are content finding fault with the smallest details and personally attacking Lomborg. Environmentalists want to think that Lomborg is a crazed right-winger intent on destroying the Earth and all its inhabitants. They cannot bear to think that Lomborg fell for the Litany once as they do now.

Lomborg has established a new way of looking at the environment and may very well spark a new, more pragmatic environmental movement, leaving the proponents of the old movement with out a podium—or inflated fear-mongering—behind which to stand.

The Optimistic Future: The Skeptical Environmentalist

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