CEPMLP Internet Journal

Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist
Cambridge University Press 2001, first published in Danish in 1998

A Review by Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
Hull University

This book claims to be about the ‘real' world: its current environmental state in comparison to the recent past. It achieves its aim splendidly - if selectively - in as far as environmental changes can be measured by statistics and reasoned evidence. But why this debunking of the green alarmist ‘Litany' from peaceful little Denmark by ‘an old left-wing Greenpeace member' (p.xix)? Why has the UK research community not achieved a similar lucid contribution to a debate that is most urgently needed?

The book thankfully avoids the methodology of global change scientists who ‘predict' our environmental future using ‘natural' baselines and dubious models. These, while hugely complex and costly, are fed with uncertain science and ‘project' outcomes that use scenarios which tend to assume the worst case outcomes from ‘mathematical experiments' - the true description of the science climate change models. Lomborg's approach alone is most refreshing: empiricism is replacing an excess of theorising and futurology that verge on astrology. Thus treated, the trends describing environmental change are improving the planet and not ‘degrading' it. The focus is on pollution rather than conservation and biodiversity where statistics are less readily available and trustworthy. But many environmental practitioners, activists and believers were naturally outraged. The flow of British journals attacking Lomborg continues. This may well be because he challenges a fundamental philosophy of life that is as popular today as it is worrying:

‘I can not exclude with certainty that the plane I'm about to board will crash, therefore I will assume it will crash, therefore I will not board.'

The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist' argues with the World Bank that economic development and environmental protection go hand in hand, that by encouraging the former the latter will follow. This is not a new idea, but is deeply entrenched in the philosophy and policy gaol of ecological modernisation. But celebrating progress does not suit anti-globalisation rhetoric, assorted commercial lobbying efforts or specific research agendas. One example of the latter is the review by FitzRoy and Smith, Department of Economics, University of St Andrews; others, less well researched, can be read in Prospect (October 2001; May, June 2002), as well as in the news sections of journals like Nature and the New Scientist. Counter views receive much less exposure, at least in Europe.

Like other critics, the environmental economists from St.Andrews accuse Lomborg of failings that academic economists are most likely to share: failure to appreciate fully the scientific evidence for the approaching doom. In support two scientists are quoted who are well-known environmental activists and interpret sketchy evidence and contested theory according to their personal values and interests – as we all do. E.O. Wilson and S.H. Schneider are cited against Lomborg when people with quite contrary views could have been called upon to support the opposite view. Schneider, a committed policy advocate of ‘combating' global warming since the late 1970s, for example, has a huge personal stake in the global warming hypothesis as interpreted in policy-makers summaries from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Greenpeace, being ‘true‘. Schneider is cited with approval as having asked Cambridge University Press why it published such a polemic. The answer should have been obvious. CUP has long published similarly polemical works, the IPCC reports and their summaries. While more scientific in style and the product of many authors, the use made of IPPC ‘summaries for policy-makers' by green lobbies, some bureaucracies and scientifically illiterate social scientists is indeed highly polemical. These ‘users' of allegedly scientific texts have tended to deliberately base their policies, economics and other forecasts and calculations on the least probably and most scare-mongering projections and scenarios included by the IPCC. This Panel is a network of primarily government funded scientific institutions, governments and NGOs set up and ‘managed' specifically to support the Framework Convention on Climate Change and thus to provide evidence that justifies mandatory government policies aimed at the ‘decarbonisation' of energy supplies.

Yet according to Lomborg's statistical research, the world in general is becoming more, not less, inhabitable. This is certainly my own experience from three countries over more decades than I like to admit. This experience and the numbers also question the currently approved justifications of much natural science research which rests on threats being forecast by mathematical models and ‘socio-economic' scenarios. It amounts to a direct challenge to much environmental ‘theorising' and the widespread belief (in the North) that humanity is ‘degrading' the Planet. Humanity, it is argued, needs to be restrained by severe policies and appeals to a planetary ethics that overrule local priorities and geographical differences. Many of my colleagues in geography from three continents agree with Lomborg and have long taught that the alarmist approach encourages fear of the future, risk aversion and contempt for humanity. The Danes seem to have realised several years ago that post-modern environmentalism is the faith of a new conservatism in the worst sense - moralising and self-righteous, opposed to development in the South, to science, economic growth and certainly to globalisation in all its forms. This faith encourages risk aversion and the waste of public resources. De facto it is likely to support growing material inequalities as governments are pressurised to protect the playgrounds and fashions of the ‘haves' while consumers and tax payers fund the ‘internalisation' of externalities and provide capital for new technologies that markets may not need.

The ‘Litany' that is being attacked is populist environmental alarmism, the doom and gloom forecasts of collapsing ecologies, destroyed balances and overstepped thresholds, and with it politically correct but economically and culturally dangerous myths of doubtful morality, disregard for truth and likely harmful cultural impacts. A critique of the Litany was urgently needed, but as most commentators have pointed out, the baby should not be thrown out with the bath water. The book could be read as being in danger of doing just this, but environmental problems are not denied. Rather they are presented as primarily local, e.g. urban, and as stage societies may have to pass through in order to accumulate capital for technological progress. As such these problems are subject to remedies related to local priorities and needs rather than intergovernmental treaty obligations that compel a degree of uniformity quite improper given the large diversity of people and environments.

Among Lomborg's enemies are not only environmental ideologues. Also present are assorted research lobbies and non-governmental bodies grown fat on populist activism or the provision of policy ‘relevant' advise to ‘policy-makers' (on ‘green' economics, technology, planning, energy and general ‘restructuring towards sustainability'). Will such advice really assist poverty reduction – the one theme now shared by all ‘actors' engaged in international policy? This remains to be seen and, with Lomborg, I have serious doubts about the economic impacts of climate change policies in developing economies. But Lomborg makes the point that in order to achieve development in areas where poverty and misery still reign, environmentalism will have to reappear in a different form and should not be dictated by ‘the North'. Improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions at high costs in the South where these remain minute per capita, makes neither economic nor human sense.

A closer look at the chapter on global warming reveals, however, that the critique, in spite of its moral force, remains rather superficial. By understandably not delving into theory of climate change and its alleged future impacts, deeper challenges to the IPCC's ‘scientific consensus' are not attempted. The providers of this knowledge, be they from the natural sciences or from disciplines that erect their myths on scientific ‘predictions', are not interrogated about the lack of disclaimers concerning the way in which their studies are misinterpreted by assorted interests. By accepting much of the IPCC story and concentrating only on exaggerations and internal inconsistencies, the proposed Kyoto policy response is nevertheless condemned as a likely failure and a waste of money. In no way does Lomberg go as far as Andrew Kenny in the UK journal The Spectator, June 22 which in its cover story ‘Prepare for the big chill' attributes the Western attraction to the warming scare to guilt about consumerism. Kenny claims that:

‘A good environmental scare needs two ingredients. The first is impending catastrophe. The second is a suitable culprit to blame. In the second case, the ice age fails and global warming is gloriously successful. It is not the destruction itself of Sodom and Gomorrah that makes the story so appealing but the fact that they were destroyed because they were so sinful. One of the real threats to mankind is the danger of collision with a large asteroid. It has happened in the past with catastrophic effect, and it will probably happen again. But there are no conferences, resolutions, gatherings, protests and newspaper headlines about asteroid impacts. The reason is that you cannot find anyone suitable to blame for them. If you could persuade people that President Bush or the oil companies were responsible for the asteroids, I guarantee that there would be a billion-dollar campaign to ‘raise awareness' about the asteroid danger, with sonorous editorials in all the papers. Global warming has the perfect culprit: naughty, industrialised, advanced, consuming, Western man, who has made himself very rich by burning a lot of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas).'

Why then so much scientific attention to ‘global warming'? Who remembers today the fuss made about acid rain and the dying of the German Forest? Lomborg avoids asking why scientists have paid little attention to scare stories even the IPCC rejects in its fuller publications. Taking the example of the recent calving of ice sheet in Antarctica, there were hundreds of claims by the media that this was a classic Global Warming signal. In the USA even there were few weak responses from scientists stating that this was normal and had nothing to do with any human induced warming that could be determined. As a colleague (Steve Hemphill) recently wrote to me:

"There is just too much incentive for the scientific community to go along for the ride. They can protest the interpretations of the science but it does not stop them from participating in the party. How many are being paid for modelling by the IPCC or NSA grants? Yet they object to the Summary Report as overstating their research? Then quit or give back the money! That would be the honest thing to do.'

The ‘deep' skeptics' answer is therefore much more radical than that given by Lomborg. According to John Daly,' the modellers have lost touch with science and scientific method - the IPCC scenarios or `storylines' are nothing but fairy tales, creatively written for an impressionable public.

Lomborg's cause is also weakened, for global warming, by the absence of any attempt to explain why in the Litany has proved to attractive not only to some governments and the UN, but also to a growing number of ‘market forces'. Western guilt is surely an inadequate explanation. Are all ‘market forces' simply chasing subsidies and regulations to advance ‘clean' rather than needed technology? If the latter, would we not be entering an era of capital accumulation with reference to ‘environment', and as such not an attack on the West, but a defence of ‘its' capitalism? It was one of the conclusion of my PhD on ‘The limits to the international control of marine pollution' (University of Sussex 1981), that global environmental 'concerns' would generate conflict rather than harmony among nations, except in one area : 'global research'. Research into global threats was a new source of income for scientific bodies that would bring governments together at a time when blue sky research funding was stabilising and growth was expected. So the ultimate 'villain' not mentioned by Lomborg is the decline of 'free' money for global research. I have many times argued that the man-made global warming hypothesis is not primarily driven by ‘pure' science that is becoming increasingly self-critical and concerned about the use of its results, but by Working Group III of the IPPC. It is here that governments, the R&D lobbies and the environmentalists have their seats.

But my criticism goes beyond what this book could be expected to deliver. To his credit, Lomborg tried to reawaken faith in humanity's own capacities, the dream of a better life for everybody in which science, technology and government remain wedded to ‘myths' more benign than those disseminated by the Litany. He shows that the environment in post-industrial areas has significantly improved for the majority and puts before us, implicitly, the view that more of ‘raw nature' will have to be exploited, changed and even destroyed, before all of mankind can share these benefits. This is a challenge. In making it, he also exposes as a real the danger to development, attempts made most easily at the international level to translate green rhetoric into ‘global governance' by global environmental agreements.

The example of the EU might be a warning here. Influence and above all funds may be shifted to allegedly green causes away from development with reference to the Litany. In Europe a least, the death of nature and global pollution are already, and quite unfairly, blamed on the USA. In Europe sins against ‘Nature' are to be countered by coercive norms such as environmental taxes, emission caps and other prescriptive limits that will shift powers away form national governments to bureaucracy in Brussels, remove money from investments and shift taxes towards poorer groups. In combination, these ‘green' efforts can be expected further to undermine global economic recovery because natural resources or capacities will be made scarcer and more expensive by intervention. This will do nothing to hinder the life styles of the super rich and little to change those the well-off. Poorer majorities will have to pay and consume less.

Lomborg's key idea is straightforward: ‘We ought not to let the environmental organisations, business lobbyists or the media be alone in presenting truths and priorities (p.xx). He left out science lobbies and bureaucracies as major actors and beneficiaries and hence has given the impression that the Litany can be defeated more easily than is likely.

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
Reader in Geography: Environmental Policy and Management
Hull University, UK
(added 08 July 2002)

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