The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the WorldBy
Bjorn Lomborg
Long Review: Bjorn Lomborg is an Associate Professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He is (by his own description) a vegetarian, out of respect for animal rights, and a former Greenpeace member. In February, 1997, he read an interview in Wired Magazine with Julian Simon, who maintained that much of our knowledge of the environment is, quite simply, wrong. Lomborg was "provoked." That fall, he set up a study group to check Simon's data. They expected to prove Simon wrong. They didn't, which left them rather non-plussed. It was also the genesis of a series of articles in a Danish newspaper that caused an uproar. That, in turn, lead to publication of a book in Danish. The book reviewed here is an updated and enlarged version of the 1998 volume, with statistical data updated to May 2001. The term "Litany" is Simon's. Lomborg is so persuaded of the essential facts of Simon's thesis that he has picked it up and used it in this book. Part I is entitled "The Litany", and it examines – and challenges – the set of beliefs that make up the Litany: that things are getting worse, that (as Time Magazine put it last year) "everyone knows the planet is in bad shape." Part two covers Human Welfare: health and longevity, our food and our prosperity. The proportion of people starving in the world has dropped from 35% in 1970 to 18% today. This, in spite of the fact that we have 2 billion more people to feed. In the same period, the average caloric intake in the developing world has increased by 38%. This is not to say that there are no problems, but Lomborg lays many of those directly in the laps of African governments. The next part stares the malthusians in the eye. It deals with whether our prosperity can continue. By "our", he means the entire planet. Lomborg is convinced that by the end of this century, the poorest parts of the world will be more prosperous in GDP per person than the developed countries are today. We are not running out of resources. In most cases, in spite of a larger population, we have more proven reserves than we did twenty or fifty years ago. Nor are we running out of food. Further, we are using our resources more efficiently. "For the world at large, almost twice the amount of wealth was produced in 1992 per energy unit compared to 1972." (page 126) Following that, Lomborg takes on pollution. Acid rain is not killing the forests. Remember the ozone layer? That is healing now. Remember the cleanup of Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground? "While this is naturally an awful toll, we also need to put this death in perspective – the total 250,000 dead birds ... is still less than the number of birds which die on a single day in the US colliding with plate glass, or the number of birds that are killed by domestic cats in Britian in two days." (page 192) The cleanup may not have helped as much as we would like to think. As an experiment, some parts of the beaches were not pressure cleaned of oil. Thoise came back to life in 18 months. The pressure cleaned areas took three to four years. Part V is entitled "Tomorrow's Problems" and deals with chemical pollution, biodiversity and global warming. We are not loosing massive numbers of species. While global warming is taking place, the typical proposed remedy of massive cutbacks in fossil fuels is worse than the damage the warming will do. (Drat, so much for my vast investments in Wyoming sagebrush!) This and more is laid out in almost excruciating detail. The trade paperback edition has 515 pages, of which 71 contain the bibliography, and 82 the 2930 endnotes. Lomborg's background as a professor of statistics shows through. He manages to explain much of the statistical fog clearly enough for a reasonably literate and numerate layperson to pick it up. Data are drawn from authoritative sources, such as the UN, the US EPA, and the EU's analogous agency. Lomborg also cites from environmentalist sources such as the Worldwatch Institute – often to throw their own reports back at them! You can quibble as to the FAO's reports if you wish, but the point here is that Lomborg is using publicly available data, data available to the creators of the Litany. Further, he uses authoritative sources, which means that the burden is on anyone who wants to dispute his data. All of Lomborg's sources are also available to the environmentalists. And, thanks to the meticulous footnotes and bibliography and the Internet, all are available to you as well, should you wish to check Lomborg's work. Please do. All of this is set forth in calm, clear language. There is no ranting, no name calling. Only in a few places does Lomborg even approach showing emotion. In its way, this calm concise presentation is even more chilling than an emotional approach would have been. The vast contrast between the facts and the Litany is far more frightening than any ranting could possibly have been. and it shows up by contrast the hysteria with which the Litany is usually presented. Lomborg names names, calls a spade a spade, and takes no prisoners. For example, he savages the Worldwatch Institute. "In its shorthand appraisal of the state of the world since 1984, Worldwatch Institute sets out a lit of problems, all of which have improved since then, and all but one of which have improved immensely since then, and one of which is just plain wrong. Not a great score for 16 years that have supposedly been been meticulously covered by the Worldwatch reports. The problem, of course, is not lack of data – Worldwatch Institute publishes fine data collections, which are also used in this book – but merely a carelessness that comes with the ingrained belief in the Litany." (page 14) And again. Lomborg quotes Worldwatch's 1998 The State of the World as saying that the long term trend in wheat prices may have ended in the 1990s, and prices may now be climbing. This analysis is based on a three year rise from a record low. But Lomborg points out that wheat prices have been declining since at least 1800. And, at the time of writing, in February 2001, wheat was at a new record low well below the start of the uptick which so alarmed Worldwatch. (page 93) Yet again: Lomborg goes through a detailed analysis of the problem of pesticides in food, He points out that the scare is over synthetic pesticides, not natural ones – as though artificiality makes a difference in carcinogenicity. Yet you are at far greater risk from naturally occurring pesticides, like the caffeic acid in your coffee and your lettuce, than from synthetic ones. "...[M]any of our perfectly ordinary foods would not pass the regulatory criteria we use for synthetic chemicals. Our intake of coffee is about 50 times more carcinogenic than our intake of DDT before it was banned...." (page 234-5) And so on. Furthermore, the discussion is conservative. For example, nowhere in the discussion of energy does Lomborg mention O'Neill colonies or cold fusion. In the discussion of resources, he ignores lunar and asteroidal sources. Nowhere does he discuss a proposal to handle global warming by putting a vast sun shade in solar synchronous orbit. One suspects that if Lomborg did hear of such a proposal, he'd wonder if the cost was worth it. Lomborg's point is not to argue for or against any particular policy proposals. Rather, he insists that we used the data we already have to understand what is really going on around us. Only then can we make the correct policy decisions. "The central point here remains: if we are to make the best decisions for our future, we should base our prioritizations not on fear but on facts. Thus, we need to confront our fears; we need to challenge the Litany." (page 327) For example, the Litany says that synthetic pesticides cause cancer. In fact, they cause about 20 cancer deaths a year in the US. Yet, if we banned synthetic pesticides, it would cost us $20-30 billion a year, or at least $1 billion per life saved. But doing so would raise the cost of fruits and vegetables noticeably. Since fruits and vegetables are know to be less carcinogenic than meats, such a ban would add 26,000 deaths a year from cancer due to the diet change. We must consider dollar costs, if for no other reason that a dollar spent saving a life here might be better spent saving several lives elsewhere. For example, if you examine the cost per life year saved in various sectors of the economy, environmental regulation costs more than an order of magnitude more per life year saved than the next most expensive sector. Again, compare government agencies. The EPA costs almost two orders of magnitude more per life year saved than its nearest competitor, OSHA. In other words, ceteris paribus, for every life year the EPA saves, the money could be spent by other agencies at an efficiency that would save over a hundred life years. "If the Litany makes us demand regulation of particular areas of the environment while we fail to consider how the money could otherwise have been spent, we actually create a societal structure in which fewer people survive. To use a harsh – albeit fitting – metaphor, we could say that when we ignore the cost of our environmental decisions on the lesser regulations in other areas, we are in reality committing statistical murder." (page 342) And that moral bomb is as close as Lomborg comes to showing any emotion in the entire book! Lomborg touches on related issues. The media are complicit in spreading the Litany, but what is their motive? They exagerate when reporting on news stories – why? More important, why do people believe in the Litany? Sometimes they do so in ignorance or because their only source of information is the media. But others, like Lester Brown of WorldWatch, don't have that excuse. Why do they believe, often in spite of the evidence? This may be the most important question the book brings up. While Lomborg offers some possible answers, they don't satisfy this reader. I would suggest that the market works: if there is a demand for people to propound the Litany, the market will provide people to propound the Litany. Perhaps a thorough answer will have to await the leisure and resources of the XXIInd century. And, by our standards, they'll have them, in spades. Now that we have that taken care of, let's see to it that the government doesn't screw things up like they usually do. OK? Indeed, big government run by an enviro-Taliban may be the greatest threat to the survival of this and other species around. You can help deal with that threat by reading this book. November 24, 2001 Charles Curley [send him mail] lives in Wyoming. Before reading this book he had been looking forward to SCUBA diving in the coral encrusted ruins of the U.N. building. Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com The
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