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...overall message eco-sceptic Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist is that practical remedies to environmental anxieties rest heavily on resources that are only abundant in affluent societies--that is money, freedom to innovate, reliable benchmark information, technological and scientific sophistication, and freedom for anyone to point out silly defects in grand schemes without fear of persecution.
In my view also, it is important to have an optimistic vision about what can be achieved. If indeed the future is truly hopeless, people will say what's the point of trying, and truly desperate people will do quite stupid things with gun held to their head.
But it is also true that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed--and hence clamorous to be led to safety--by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary", as so archly noted by H.L. Mencken. Doom and gloom, gross exaggeration and imaginary hobgoblins have long been the domain of environmentalism. In the public mind, the complicated mix of biology, economics and geophysics that environmental activists enlist to paint a picture of a world careering towards Armageddon reinforces many prejudices, and finds much tacit support. But when environmentalism is challenged to face up to the implications of this political reliance on exaggeration and fear-mongering, as they are by Bjorn Lomborg, matters of accuracy and honesty quickly become an important issue.
Environmental and economic pessimism has quite a history, going back at least to Malthus and Marx in the nineteenth century, both of whom were consistently wrong in their gloomy predictions for the future. These errors do not seem to have deterred pessimists though, and the 1960s and 1970s saw the full flowering of global Doomsday worries about the environment, with Rachel Carson's iconic Silent Spring, Donella Meadows' Limits to Growth, and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. These works were enormously persuasive, and gave rise to the modern environmentalist movement, in which pessimism is almost an art form.
Even early on, voices of dissent against this movement were relatively muted, but one optimistic dissident was the late American economist Julian Simon. Simon challenged Paul Ehrlich in a celebrated bet about looming shortages. Simon and Ehrlich agreed that shortages would be manifested in long-term trends to higher commodity prices. Simon, however, confidently predicted that prices would fall over time, and that due to human ingenuity, mineral resources were effectively inexhaustible (an overstatement which outraged the pessimists). The fact that Ehrlich lost the bet, and was similarly wrong in predictions about global population trends and mass famines (predicted to occur in the 1980s as the world ran out of food) does not seem to have dented Ehrlich's opinion that he, the pessimistic biologist, knew more about economics than Simon, the supposedly naive student of market forces. Nor does being wrong seem to have subsequently aroused much interest in Ehrlich or in many other environmentalists to understand why a biologist's view of the world could be so at variance with the actual economic and environmental historic record in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Despite the power of pessimistic doom and gloom in practical politics, the optimist case for human ingenuity did not go away. The argument was joined by others who included the late Aaron Wildavsky, Matt Ridley, Indur M. Goklany, and more recently Jack Hollander, who has just published The Real Environmental Crisis: Poverty not Affluence is the Real Enemy of the Environment. To these could be added the pro-technology United Nations Development Program Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development, also a target of Green wrath, and a slew of more general liberal and libertarian opinions from F.A. Hayek to Virginia Postrel.
But the optimistic effort which has attracted the most attention is Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE). TSE is a comprehensive (and very readable) statistical assessment of the economic and environmental records which attempts to find out the true state of the world.
In TSE, common myths about the environment are described as "The Litany", by which Lomborg means the prevailing conventional wisdom of impending doom propagated widely in news media and in popular books, and including pessimistic views of air and water pollution, pesticide scares, species extinction, population growth, genetically modified foods, and allegations of crisis in climate change, which of course, whether true or not, have major political and policy implications because they are an item of almost religious belief for so many people (witness Kyoto and the rise of...
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