Greens With Envy

Poor Bjørn Lomborg. Although reviewers hailed his study The Skeptical Environmentalist as "brilliant and powerful" and the Economist named it as one of the "finest books of 2001," some environmentalists and critics have dubbed the photogenic associate professor of statistics at Denmark’s Aarhus University an "inexperienced environmental statistician [who] puffs himself up as he who knows best."

Lomborg’s crime: His door-stopping 515-page tome (with 2,930 footnotes) published by Cambridge University Press argues that the global environment is getting better, not worse, and that the media and the green lobby have duped us to believe otherwise. Among his many controversial assertions are that the dire predictions about global warming will not come to pass (and that the money spent reaching the emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol would be better spent on safe drinking water), that waste management is not a problem (the landfill area to handle U.S. waste throughout the 21st century is a square less than 18 miles on each side), and that acid rain is not killing the forests or polluting lakes.

Like a cloud of angry bees, Lomborg’s critics have swarmed across the pages of his book, faulting him for oversimplifying the facts and using data selectively (the same tactics that he attributes to eco-doomers). The World Resources Institute has included a list of "nine things journalists should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist" on its Web site. The January 2002 issue of Scientific American devotes 11 pages to four prominent scientists who take issue with Lomborg’s assessments of global warming, population, biodiversity, and energy.

What accounts for the massive cognitive dissonance between the mainstream media and a vocal segment of the environmental establishment, two groups that conservatives often charge are in cahoots? Citing a similar media response to Gregg Easterbrook’s 1995 book, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, asserts that the glowing reviews of Lomborg speak volumes "about the press wanting to bend over backward to prove it is not pro-environmentalist." Easterbrook, senior editor at the New Republic, argues instead that the "semi-credible reception" to Lomborg shows that some progress has been made in the continuing effort to help the public "wake up to the fact that the environment is getting better in the Western world… [and that] environmental regulation is working." (Easterbrook emphasizes that the developing world is not experiencing the same kind of progress.)

Parsing the truth about Lomborg’s book, let alone the true state of the world, is not for the fainthearted lay reader. But the multiple reprints that The Skeptical Environmentalist has gone through since its initial September 2001 print date suggest that in the publishing arena, at least, a little good news about the global environment can go a long way.