Examentrainers

DANISH DARTS

Reviled for sticking it to ecological dogma, Bjorn Lomborg laughs all the
way to the bank

1			How did a lanky Danish vegetarian who wears T shirts to
			important meetings and votes only for left–wing politicians
			become the great Satan of environmentalism? By telling
			everyone he is an environmentalist but sounding like the
	5		opposite. “We are not running out of energy or natural
			resources,” writes Bjorn Lomborg, 37, an associate professor
			of statistics at Denmark’s University of Aarhus and a former
			member of Greenpeace, in his 1998 book The Skeptical
			Environmentalist. “Air and water around us are becoming less
	10		and less polluted. Mankind’s lot has actually improved in terms of practically
			every measurable indicator.”
2			The book, which was published in English last year, became a best–seller, and
			conservatives worldwide use its ideas to justify inaction on such issues as
			deforestation and global warming. “We should do something that actually does
	15		good and not sounds good,” he says of the expense of complying with the Kyoto
			Protocol on global warming. “For the cost of Kyoto for one year, we could give
			clean drinking water and sanitation to every human being on earth.”
3			Some scientists say they initially hoped to ignore Lomborg but in the wake of
			his book’s popularity have reacted with a fury rarely seen in academia. Peter
	20		Raven, chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
			calls Lomborg “the prime example in our time of someone who distorts statistics
			and statements to meet his own political end.” A dozen esteemed environmental
			scientists, including Raven and Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson, are demanding that
			Lomborg’s publisher cut him loose. “We are deeply disturbed that Cambridge
	25		University Press would publish and promote an error–filled, poorly referenced and
			non–peer–reviewed work,” they write in a letter calling on Cambridge to transfer
			publishing rights to a popular, nonscholarly press.
4			The problem is, Lomborg gets many of his facts right– and provides 2,930
			footnotes to make them easy to check. Some scientists and environmental
	30		advocates have made exaggerated claims about environmental doom, and it’s not
			surprising that they have finally been catalogued. Yet Lomborg is as guilty of
			exaggeration and selective use of data as those he criticizes. He is right that air
			and water quality and agricultural productivity have improved in much of the
			world. But to look at the data on global warming, biological diversity, marine
	35		depletion and deforestation and still say
			things are generally getting better takes a
			willful blindness. That’s why it’s a shame
			so many of the attacks on Lomborg rely
			on name–calling. All that does is avoid
	40		what could be a valuable debate on the
			substance of environmental policy– and,
			of course, help Lomborg sell books. “I’m
			making a fair amount of money from the
			book,” says Lomborg. “A lot more than
	45		Cambridge thought.” By Andrew
			Goldstein. With reporting by Ulla
			Plon⁄Copenhagen and Charles P.
			Wallace⁄Berlin

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