Bjorn Lomborg
Upfront
Bjorn Lomborg
by Rowan Taylor
Rowan Taylor talks to Bjorn Lomborg about being an “environmental sceptic” and getting a pie in the face.
Excuse the scepticism, but what’s a vegetarian “left-wing kinda guy” in a T-shirt doing lecturing to 500-plus Business Roundtable dinner guests?
“They invited me and provided the microphone,” says sceptical environmentalist and Greenpeace apostate Dr Bjorn Lomborg. “But I decide what I say, and I say exactly the same thing to them as I say when I go to the colleges and to a conference or when I give talks at universities or in the media.”
The important thing is being here to spread the word about prioritising our environmental problems.
“I’ve said several times that I would love for Greenpeace NZ to invite me. They don’t.” No surprises there. Greenpeace also declined to appear with him on Holmes, as did the Green Party’s Jeanette Fitzsimons.
Ever since the publication of Lomborg’s controversial 515-page book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: The Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2001), he has been vilified on the left and lionised on the right for arguing that the world is not as bad as we might think and that environmental groups, interested scientists and the media tend to exaggerate the bad news.
“Most people don’t trust business groups – and rightly so, because they have a vested interest – but environmentalists have an interest, too, an interest in getting attention for their cause.”
Not that this is inherently wrong. But, if they are listened to uncritically, it can lead to wrong decisions – decisions made in panic rather than on the basis of careful science and a cool cost-benefit analysis.
This is music to the ears of the business-as-usual crowd, which is why the 38-year-old statistician, who lectures at Denmark’s Aarhus University and also heads the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, is now a sought-after speaker at conservative shindigs such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US and the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.
So what are his politics?
“I’d say I’m one of those New Left people who definitely say markets work. They make the most efficient economy. But they need redistributing. That’s what we do with taxes and regulation and I’m in favour of strongly redistributing.”
But not just for the hell of it.
“I think being left-wing is mostly about caring about people who are not so fortunate – making sure we have a much more equal distribution than would otherwise arise from a market economy. And I would also say very strongly that we have a responsibility for the Third World. We have a responsibility to make sure that we actually end up doing good, for instance, for the people in Bangladesh and not just doing feel-good things like Kyoto.”
The Kyoto Protocol is a pet hate and one that went down well with the Roundtable crowd – the first part of it, anyway. Lomborg explained that, because the Protocol will have little effect on global warming, we would be better to scrap it and use the money to address Third World problems.
“We could provide clean drinking water to the entire Third World, and combat malaria and HIV, for a fraction of the cost of Kyoto.”
Which is just the sort of argument that gets Lomborg’s critics steaming. It invites “paralysis by hypothesis”. It pits an imperfect real initiative against a non-existent mother-and-apple-pie alternative. Assuming Kyoto was dropped, who would lead the campaign to boost foreign aid and clean up the Third World’s water and hospitals? The Business Roundtable?
Lomborg acknowledges the point.
“I definitely agree that you should not allow realism to be derailed by good intentions. Kyoto is going to happen in some way or another. It’s going to stagger through and a lot of things are not going to be fulfilled and a lot of countries are going to opt out in the last second and that kind of thing. But the real issue here is of course to make sure that we never do such a thing again without having the discussion. How big are the problems? And how much of a solution is this? I just hate to see all good people’s intentions being pushed into something that will do so little good.”
Generally, the media have taken Lomborg’s smiling eco-optimism at face value – and rightly so in the case of human quality of life. The past century has seen remarkable improvements in all the main indicators – health, wealth, life expectancy, education, poverty, starvation, infant mortality and so on. In these respects, Lomborg reminds us that the world is still far from perfect, but on the right track.
On many other things, though, Lomborg and his critics part company. In fact, as one commentator noted, there is now a veritable cottage industry of anti-Lomborg websites. Most do a big line in name-calling and character assassination – one even proudly displays a photo of Lomborg getting a pie in the face.
Lomborg’s accusers assert that he selectively uses statistics to give a falsely rosy view of the world’s forests, fisheries, biodiversity, climate, pesticides, landfills, fossil fuel supplies, etc.
He is also accused of putting too much faith in market forces and economic growth as substitutes for environmental policy and environmental ethics.
In particular, his penchant for human-centred cost-benefit analysis is said to ignore uncertainties and to undervalue costs and benefits that are hard to monetise, such as “ecosystem services”, human life and the intrinsic worth of other species.
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