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A young Danish statistics professor has come up with a sure-fire recipe for custard pie. First, be an environmentalist. Second, study the statistics on all matters concerning pollution, deforestation, and resource scarcity. Third, go to an environmentalist meeting and report those facts.
"The Litany," of course, is the usual list of looming catastrophes that Greens have been predicting ever since Silent Spring was published in 1962. The most amazing thing about the Litany is that it is, to an astonishing extent, wrong. Not just wrong, but so sloppily incorrect as to convince any intelligent observer that virtually nothing claimed by the usual environmentalist organizations can be accepted at face value. In analytic tones, Lomborg debunks every environmental "crisis." Lomborg began his quest in an effort to refute Julian Simon's position that the world is not running out of resources, and that most resources will get cheaper as time goes on. Thinking this thesis ridiculous, he put together a university team to study it, and found to his amazement that Simon was overwhelmingly correct. Continuing his analysis into other areas, Lomborg kept coming up with results sharply at odds with the usual alarmist enviro headlines. For example, acid rain has had virtually no deforesting effect. We are not in any shape or manner running out of water - we have only water distribution problems, which are typically the result of incompetent, socialist Third World governments. Amusing and instructive facts abound. The number of birds killed by the "catastrophic" Exxon Valdez was 250,000 - fewer than die daily in the U.S. from collisions with plate glass, or two days' kill by domestic cats in England. The entire cleanup cost about $3 billion, yet even the government-sponsored Trustee Council admits that cleanup efforts by humans actually made the situation worse. At any rate the area, just like the Persian Gulf around Kuwait, which was predicted to be a disaster for generations, is virtually back to normal. Is topsoil erosion a major world problem, as Lester Brown of Worldwatch constantly asserts? It would be if the methodology he employs bore any resemblance to reality. It turns out that the commonly used measure applied to Europe is an extrapolation from one study of part of one field on one farm in Belgium. Such a ridiculous extrapolation is absurd. One is reminded of the force feeding of huge amounts of dioxin to "prove" its danger in tiny doses. Thanks to the sensationalization of sloppy data, Silent Spring itself has led to an enormous fear of pesticides as cancer producers. But as Lomborg demonstrates, fresh fruit and vegetables are key to cancer prevention. We need pesticides to grow the cure! Lomborg is under heavy fire from an army of enviros. But his cool and measured tone is sharply at odds with the hothouse histrionics coming from the Left. Make no mistake, that rhetoric is the daily fare being served up in virtually every grade school science book in American schools. It's high time to get down to the facts and stop scaring our children and ourselves with nonexistent bogeymen. Real problems can be solved. Fictional ones can't. (Cambridge University Press, 2001, 352 pps., $28) |
Former Greenpeacenik Bjorn Lomborg of the University of Aarhus has been getting a lot of pies in the face these days. This is the preferred response of radical environmentalists who don't like his debunking of what he calls "The Litany."
