Bj?omborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist has stirred huge controversy. Hailed by free marketeers as a rigorous counterblast to simplistic environmentalism, it has been attacked in Scientific American, with a rejoinder defence in The Economist. It is easy to understand its appeal. It explodes many myths and overstatements of which the green movement is sometimes guilty. It leaves the reader with an encyclopaedia of useful facts and arguments on a range of ecological debates. And it explores some of the complex issues with clarity. Whether one agrees with Lomborg or not, it is worth reading him.
But Lomborg’s book is not what it pretends to be. It is not the work of a true sceptic, of a pragmatist interested in the dispassionate assessment of real environmental problems. Rather, it is a robust polemic which attacks one strand of environmental opinion, with which one can disagree fundamentally whilst also finding some of Lomborg’s own analyses, particularly on global warming, profoundly unconvincing. Indeed, one good reason for reading Lomborg’s flawed but valuable book is that it helps, quite unintentionally, to clarify an important distinction between different schools of environmental thinking.
Lomborg’s success is based partly on the oldest trick of the trade: seek out the extremists amongst your opponents and quote them. To many environmentalists his opening chapter-an attack on what he calls “The Litany” of environmental myths-amounts to a series of straw men effectively destroyed. Ecological polemicists have said some demonstrably silly things over the last three decades and Lomborg rumbles them in a fashion which is fun but of little import.
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