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.
The more important charge against Lomborg, however, is one of presentational bias. Far too often (and most seriously in the chapter on global warming) he uses the same techniques he self-righteously condemns in others-facts presented to fit his chosen argument, not to enable the reader to make an informed judgement. Strangely, he provides an illustration of this technique in the very section devoted to exposing his opponents' tricks. Chapter one concludes with an attack on how environmental polemicists manipulate language and figures-absolute millions of tons emitted or thousands of species lost cited when environmental impacts need exaggerating; percentages of very large aggregates such as national income used to make costs of clean-up look small; gross costs or net costs deployed according to which best fit the argument.
But in discussing one of his key examples-a carefully constructed claim that recycling toothbrushes can avoid a significant 45,000 tons of landfill waste at a trivial cost of $17 per person-Lomborg cannot stop himself playing the linguistic game in reverse. He cites the huge cost of $4 billion versus the slight benefit of a 0.02 per cent reduction in landfill volumes, but omits to mention that if you express $4 billion as a percentage of US GDP you get 0.04 per cent-and that if you use not the gross cost but the net cost of recyclable toothbrushes versus ordinary ones, you come down to around 0.02 per cent. Leaving us with the conclusion which common sense would have told us in the first place: both the benefits and costs of recycling toothbrushes are trivial. In this case, unlike on global warming, also a trivial fault since the whole subject is de minimis. But the point is made: this book should be read, but read with care.
For some people, concern about the environment is rooted in a worldview of anti-modernist and anti-capitalist pessimism. It is this "anti-modernist" school that Lomborg demolishes. The anti-modernists tend to express environmental concerns in quasi-religious terms, rejecting a homocentric world view: environmental improvements are not needed to make human life more pleasant, but because they are in some absolute sense right. It displays a deep suspicion of the market economy and of big business and is susceptible to conspiracy theory and scare stories, with selfish actions forever threatening health and the environment. But above all the anti-modernist school is characterised by a belief that the developed world model of ever-growing prosperity is unsustainable and in any case tawdry, and that fundamental reform of modern lifestyles is required to restore balance to the world. This belief makes its adherents highly suspicious of any assertion that mankind has achieved real improvements, not only in material conditions, but also in some aspects of environmental quality. (As Stephen Budiansky pointed out in last month's Prospect, even scientists such as EO Wilson lean towards this view.)
The anti-modernists, however, have no monopoly on environmental concern. There are many other people who are deeply concerned about environmental issues but untouched by the anti-modernism and pessimism which Lomborg attacks. This school can accept a largely homocentric attitude to objectives and morality, but believes that mankind will undermine its own quality of life unless we carefully manage the environmental impact of rising prosperity. Its adherents are well aware that the huge increases in material prosperity achieved over the last 50 to 100 years have been accompanied in recent decades by significant improvements in local environments-better urban air and cleaner rivers-but are convinced that such improvements have only been achieved through overt public policy. They make no prior assumptions about the adequacy of raw material reserves. And they are willing to use market instruments to achieve environmental aims. They do not see prosperity and environmental improvement as alternatives: they want both.
To adherents of this school of environmentalism, the greater part of Lomborg's book is interesting and well researched but largely irrelevant to their concerns, while the chapters which address the environmental impact of prosperity are the least convincing. The chapters explaining that material prosperity has risen are well presented but unsurprising and tangential to environmental issues. Lomborg's lengthy section on "Can Human Prosperity Continue?" has in turn a revealing pattern. The longer chapters arguing that we will not run out of food or other non-energy resources are convincing, but have little to do with the environmental impact of prosperity. The shorter chapters addressing specifically environmental issues-water and forest sustainability-are far less convincing and marked by presentational bias.
The chapter on energy supply meanwhile is a successful demonstration of the fact that there is no shortage of energy and probably no shortage of fossil fuels for the next several centuries. This is presented as a trump card against the environmentalist "Litany," but for environmentalists of the pragmatic school its actual impact is to increase concern about global warming. Indeed, the chapter demonstrates the strange phenomenon of a debate between protagonists who are each undermining their own arguments. If fossil fuels were likely to run out soon, we should be much less worried about global warming, since the free market consequence would be rising fossil fuel prices and the rapid development of renewable energy. The problem is rather that fossil fuels may be so plentiful that their prices will not rise until significant environmental damage has been done-the free market price failing to reflect the economic externality of CO2 emissions. Lomborg's illustration of huge fossil fuel availability and of the tendency for discovered reserves to overshoot predictions, while prices undershoot them, undermines his later confidence that free market forces will solve global warming without policy intervention. Conversely, the "we're running out of fuel" rantings of anti-modernists undermines their case for taking action on global warming. Environmentalists of the pragmatic school can only look on in bewilderment.
The fact that Lomborg's target is the pessimistic school drives the book's omissions as much as its irrelevant inclusions. There is an effective demolition of exaggerated cancer scares, but nothing on transport congestion or on how the noise and visual impact of roads, or the expansion of housing over countryside, destroy quality of life. The section on biodiversity is focused on counting how many species survive, not on landscape and wildlife as a nourishment to man's love of beauty. A few tigers surviving in zoos, but none in the wild, would count as a species survival on this basis, and therefore not a problem. And while Lomborg sees himself as the champion of a rigorously rational homocentric approach, he fails to recognise that rising demands for environmental quality reflect the consumer preference of increasingly wealthy people. As people get richer, they care more about clean air, preserved countryside and natural beauty, precisely because they are closer to satiation on simpler material needs.
The most significant disagreement between pragmatic environmentalists and Lomborg, however, relates less to his description of trends than to his point of view on causes. On several environmental measures, in particular local pollution in developed countries, the world has improved. And many of the improvements depend, as Lomborg argues, on the technological advances which prosperity has fostered. But Lomborg goes further-implying that prosperity and the market economy are not just enablers of environmental improvement but close to sufficient in themselves. Pragmatic environmentalists believe that public policy interventions, responding to environmental concerns and lobbying have been vital in achieving the improvements made so far. Lomborg seeks to downplay such interventions. Yet the example he cites is bizarrely unconvincing. Anyone who lived in London, or in my case Glasgow, before the Clean Air Acts will recognise the great improvements in air quality to which Lomborg refers, but most will be bemused by his belief (on the basis of one referenced study) that the sudden, visible and smellable improvements which followed those Acts and which can be traced on Lomborg's own graph, were unrelated to them. Technology makes environmental improvement possible, markets can help achieve change cost effectively, but regulation and environmental taxes are needed to give expression to people's desires for environmental improvement and to reflect externality effects in the prices facing market participants.
Above all that is true in respect to global warming, and it is on global warming that pragmatic environmentalists have to part company completely with Lomborg. For it is in the penultimate chapter, "Global Warming," that Lomborg's polemics most seriously compromise and devalue his arguments.
Lomborg's argument is simple. Global warming is occurring and is caused at least partially by rising man-made CO2 emissions, but renewable energy technologies are likely to deliver an automatic market-driven solution from about 2050 onwards, with the maximum warming limited to an acceptable 2º to 3ºC. Policy interventions such as the Kyoto protocol are therefore unnecessary as well as very costly.
That argument could be a legitimate contribution to the climate change debate. The way Lomborg makes it is not. The chapter is biased in its tone and presentational devices. Inevitable uncertainties in scenarios for CO2 emissions and temperature change are played up to give the impression that no reasonable judgements can be made. William Nordhaus's calculations of an optimal policy response, which rest on hugely uncertain estimates of economic impacts and costs from now to infinity, are paraded as providing us with certain knowledge-"a clear standard with which to compare alternative policy approaches." More fundamentally, however, Lomborg's key arguments on both climate change risks and the costs of offsetting policies, are flawed and logically inconsistent.
Lomborg's starting point is the assessment produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2000. Rather than present a single forecast, the IPCC set out a number of scenarios for CO2 emission levels reflecting assumptions along three key dimensions-world population growth, income per capita growth, and technical and economic progress towards energy efficiency and use of renewable energy. It then commissioned climate change modelling for each of the chosen scenarios. One of the resulting scenarios is labelled "A1FI." To Lomborg (and to me) this scenario, like all the A1 scenarios, has the desirable feature of describing an increasingly prosperous world, rather than one where growth has been cut severely to avoid environmental damage. However, A1FI also assumes only a limited move away from fossil fuels: as a result it produces a temperature rise of 4.5ºC by 2100, with further rises likely thereafter-a worrying scenario since most models suggest that the harmful consequences of global warming increase rapidly as we move beyond a 2º to 3ºC rise. But Lomborg believes that A1FI ignores the potential for renewable technologies (mainly wind and solar energy) to become economic versus fossil fuels by about 2040 and argues that the alternative scenario "A1T" is more realistic. A1T suggests emissions falling steadily after 2040, with the level in the year 2100 75 per cent below a "business as usual" scenario, and lower indeed than in 1990. As a result, warming is limited to 2º to 3ºC.
All of which could be true-Lomborg's technological optimism is at least a possible result. But what Lomborg fails to stress is that the A1T assumption on population growth foresees world population peaking at below 9 billion in 2050 and falling rapidly to reach 7 billion in 2100, heading back to the world's present population level in the early 22nd century. This, as Lomborg knows but does not say, is an incredibly optimistic scenario, and one for which his own chapter on population growth gives no support, focusing instead on the UN's mid-range forecast of a world population of 10.4 billion in 2100 (about 50 per cent higher than the A1 scenario). Combining this more reasonable population assumption with Lomborg's technological optimism would produce an end of century temperature much higher than the 2.5ºC which Lomborg believes acceptable. In other words, Lomborg's "don't worry" message depends on combining an aggressively optimistic (but just possible) technological assumption with a population assumption which most experts would consider unbelievably benign. The polemical effectiveness of the chapter depends on the reader not noticing that fact.
Whatever the population assumption, however, the vital long-term issue remains, as Lomborg says, whether and when renewable energy sources will substitute for fossil fuels, and whether we should leave the transition to market forces alone or seek to speed it along with policy interventions. Apart from a little nudge via increased R&D support, Lomborg believes policy interventions unnecessary and condemns Kyoto as making only a minimal difference to the likely temperature increase at an enormous economic cost. His argument, however, is based on a blatant logical inconsistency and on an obtuse refusal to think through the likely economic and technological consequences of a Kyoto style agreement.
Kyoto, Lomborg claims, will make only a minimal difference to total emissions and temperatures, since it doesn't cover the developing countries. As a result, his chart shows a Kyoto-influenced world relentlessly increasing its emission levels to 18 billion tons in 2100, only slightly below a business-as-usual level of 21 billion. Since, however, his preferred no-intervention scenario (A1T) has emissions falling quite naturally to 5m tons, this is nonsense. He could still argue that Kyoto implementation would improve the situation only slightly versus A1T, but he cannot argue that a Kyoto-influenced world will produce emissions far above his preferred scenario. Nor are his high estimates of the costs of Kyoto consistent with his technological optimism. Kyoto, he claims, will cost 2 per cent of OECD countries' GDP by 2050, growing further to 4 per cent by 2100. The increased burden beyond 2050 cannot exist, however, if Lomborg is right in his optimistic assumption that renewables will be substituting for fossil fuels, even without policy intervention, from 2040 onwards. Kyoto-style intervention could logically be unnecessary because technological development and free market prices are in any case going to drive rapid substitution. It could alternatively entail a very large (though arguably unavoidable) cost if technology does not come so quickly to our aid. But Lomborg's assertion that Kyoto is both unnecessary and hugely expensive even beyond 2050 is a logical nonsense.
In fact, Kyoto is neither unnecessary nor unacceptably costly. Instead, it is an intelligent first step, and one whose most important effect will be to accelerate the technology developments on which Lomborg's optimistic scenario depends. Lomborg refuses to see this, drawing a sharp distinction between Kyoto's policy of "limiting" carbon emissions and his preferred approach of substituting renewables for fossil fuels. But he must know that this is a meaningless distinction. Replacing fossil fuel sources with renewables is not an alternative to "limiting" emissions, it is one of the ways by which limitation could be achieved. If Kyoto had sought to limit energy consumption rather than CO2 emissions, Lomborg's distinction would be a real one; but it seeks no such thing. It sets initially modest targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions since that is the only way to offset climate change, but leaves it to individual countries to design the measures used to achieve that objective. If countries are sensible, they will implement it making maximum use of price signals-increasing the tax-inclusive price of fossil fuels, modestly at first, but with clear commitments to significantly higher prices later. All that we know about the power of market mechanisms suggests that this will result in a cost of adjustment well below what simple econometric models suggest. The new price signal will unleash a myriad of changes-in consumer behaviour, product design, locational decisions, medium-term product development and long-term research-which no planning system could imagine and which modelling cannot predict. The stimulus of Kyoto will therefore bring forward and make more certain the economic cross-over between fossil fuels and renewables, both because of the direct effect of higher fossil fuel prices and through the technological progress unleashed.
Seen in this light, the criticism that Kyoto does not cover developing countries is largely irrelevant. A later global agreement is desirable, but the only politically feasible first step is an agreement of the developed countries, which now emit four times as much CO2 per capita as the developing world. Even without subsequent global agreement, the technological development stimulated by Kyoto will accelerate increases in energy efficiency and renewables substitution in the developing world too. Calculations of Kyoto's impact which make no allowances for this accelerated substitution are pointless polemics of which a supposedly market-friendly writer should be ashamed. Lomborg's technological optimism, combined with rising prosperity, is an attractive outlook: Kyoto will make it more likely.
Indeed it is odd that Lomborg himself does not argue a variant of that case. It would have been possible to combine a great deal of his book with a more balanced discussion of global warming, avoiding the glaring inconsistencies between, for instance, his reasonable population scenario in chapter three and his hyper-optimism in chapter 24, or between his bullish fossil fuel reserve and cost forecasts in chapter 11 and his global warming assumption that fossil fuels will rapidly become uneconomic. A work of environmental pragmatism would have combined Lomborg's trenchant debunking of scare-stories with a recognition of real environmental problems. It is interesting to wonder why Lomborg did not write that book, and legitimate to do so since Lomborg himself questions his opponents' motives as well as their logic.
The answer must partly be the motivation of any author to set out a strong and controversial line-a full-scale assault is more newsworthy than a balanced account and, partly as a result of the book, Lomborg has become an academic star advising governments and corporations. But the answer also appears to lie in Lomborg's fixation with the exaggerated claims of some ecologists. Any overstatement of the environmentalist's case seems to raise in him a righteous anger, sometimes with close to laughable results. He seems incapable of accepting that green lobby groups operate in a market for public attention, in competition with companies selling their wares and business lobby groups pursuing their self-interest, and that if green lobbyists eschewed the techniques of emotional appeal and, yes, sometimes slanted presentation, which companies and business lobbyists use, they would be unfairly disadvantaged. He is worried about the power of the "finely tuned PR departments" of environmental lobby groups, but uninterested in the larger, slicker PR departments of big corporations. His account of the political dynamics of the global warming debate manages to mention the lobbying power of the windmill manufacturers, while omitting any reference to oil companies. As someone who has played a reasonably senior role in business lobbying at British and European levels, including on environmental issues, I have to admit that the sinister clout of the windmill manufacturers passed me by.
More fundamentally, what raises Lomborg's ire is the hidden agenda of the anti-modernists, and here he makes a legitimate and important point. As his discussion of the IPCC's conclusions reveals, some environmentalists do not want to make increased material prosperity compatible with environmental improvement. They therefore use global warming fears as a rhetorical ally in an anti-growth and anti-free market argument. Kyoto to them is the first blow against the idea of ever-increasing material prosperity and because they present it like that, Lomborg feels the need to oppose it. His own figures reveal how little he needs to. Even on his own pessimistic assumptions about Kyoto-induced cost, what we face is the possibility that between now and 2050 the developed world might grow just 0.04 per cent per annum slower then it otherwise would, attaining some time in November 2050 the prosperity level we would otherwise achieve in January: a prosperity level roughly three times today's. And if his technological optimism is right, no further sacrifice of growth would be required beyond 2050. The dream of the anti-modernist pessimists that our response to global warming will require the end of growth will be disappointed: the scare story of US business lobbyists that Kyoto is unaffordable will prove to be as wildly exaggerated as arguments against previous environmental improvements. There is a very good case to be made for a pragmatic, market-friendly and rational environmentalism. It is a pity that Bj?omborg does not make it.
