ten pinches of salt a reply to Bjorn Lomborg Tom Burke “green alliance… the author 2 Tom Burke CBE is a member of the Executive Committee of Green Alliance. Currently an environmental adviser to Rio Tinto and BP and a member of the Council of English Nature, he was previously special adviser to successive Secretaries of State for the Environment. He is a former director of Green Alliance, and of Friends of the Earth. ten pinches of salt Design by Upstream Edited by Rebecca Willis Published August 2001 Green Alliance Green Alliance is one of the UK’s foremost environmental organisations. An independent charity, its mission is to promote sustainable development by ensuring that the environment is at the heart of decision-making. It works with senior people in government, parliament, business and the environmental movement to encourage new ideas, dialogue and constructive solutions. Green Alliance 40 Buckingham Palace Road London SW1W 0RE tel: 020 7233 7433 fax: 020 7233 7433 [email protected] www.green-alliance.org.uk The Green Alliance Trust is a registered charity number 1045395. Company limited by guarantee, register number 3037633. contents Introduction: ten pinches of salt 3 Professor invents caricature 4 Unoccupied position successfully stormed 5 Dead dragon slain – again! 6 Did he say that? 7 Simon says 8 ‘Let them eat cake’ 9 ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’ 11 ‘Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly’ 12 Cool views 13 First stone thrown? 15 3 Introduction: ten pinches of salt ‘The Sceptical Environmentalist’, by Professor Bjorn Lomborg, is published by the Cambridge University Press this week. Professor Lomborg is a statistician and political scientist and, by his own assertion, an environmentalist. ten pinches of salt The book has received widespread advance notice in the press - a half page article in the Observer; an invited essay in the Economist; a series of three articles by the author in the Guardian and additional articles in both the Evening Standard and the New York Times. Professor Lomborg’s argument is that ‘environmentalists’ are responsible for creating a widely held illusion that the ‘environment is in poor shape here on Earth.’They have accomplished this result by the repetition of a series of false propositions he calls ‘the Litany’. He sets out the Litany on page four: “this briefing ‘The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever offers ten more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers – we kill off more than 40,000 each year.The forests are disappearing, fish ‘pinches of salt’ stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying. to bear in mind We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying as you read the the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process.The world’s 352 pages and ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limits of viability, and the 2,930 footnotes” limits to growth are becoming apparent.’ The repetition of this Litany combines with four other factors to cause ‘a disjunction between perception and reality’. These four factors are: lopsided scientific research; the need of environmental groups to generate funds; the media’s preoccupation with bad news and ‘poor individual perception’.Taken together, the Litany and these four factors lead to ‘faulty judgements’ in the allocation of resources, the most significant example of which, as least as judged by page length, is climate change. In the Professor’s view these ‘environmental exaggerations’ make us ‘scared…..and more likely to spend our resources and attention solving phantom problems while ignoring real and pressing (possibly non- environmental) issues.’ This briefing offers ten considerations, the ‘pinches of salt’, to bear in mind as you read the 352 pages and 2,930 footnotes. 1. Professor invents caricature 4 No major environmental organisation anywhere in the world subscribes to the views outlined in Professor Lomborg’s Litany.This might explain why the references used to support this assertion come from two magazines and a pair of science fiction writers. Science fiction writers and magazine editors are, of course, entitled to their opinions and are fair game for criticism, but ten pinches of salt they can hardly be taken to be representative of an environmental community with some tens of millions of professional and volunteer members and a vast “no major array of informational outputs – outputs that could readily have been surveyed to discover what today’s ‘environmentalists’ actually think. As a statistician, environmental Professor Lomborg has the skills to have done so. organisation What is an influential idea within the environmental community is the idea that there are anywhere in the limits to the extent to which we can degrade biological systems and still go on benefiting from world subscribes the goods and services they offer.There is a wide consensus, not just within the environmental to the views community, but also within governments and inter- governmental organisations, that the ecological outlined in foundations of the economy are being degraded in an increasing number of places, beyond the point Professor at which it is economically or biologically possible to replace that lost productivity with inputs of fossil fuels or non-fossil minerals.This is why 124 Lomborg’s nations agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that the world must make a transition to sustainable Litany” development. It may be that Professor Lomborg, like many other propagandists, has exaggerated for effect. This is a much used literary device and is, generally, well understood by most readers. But its use is, to say the least, somewhat odd in a book that rounds quite so aggressively on others for deploying the same device. 5 2. Unoccupied position successfully stormed Professor Lomborg devotes 13 pages to demonstrating that ‘we are not having an energy crisis’. He is right. It is true that we are not having an energy crisis. What is not true is that ‘environmentalists’ think that we are having an energy crisis.To support his belief that an energy crisis is part of the Litany, the Professor cites a CNN report and a magazine called E ten pinches of salt magazine. He does not cite an environmental organisation or even a leading environmental personality as believing in an energy resource crisis, for the simple reason that none do. Professor Lomborg has waged a powerful attack “in the early 1970s, on a position that no serious person in the environmental world holds. His many environmentalists success is guaranteed, but his purpose did believe in an energy is a mystery. There was a period in the early 1970s resource crisis, but when many environmentalists did believe in an energy resource crisis, they were hardly alone. but they were hardly alone. Just about every government, business and Just about every media outlet in the world also believed that we would soon run out government, business of oil. It was actually leading environmental thinkers who led the counter-challenge, arguing and media outlet in the persuasively that we had all the energy resources we could ever need, world did too” but we were not using the right technologies to convert them into services useful to people.This case was first set out by Amory Lovins in his book, ‘Soft Energy Paths’, published when Professor Lomborg was 11 years old. It was derided at the time for proposing that energy efficiency improvements and technology changes would reduce global demand for fossil fuels well below what was then projected. Global primary energy demand only reached his ‘soft path’ level in the year 2000. The only people that have argued strongly that there is an energy resource crisis of any kind in recent times have been the President and Vice-President of the United States and their allies. Opinion polls suggest that they have not yet managed to persuade their fellow Americans that they are correct.The current evidence from the movement of key prices is that the American people are right. 3. Dead dragon slain – again! 6 Environmentalists do not believe that ‘natural resources are running out’. There has been no such unqualified statement from major environmental organisations individually or collectively, nor, as far as I can recall in any influential environmental book or journal, in the past twenty years.The Club of Rome did make this argument in 1972, and did indeed attract ten pinches of salt considerable attention to it for a few years. But even they had begun to modulate this position by 1974. Paul Erlich did make, and lose, his famous wager with Julian Simon.This tells you that whilst Erlich knew a lot “in so far as there about ecology he knew somewhat less about economics, a fault he has in common with much is any concern of the human race. It is hard to see what is gained in 2001 by resurrecting a long dead argument only with things to kill it all over again. ‘running out’ in It is a common mistake, often made by environmentalists, to argue too quickly from the the contemporary particular to the general. In so far as there is any concern with things ‘running out’ in the discussion of contemporary discussion of environmental and resource issues, it is biological not mineral resources that are in focus.The term ‘natural environmental resources’ does of course cover both, but it is clear from the author’s claim that ‘energy and other and resource natural resources have become more abundant’, and from the other evidence he cites in his book, issues, it is that what he actually has in mind are mineral resources.