Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish economic statistician and political scientist by background. He is currently also an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and a director of the Danish Consensus Center, a group of economists who create, or contrive, cost-benefit analyses of climate disruption and possible solutions.
Back in 1998, Lomborg wrote a book in Danish that came out in English in 2001 called The Skeptical Environmentalist. It thrilled the climate-change deniers and thrust Lomborg into international fame and controversy. Even though Cambridge University Press published it, professional climate scientists debunked the book and strongly criticized Cambridge for not doing a better peer review of the book's contents. (See, e.g., Wikipedia's article on The Skeptical Environmentalist.) I note from the above article that Lomborg likes the ideas of endless-growth economic theorist and free-market environmentalist Julian Simon, who claimed there is no global population problem. (See, e.g., Wikipedia's article on Julian Lincoln Simon.)
Having suffered a thorough debunking in 2001, why is Lomborg now back with many of the same arguments in a new book, Cool It: A Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Climate Change, and also, as of November 12, with a “documentary” movie of the same basic name?
I am interested in learning what wealthy conservatives, and/or what energy corporations or fronts thereof, might have financed this movie.
The New York Times review of November 12, 2010 says the film "[i]s planted firmly in the middle ground between end-is-nigh panic and drill-baby-drill denial." (See, movies.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/movies/12cool.html?src=twrhp.)
Being in the "middle ground" is a cautious, feel-good phrase that makes me suspicious. Why? Because I have read the reviews debunking Lomberg's earlier book and concluded very quickly that he is simply a shill for the idol of narrow-focused so-called economic efficiency and the same corporate interests that have poured millions of dollars into deceptively creating doubt in the public mind on the scientific consensus about climate disruption.
Lomborg may support some good ideas, like a carbon tax, as was advanced several years ago in the UK's official Stern Report. He also apparently supports US aid to developing countries to help them reduce greenhouse gases. Fine, but these are not ideas that he originated. He may also be right in criticizing corporate "green-washing" and in saying that florescent light bulbs and hybrid automobiles are not "the solution" to climate disruption -- as if any sane person actually thinks they are.
In general, I am very skeptical of Lomborg and of his and other economists' efforts at doing a "cost-benefit" analysis of varying degrees of climate disruption -- as if the biosphere is some linear set of processes that we can finely tune. Whose costs and whose benefits are they calculating? Who gives them the right to "calculate," as if objectively, how many non-human species, for example, human population growth and its expanding footprint on Earth can sacrifice and ethically exterminate in the self-interest of those who benefit from growth? The current figure of annual species loss puts it as high as 140,000, and people who have actually bothered to study the alleged benefits of economic growth tell us that -- guess what! -- it is the rich, not the poor, who disproportionately benefit.
To start to get a feel for Lomborg's latest effort to capitalize on public ignorance, let's take a look at four excerpts from Wikipedia's article on Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.
(1) The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel offers a critique of Cool It which traces Lomborg’s many references and tests their authority and substance. What Friel finds is "misrepresentation of academic research, misquotation of data, reliance on studies irrelevant to the author’s claims and citation of sources that seem not to exist."
(2) He [Friel] therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised as an academic." I don't want to be as trusting as the reviewers who praised Lomborg's scholarship without (it seems) bothering to check his references, so rather than taking Friel at his word just as they took Lomborg at his, I've done my best to do that checking. Although Friel engages in some bothersome overkill, overall his analysis is compelling. —Sharon Begley, Newsweek.
(3) Economist Frank Ackerman of Tufts University and the Stockholm Environment Institute wrote a review of Lomborg's book. In it, Ackerman criticized Lomborg for his views on the economics of climate change, including the costs of the Kyoto Protocol and the use of cost-benefit analysis.
(4) IPCC lead author Brian O'Neill wrote a mixed review of Cool It, concluding: “[...] Bjorn Lomborg is like the Oliver Stone of climate change. He has written a book that sets out to support a certain point of view, and, unless you are an expert, you will never know which facts are correct and appropriately used and which are not. You might not be aware that large (and crucial) chunks of the story are skipped altogether. But like a Stone movie, it is a well-told tale and raises some questions that are worth thinking about. So if you are going to read only one book on climate, don’t read this one. But if you are going to read ten, reading Lomborg may be worthwhile."
Given the results of the US mid-term elections, Lomborg is undoubtedly looking forward to a financially successful career of helping "middle ground" Tea Party legislators waste America’s and the world’s precious political time and energies by trying to "debunk" climate science at US House and Senate hearings chaired now by Republican obstructionists. This will again set back any progress that could have been made during the Obama administration on the climate issue, which in turn will push the global system only ever more close to climate tipping points.
Cool It's movie trailer blames certain environmentalists (like Al Gore) for the “hysteria” that supposedly surrounds discussion of climate disruption. The really frightening problem is not, however, just climate disruption. The really frightening problem is that climate disruption is only one of many global problems, all of which tend to synergize the others. Taking a narrow, "don't get alarmed" focus on climate disruption alone, as if it be some kind of isolatable part of a simple machine, is itself a form of denial of the seriousness of the total, interconnected, unsustainable situation facing humanity and the biosphere.
The film promotes Lomborg as having "bright ideas." I'll be interested to see just what these "bright ideas" actually are, or if they are simply more of the same techno-optimist, cornucopian, free-market environmental bull shit that fits into the interests of the corporate Moloch and that so easily dupes an uncritical and politically brain-dead public.
John Dale
