Date created:22 January 2002 Last modified: 22 January 2002 Maintained by: John Quiggin John Quiggin
28 March 2002
One interesting aspect of life as an academic economist is the regular receipt of manuscripts purporting to correct the errors of mainstream economics. Quite commonly, these manuscripts come from natural scientists, including physicists and biologists, who are convinced that they can do, in their spare time, a better job than the economics profession has managed in the last 200 years.
Natural scientists must have similar feelings when they see economists who should know better rushing to endorse The Sceptical Environmentalist, a book by a social scientist, Bjorn Lomborg, which purports to show that natural scientists have got it wrong on everything from species extinction to global warming.
Lomborg's book introduces him as a political scientist and statistician with a number of international publications in the fields of game theory and computer simulation. The Web of Science database reveals that the relevant number is one. More interesting is the number of refereed publications Lomborg has produced on statistical or other scientific analysis of environmental issues Ñ zero.
One aspect of Lomborg's book, the economics of global warming. had particular interest for me. Lomborg relies heavily on the work of US economist William Nordhaus. Among serious economists who have studied this topic, Nordhaus gives some of the lowest estimates of the costs of global warming, and some of the highest estimates of the cost of doing anything about it.
As it happens, I am the author of a two-page note in the American Economic Review, pointing out a serious error in Nordhaus' work on this topic. It's not an epoch-making contribution, and there have been many other, more substantive, critiques of the Nordhaus model. Still it's two refereed pages more than Lomborg has ever published on this, or any of the topics covered in his book, and I was interested to see how he would respond to me and other critics.
The answer, of course, is that he does not respond. Lomborg ignores both criticsof Nordhaus and the work of prominent economists whose estimates of the costs of warming are higher than those of Nordhaus. According to analyses published in authoritative journals such as Nature and Scientific American, covering a wide range of issues addressed by Lomborg, this kind of selective presentation and distortion of evidence is par for the course.
The explanation of this selectivity is not hard to find. As Lomborg himself says, his book so much a new and original critique of environmentalism as a restatement of the arguments of the late Julian Simon in favour of population growth. It is supplemented by similar arguments on other topics, mainly derived from the American right.
Lomborg's reliance on right-wing US sources is even clearer in the Danish original, which is entitled The True State of the World, and is clearly indebted to The True State of the Planet by Ronald Bailey (Free Press, 1995). Bailey is an adjunct scholar with Fred Singer's Competitive Enterprise Institute, a 'non-profit public policy organization dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government' which also promotes Lomborg's work. The delays involved in translating the arguments from English to Danish and back again may account for the rather dated feel of Lomborg's treatment of many of the issues.
In summary, far from being a skeptical environmentalist, Lomborg is a credulous follower of the antienvironmentalist right. Lomborg's credulity is matched only by those who've swallowed his self-presentation as a leftist and Greenpeace member, suddenly converted to the truth.
I first heard this kind of story in Sunday School and I've heard it many times since. Sadly, I've found that converts routinely exaggerate the extent of their previous unbelief.
In Lomborg's case, there is an easy credibility check. Unlike many organisations, Greenpeace does not have 'ordinary' dues-paying members. Membership of the organisation is confined to activists engaged in Greenpeace work. 'Supporters' are invited to donate to the organisation, but cannot become members.
In a recent ABC debate, Tom Burke pointed out that, according to Greenpeace records, Lomborg has never been a member. Lomborg responded by saying he was an 'ordinary suburban member', but there is no such thing. Giving Lomborg the benefit of the doubt, we might suppose that he had at some point made donations to Greenpeace and thought he was a member.
By now, however, Lomborg has clearly been apprised of his error. Even though this claim is central to his credibility, he has not chosen to withdraw it or clarify it. His Greenpeace credentials are as bogus as the rest of his book.
Professor John Quiggin is a Senior Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council, based at the Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology.Read more articles from John Quiggin's home page
