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The hidden agenda behind the "scientific" attacks on Bjorn Lomborg's controversial new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist
ON SEPTEMBER 5 the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, sat down at a Borders bookstore in Oxford, England, to promote his controversial book.A pie was thrown in his direction. "I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face," said the perpetrator, "in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska."
It was one of the more honest attacks on Lomborg and his book. Filled with scores of charts and graphs, backed by some 2,900 endnotes and 70 pages of references, The Skeptical Environmentalist looks at a host of global environmental issues, including population growth, pollution, deforestation, and climate change. For his trouble in writing it, Lomborg has become the target of an intellectual hate campaign.
The World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute jointly warned journalists to "proceed with caution" in writing about the book. They accused Lomborg of deploying "distorted quotations, inaccurate or misleading citations, misuse of data, [and] interpretations that contradict well-established scientific work." Scientific American was vexed by Lomborg's "presumption," asserting that his analysis of the state of the global environment "is often marred by an incomplete use of data or a misunderstanding of the underlying science." In Nature, Lomborg was denounced as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
The bitter anti-Lomborg campaign reveals the hidden crisis of what we might call ideological environmentalism. Ideological environmentalism goes far beyond sensible efforts to reduce pollution or protect wilderness. It argues that the modern world fosters institutions and ideas that exploit and oppress people and degrade and destroy the environment. According to this view, the only solution to the supposedly looming ecological crisis is the sweeping, global transformation of the world's economies and political systems. The notion is neatly captured in former Vice PresidentAl Gore's demand that humanity"make the effort to save the global environment the central organizing principle of our civilization."
Unfortunately for the doomsayers, their central predictions are simply not coming due. And so their best and perhaps only defense against a dispassionate analysis of their claims has been to smear the analyst.
The environmental canon is built...