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Skeptical Environmentalist Debates Critics Broadcast on Saturday 13/10/01 Summary: The book, The Skeptical Environmentalist has environmentalists and scientists from around the world fuming. Danish author, Bjorn Lomborg, accuses the environmental movement of making false claims about the state of the world, which he calls the 'litany'. Earthbeat brings Bjorn Lomborg face to face with outspoken critics from three continents, in an extended debate. Transcript: Alexandra de Blas: Hello, welcome to Earthbeat, I’m Alexandra de Blas. Climate change led the way as the environment entered the Federal election campaign this week. On Tuesday, Opposition leader, Kim Beazley, announced that Labor would ratify the Kyoto Protocol next year. But Environment Minister, Senator Hill says this would be irresponsible, as it’s impossible to assess the cost to the Australian economy before the rules of the Protocol are finalised. Earthbeat will bring you an in-depth analysis of the key environmental policies as we move closer to polling day. But now, to a climate change controversy of a different kind: The Skeptical Environmentalist. THEME MUSIC Alexandra de Blas: Well very few books have raised the ire of environmentalists as much as Bjorn Lomborg’s recent book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The media love it, and it’s had major write-ups in The Economist, The Guardian and The New York Times. But scientists across the globe are passionately refuting its claims and emails from an extraordinary list of who’s who in the environment movement have been darting back and forth across the planet. Professor Lomborg accuses the environment movement of making false claims about the state of the world, which he calls ‘the litany’. Claims like the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat, that forests are disappearing and species are rapidly becoming extinct. Lomborg argues that the environment is actually improving, more people are better fed and that there are more pressing issues to spend our money on than mitigating climate change. To find out more about The Skeptical Environmentalist I’ve invited the author, Bjorn Lomborg, and critics from three continents to discuss the book with me now. Alexandra de Blas: Bjorn Lomborg is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and he’s joining me from Los Angeles where he’s currently promoting his book. Welcome Bjorn Lomborg. Bjorn Lomborg: Thank you. Alexandra de Blas: Also in California, Stephen Schneider is a world authority on climate change and Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change with the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. Welcome, Stephen Schneider. Stephen Schneider: Thank you, glad to be here. Alexandra de Blas: Dr Tom Burke is in our London studios and he is a member of the Executive Committee of Green Alliance, one of the leading environmental organisations in the UK. He’s also a former Director of Friends of the Earth and is currently an environmental adviser to Rio Tinto and BP. Thanks for joining us, Tom. Tom Burke: Hello. Alexandra de Blas: And here in Australia, Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University. He was the inaugural winner of the Prime Minister’s Environment Prize last year. He chaired the Advisory Council that produced the first National State of the Environment Report and he’s a former head of the Commission for the Future. Welcome to you all, and thanks for joining me on Earthbeat today. Bjorn Lomborg, you’re a Professor of Statistics in Denmark; what led you to write a book that fundamentally challenges the state of the world as environmentalists know it? Bjorn Lomborg: Well Alexandra, let me just give you the short story. Basically I read a claim by the now late Julian Simon, an economist at Maryland, where he claimed that things were actually getting better, and I said, ‘No way.’ I’m an old Greenpeace member and I thought that can’t be true, but he said one thing which I always tell my students in statistics. He also said, ‘Well, go check your data for yourself.’ And I figured that would be worth actually challenging, so I got some of my best students together and we decided we were going to debunk him, just showing this as right-wing American propaganda. As it turned out, a lot of what he said was actually true, not all of it, but a lot of it was true, and that was what really led me first to write some articles in Denmark and it turned into a big discussion in Denmark, which led to the Danish book and now this international book. Alexandra de Blas: Well you’re not an environmental scientist, and you haven’t done any work in the field; what’s the basis for your argument that the environment is actually getting better? Bjorn Lomborg: Basically I try to ask the different question. A lot of people in the environmental movement will tell us what is the problem in this issue, which is fine, that’s what we want science to do, to make society aware of where are the problems. So what I do is try to take the best statistical evidence that we have and actually ask the question, So overall, on all the major important issues in the world, how are things going, are they going in the right direction or in the wrong direction? That’s typically not the question that’s being asked. And of course when we start to say ‘Well maybe things are actually going better’. Then we can also start to ask the other very important question which is the political science economics question, namely, ‘So, of all the different problems that still remain, which ones are the most important, which ones are the ones we should actually deal with first?’ We need to have a prioritisation, there’s lots of stuff to do out there, but we need to deal with first things first. Alexandra de Blas: OK, well I’d like to now go to our other guests, and for you to give me a brief assessment of the book. Tom Burke in London, you’ve criticised Bjorn Lomborg in The Guardian newspaper, you’ve also written a damning paper called ‘Ten Pinches of Salt’; what are you main concerns with the publication? Tom Burke: Well one of my first concerns I should pick up, I’ve actually talked to Greenpeace, and they are very clear that they have no record of Bjorn Lomborg as a member, as an activist member. Now he may have contributed money to Greenpeace, lots of people have, but you know, before you call yourself an environmentalist you have to do a little bit more than contribute money. I say that because it’s quite important here to establish the test of people’s veracity. And Professor Lomborg is really challenging the veracity not just of a few members of environmental groups but of really a vast array of scientists around the world, and the issue is, who’s telling the truth? He sets out in his book the claim to be telling you the real truth about the environment, by implication everybody else is telling falsehoods. Alexandra de Blas: So Bjorn Lomborg, you say you’ve been a paid-up member of Greenpeace? Bjorn Lomborg: I’ve been a member, I’ve never been out in a rubber boat, I’m a suburban kind of Greenpeace member, your stereotypical person who contributes and nothing else. Tom Burke: That doesn’t make you an environmentalist Bjorn, I mean that would make me a statistician because I’ve done some calculations. Alexandra de Blas: OK, well Stephen Schneider at Stanford, you’ve written extensively in the field of climate change and this book’s got you and your colleagues red hot under the collar. What are you so upset about? Stephen Schneider: Well for those of us who in my case have spent about three decades working with thousands of scientists and policy analysts and others, trying to figure out something about whether the future that we face, not just environmentally but also a whole range of other issues that we call sustainable environmental development, we end up with a maddening degree of uncertainty. We end up with scenarios which, if we’re lucky, give us mild outcomes and we end up with scenarios that, if we’re unlucky, give us catastrophic outcomes. We fight amongst ourselves bitterly about the relative likelihoods of these, and have virtually no agreement and now all of a sudden I see in The Skeptical Environmentalist, the sub-title: ‘Measuring the Real State of the World’, and the person who’s a non-contributor to the debate has selected largely out of context the happier news. He’s very confident that we’re not going to get the more serious outcomes, a confidence that’s not based on any significant analysis by him, or any properly balanced citation from the literature. Alexandra de Blas: Ian Lowe here in Australia where both farmers and environmentalists agree that we need to spend $65-billion in the next decade to repair the country, how do you see Bjorn Lomborg’s thesis that the environment is in fact getting better? Ian Lowe: Well I think Bjorn is correct to remind us that some environmentalists, like some politicians or some industrialists or some economists, sometimes select sources to make a political argument, and he is right to point out that some indicators of environmental quality are getting better. But I think the unfortunate thing is that the book appears to sweep on from that to argue that all environmental indicators are getting better when most of the major problems are getting worse. Population is increasing, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, rangelands are deteriorating, temperatures are rising, plant and animal species are disappearing. And most fundamentally I think, I was very annoyed with his conclusion that essentially it’s imperative that we focus primarily on the economy, a sort of environmental version of the trickle-down effect, that if only we get rich enough, all the problems will automatically be solved, whereas what we know to our cost in Australia is that some of the things we’ve done in the past to get rich, have produced irreversible deterioration of the natural environment. Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, how do you feel about the fact that many of the world’s leading environmental experts think that your work is inconsistent, inaccurate at times, and guilty of the very flaws that you criticise others for? Bjorn Lomborg: Well I can only say I’m happy for the discussion, and I really think that it’s all important, and I think we can take some of these issues up in this forum. Of course, this has to be a work based on facts. On the other hand, I also have to say, when Stephen Schneider tells us there’s a maddening degree of uncertainty. Well the point is here, that no matter what kind of model you take, when we talk about global warming, we have a situation where what we can do is dramatically little, however at a very high cost, and that cost, I argue, we could spend much, much better, and that’s the main point. Now that is not a question which Stephen Schneider is particularly well-founded at discussing. This is not a science issue on global warming, this is the issue of economics of global warming, which the IPCC has now actually decided not to take any more. So in that sense, it really is an important issue and it seems to me to be an issue which is rather uncontroversial, that we need to think about. Is it actually a good idea to do something where the cure will be more costly than the original affliction? Tom Burke: Stephen Schneider has quite correctly pointed out that we have a lot of difficulty modelling the climate. Compared to modelling the economy, modelling the climate is fairly straightforward, and compared to our models of the climate, our models of the economy are far less reliable guides to public policy. At least we can go out there with our model of the climate and make some tests and some attempts to validate it empirically. Our models of the economy are all over the place. Ian Lowe: I wanted to make a similar point, Alexandra, that when you compare models that attempt to work out the cost of climate change, they vary hugely, depending on what assumptions they make. But most of the models that Bjorn has accepted uncritically, make no attempt to quantify the benefits of responding to climate change, they only calculate the costs, and indeed in his book, he airily dismisses the idea that there could be ‘no regrets measures’ quoting Nordhaus, comparing it with a restaurant where you paid to eat. But we know that there are any number of examples of ‘no regrets measures’, or measures that are revenue positive. Dupont have halved their emissions and improved their profitability; BP Amoco in Australia are proposing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by measures that are revenue positive. The point is that there are a huge number of cost effective things to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and of course we should be doing those before we undertake hugely expensive things, but the modelling that Bjorn quotes simply takes no account of those ‘no regrets measures’. Bjorn Lomborg: But naturally I do say that there are those ‘no regret measures’, and naturally we should do those. However most economists are very wary of the argument that there should be free lunches lying around which companies are not currently picking up. And we also have to realise, even just to do Kyoto, we need to cut our emissions about 30% from what they would otherwise have been, and that is not just a small amount. Dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are just simply not validated by the integrated models. Stephen Schneider: Let me comment on this, since I was also characterised as not being involved in the economic modelling which is actually false. I’ve been going to the Energy Modelling Forum for the last ten years, I’ve published dozens of papers in this area. I don’t want to get into that and I work for it in IPCC. What I want to do is show you that, not only does Bjorn Lomborg not know my credentials which is irrelevant to your listeners, but the modelling that he does is elliptical and out of balance with the community. Because, he cites one set, which is the neo classical growth economist’s, and ignores the wide range of their critics, both in economics and at the same time, the engineering studies. This is a religious argument. So when he cites in his book on page 318 of the costs of the economy of climate policies between $3-trillion and $33-trillion he’s giving the range that comes from these simple economic models that are not well validated and which the community admits has neglected many things. Even worse, he cites the costs of climate change as something on the order of $5-trillion and says, ‘Well compare that to the $3-trillion to $33-trillion of the costs of trying to fix it, it looks like you’re not ahead in the cost benefit ratio’. It is inconceivable that anybody who has a balanced position could cite a range of costs of the economy of intervening to slow it down and then give one number for the benefits of stopping climate change and not citing that range, makes me entirely suspicious that anything you have to say about economics and policy, Bjorn, is coloured and biased in order to reach a conclusion this is a non-problem. Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, would you like to respond? Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, I’d like to ask Stephen, I mean isn’t it true though, that we did have an experiment where we tried to raise taxes, namely when the oil exporting countries, the OPEC actually raised the price of oil back in ’73, and in the early ‘80s again? We had actually a situation where we saw what happened then, we’d got a dramatic decrease in economic growth, and that is exactly what we need to do if we actually want to cut carbon emissions dramatically, and that is what those macro-economic studies say. No matter what the cost is, as long as what we do with Kyoto has simply postponed warming for six years, then it changes almost nothing. Primarily what it simply does, Kyoto, is postponing the problems for six years, and that’s…(interrupted loudly by other panellists)… Alexandra de Blas: OK, OK Tom Burke. Tom Burke: Well first of all, that’s just a distortion of Kyoto. That says what would happen if you extended - what Bjorn’s just said - If you extended the first commitment period forward indefinitely into the future. But the reason why the Kyoto process has broken up into a series of commitment periods is that everybody realised that what you would first need to agree to, would not be enough and therefore there would be a second commitment period because it was widely recognised by all of the policymakers that you had to learn as you walked through this process, and you do things step by step, precisely to avoid the kind of economic consequences that Bjorn is talking about. So he’s misrepresenting the Kyoto process. He’s simply extrapolating from one element of it, and coming to a false conclusion. Now he does that all the time, and may I make a comment on Nordhaus, and on this debate about the economics. The idea that anybody can come up with a number that will tell us what the costs, either of climate change will be, or of adapting or mitigating climate change in the current state of economic analysis, is simply farcical. Bjorn Lomborg: Tom, it actually seems a little bit to me that you would like not to have this figure out in the open. But naturally if we are making a bad policy decision, then we need to know so, and just saying that Kyoto is only a first step, and that’s true, a lot of people have started saying it’s just a symbolic act, is quite unusual really because if the first step is a bad decision, then possibly, and I mean it would be quite likely, that the other steps would also be bad decisions. And indeed that is what the cost benefit analyses indicate. So why is it that we so religiously believe that Kyoto is just simply a good thing - that we need to do something about global warming, when there’s so many other obvious issues that would be better dealt with. Tom Burke: Because Bjorn, we don’t live in an academic ivory tower where you can take the results of abstract cost benefit analyses as policymakers, and decide that you’re going to shift money around. It’s one of the faults of economists, that they think all outcomes are fungible. In the real world, all outcomes aren’t fungible. You simply can’t take money out of a pocket for addressing climate change and put it into a pocket for addressing some other problem. Good policy allows us both to feed the hungry and to deal with climate change. In fact, if we don’t deal with climate change, we won’t be able to feed the hungry in any case. Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, but I think it’s still important to point out that fulfilling Kyoto for just one year probably is the equivalent of solving the single biggest problem in the world, giving clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth. If we realise that there are more important problems that could be solved at a much less cost, then maybe we would want to redirect that. Politics is also about steering the world, and actually making good moral choices. So in that sense we need to ask those questions, and just simply saying that there’s money for both of it, is very disingenuous. I mean basically the point is that there is an incredible array of other issues that we could solve first and then perhaps get to climate change at the end. We have to ask that question, and we certainly have to be daring enough to ask it. Alexandra de Blas: Stephen Schneider, what do you think would happen if we followed the advice of Bjorn Lomborg here? Stephen Schneider: I think that we’d be looking at a significant extinction crisis where I don’t know what the number is, it’s impossible to say, this is punctuated by tremendous uncertainty. But certainly tens of percent of potential loss of species, if we had climate change more than 3-degrees say. That’s precisely the kind of advice that his ‘Everything’s-OK-be-happy-Julian-Simonesque’ views lead us to. I also think that we’d be missing the opportunity to help the developing world with sustainable development, because right now one of the few international mechanisms that’s available to get the kinds of global co-operation (and here I agree with Bjorn that we need to work on the sustainable development problem) is go to get started through the climate process. Kyoto isn’t a thing, it’s a process of negotiations among nations to try to deal with the common problems of the world, and it actually helps us to get towards the very goals you said by setting up the capacity for us to talk to each other, which eventually, as people learn to trust each other, might lead to the larger transfers of resources that are necessary to deal with the problems you suggested. Alexandra de Blas: Well you were just hearing from Stephen Schneider, who is a US climatologist. Also joining me is Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. In Australia we have energy expert Ian Lowe and Tom Burke from the Green Alliance is joining us in the UK. Tom, I’d like to bring you in again here. You’ve all been very critical of this book, but isn’t part of its power that there’s actually some truth in it and that’s why it hits a raw nerve? Environmentalists are saying the sky is going to fall in, but the environment is getting better on many fronts. There are more national parks, air quality in many cities is better; rivers like the Mersey and the Rhine have got fish in them. Modern agriculture has made incredible gains in productivity, so proportionately fewer people are going hungry. Isn’t this a message whose time has come? Tom Burke: Well it’s not a new message, Alexandra, I don’t think there’s anything new in saying that the story on the environment is mixed. The gains are all tactical and the losses are all strategic. So we have made some gains in river quality in Europe, nobody’s argued about that. We’ve made some gains in air quality, nobody’s argued about that. Of course we’ve made gains and they’re welcome. Partly of course we’ve made those gains because people in the environmental community have raised the alarm. Now have people, when they’ve been raising the alarm, sometimes exaggerated? Yes, of course they have. So attacking people for exaggeration misses the point. The argument with Bjorn’s book is not that he raises some points, most of which are not very new, but that he goes on to say that he’s telling you the real truth. Well he’s not telling you the real truth, he’s telling you his view of what he’s assembled from all of this. Now most of the people who’ve actually spent their lives working on these things don’t agree with his view. Now what I do share with Bjorn is the idea that people want to go on getting better off. The point is, that the 6-billion of us who are now getting better off are getting better off in ways that we can’t sustain indefinitely into the future. I don’t believe that we’re in a zero sum game. I believe we can meet the needs of not just six but the 9-billion of us who’ll soon be on the planet, for resources to support a decent standard of life, but not if we go on doing it in the ways that we’re currently doing it. That’s the thrust of the environmentalist argument, not a sort of abstract question of whether there is or isn’t a problem. Bjorn Lomborg: Why is that we can’t go on? Why is it that we’re not going to be able to sustain our way of life? Tom Burke: Because the current ways of doing things undermine the productivity of croplands, rangelands, forest lands, fresh waters, oceans and the atmosphere which are the underpinning of our whole economy. Everything in our economy that does not come from fossil fuels and non-fossil minerals, comes out of those goods and services supplied by those six biogeophysical systems. We’re degrading at an increasing rate the productivity of those systems. Very simple proposition: if you degrade the productivity of those systems then you undermine the productivity of the economy. Ian Lowe: That was the point of the Global Change Science conference in Amsterdam which I spoke to you about three months ago, and this wasn’t a group of economists or environmentalists, it was 1700 of the world’s top scientists working on global change issues. And, they concluded that we’re engaged in a dangerous experiment, that things are clearly getting worse, and that we need to change our policies or we’re in danger of producing irreversible changes to the world’s natural systems. Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, how do you respond to a grouping of scientists like the one who put forward the Amsterdam Declaration? Bjorn Lomborg: Well basically you have to look at, which is what I try to do, look at the facts, and look at the best models we have, predicting what is actually going to happen into the future. And we hear about ‘Oh, we’re polluting the oceans’. Well actually we don’t seem to be doing so. The UN Declaration is that they’re still so vast that we haven’t even, I mean we can find trace amounts of pollutions, but they don’t actually affect the oceans, and we actually are fishing close to the maximal limit of what we can do from the oceans. Yes, we could press out a little more, and we should get better regulations, no doubt about that, but we need to get a feel for how big is that problem. Well it’s probably around 1%, or 0.1% actually of the total outcome that we get from agriculture. So it’s a very small problem, whereas in agriculture we actually seem to be able to feed ever more people, ever better. And it does not seem as if soil erosion is going to be this big problem that people would like to make it into. So we have to ask, ‘Why is it we can’t live this way?’ We’ve been told that we keep on polluting both the soil and the atmosphere and the ocean and also the coastal waters, what we have to ask, ‘What kind of size of these problems is this?’ I try to go through that in the book, and say again, well take for instance, food. It does not seem as if we would not be able to feed ever more people, despite the fact that ‘Yes’, we will be trying to get more yields out of every single hectare. Stephen Schneider: We’re not arguing whether the world is incapable of producing enough food to feed people, I think that we probably could make a strong argument that it is. But the question is, what does it do to the ecological base of the planet in the process of doing that, and will we be distributing the food in a way that gets to the people? There is already enough food produced on the planet to prevent starvation and yet there are many people living perhaps a billion what we would consider reasonable nutritional levels. This has to do with politics in a sense, more than other things, but degraded environments add to that problem. And when you add the degradation of the environment on top of an already difficult social and political problem, it makes it worse. So we cannot look at global aggregate numbers for food and come away happy any more than we can look at global aggregate numbers for ocean pollution, because the biggest problems are in coastal reefs and other areas, so you can’t just average every cubic metre in and say the average load is low, you’ve got to look at the hotspots and the pressure points. And that’s the main thing that those of us in environmental science focus on so that we can avoid the catastrophic potential that comes when those hotspots are degraded. Bjorn Lomborg: And naturally, the question here is, ‘So where should we focus?’ Experience tells us what really matters is if you give private property rights and if you give people enough money, then they actually do have time and care to worry about it. If they have an empty stomach they don’t care about the future, and there’s good reason to believe that we will be able to feed those people in the future, even the most pessimistic's ambition is a developing world as rich or even richer than we are today in 2100. Then naturally they will also be inclined to be protective of the environment when we get there. Should we get people there or should we go in and say 'No, we’d rather have more butterflies than fewer hungry children in Ethiopia'. And that is a real trade-off. Alexandra de Blas: Ian Lowe. Ian Lowe: I just wanted to make the point that to say the problems will be solved by greater wealth and private property rights is economic dogma, that’s not science. There’s no convincing evidence that greater wealth necessarily leads to environmental improvement. Even Bjorn’s figures show that in some cases greater wealth makes the environment better, in others it clearly makes it worse, it all depends on the starting point and what options people have. It’s just not true that you solve the problem by privatising it and by making people wealthier. Alexandra de Blas: Stephen Schneider, you were very disappointed with Cambridge University Press for publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist, isn’t that just a case of the Old Boys’ Club getting their nose out of joint because there’s a new voice with a very different message? Stephen Schneider: Well if it were a new voice with a very different message, then I think that would be a valid criticism. What we resent is having him cite, often out of context, the very caveats that are written by the people who write the papers that he attacks, and then recycles them as if he invented them. And that’s the thing we resent. And, why I was angry at Cambridge University Press for, wasn’t just the publication of the book, but the way it was done. It was published from the social and political science part of the shop, yet this book requires a tremendous amount of natural science, physical and biological sciences, upon which a lot of these conclusions about social science are based. And what Cambridge should have done, in my opinion, and I’ve held them they’re quite derelict for this, they should have reviewers across all three of their groups, the physical, biological and social, so they could have found out whether the grounding in the various other disciplines was a balanced treatment - which I would argue was not even remotely, on the natural science. And I think had they done that, they would have made a very different conclusion about publishing this book. Alexandra de Blas: Bjorn Lomborg? Bjorn Lomborg: Well I’m glad to say that he thinks he hears nothing new, and I don’t understand why he would actually say that I claimed that I’d invented it. No, I only cite all the other statistics and I cite the basic statistics from the best places we have on earth. Yes, I’m a political scientist, economist, statistician. Yes we do actually look at things in a different way. I asked the question which is fundamental to democracy and to our prioritisation process, ‘So overall, how are things going?’ A lot of these people would really like to sit on the debate and say ‘We have the right answer’. Well no, they have the right understanding in many of those models, but the basic question of what should we do, how are things basically going, needs also to come out there, and that I think has not been coming out from science. But certainly we need to get that overview of the world and that is what I’ve tried to provide. Alexandra de Blas: On that note, I’d like to bring the discussion to a close. I’ve been speaking with Bjorn Lomborg, Professor of Statistics at Aarhus University, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Stephen Schneider is Professor of Biology and Global Change at Stanford University in California; Tom Burke is with the Green Alliance in the United Kingdom, and he’s an adviser to BP and Rio Tinto and he was in London. And Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University, and he’s been speaking to us from Perth today. Well thank you all very much for joining me on Earthbeat today. All: Thank you. Alexandra de Blas: Today’s program was produced by Natasha Mitchell with John Diamond behind the studio controls. I’m Alexandra de Blas, thanks for your company. Guests on this program:
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