The Green Lie

INTRO RICHARD CARLETON: In the eyes of the Green movement, Bjorn Lomborg is the man who sold them out. Now, what makes the Greens so angry and Lomborg so dangerous is that he was once one of them, a passionate believer in Green views, until, he says, he found they were wrong — yes, wrong. This brilliant young university professor then produced an explosive book exposing what he calls "the great Green lie".

STORY RICHARD CARLETON: The first thing you notice about Bjorn Lomborg is that he's young, smart and for someone who's almost universally despised, he's a very nice guy. He's controversial because he's shaking the trees in the Green movement like never before, and they hate him for it. In his glorious home town, Copenhagen, Lomborg told me how the world's worst environmental fears are largely, he says, mythical. The world is hopelessly overpopulated.

RICHARD CARLETON: The hole in the ozone layer may well prove to be catastrophic?

BJORN LOMBORG: No, it was a problem, we've fixed it and it will be over in 50 years.

BJORN LOMBORG: Well, the Greens tell us we are eradicating 50 percent of all species in our lifetime. The real number is 0.7 percent.

RICHARD CARLETON: Another myth, he says, is that the world we'll leave our children will be worse than the one we inherited.

RICHARD CARLETON: Denmark is beautiful, ordered, wealthy and clean. That's the main harbour and health-wise what they're doing there is quite safe. How is it that a product of this near-perfect environment, with no experience of pollution, hunger, overpopulation, can be turning the environment debate on its head? You were yourself at one stage a Green activist.

BJORN LOMBORG: Yeah, I was carrying a Greenpeace badge and we set out to disapprove this guy I read in a magazine who said, "Things are actually getting better." I thought, "Hell no, right-wing American propaganda." So I wanted to check it out. As it turned out, a lot of what he said was actually true.

RICHARD CARLETON: Lomborg is a statistician with professorships at both American and Danish universities. His work involves combing through an eye-glazing mass of data on the real state of the world.

BJORN LOMBORG: It's not something I've made up. I mean, it's from the most respected sources — the UN, the World Bank, all the other places that we typically use for statistics.

RICHARD CARLETON: He set out his analysis in a highly controversial book The Sceptical Environmentalist and he became the toast of talk shows around the world. Some scientists were livid. They called him a parasite, an idiot. He was akin to a Holocaust denier.

INTERVIEWER: So basically you're accusing thousands of respected scientists who've spent a lifetime on their area of particular study of what, either being stupid or dishonest, which?

RICHARD CARLETON: But Lomborg is sticking to his guns. Take the issue of global warming. He agrees the world is heating up, but he says the Greens are simply fixated on this problem.

BJORN LOMBORG: If we cut carbon emissions about 30 percent in the industrialised world from what it would otherwise have been — this is the Kyoto treaty — all models show it will do virtually no good, it will basically postpone warming about six years in 2100. So the guy in Bangladesh whose house gets flooded in 2100 can wait until 2106. It's not very much good.

RICHARD CARLETON: Now this is the why the Greens loathe him. Lomborg says that trillions of dollars required to fix this problem could be far better spent.

BJORN LOMBORG: Just to give you an example, if we gave one year of Kyoto, the cost of Kyoto, to the Third World, we could solve the single biggest problem in the world. We could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth.

PETER GARRETT: This argument is a furphy; it's based on one simple study. And it is not consented to by most of the scientists around the world who know this subject well.

RICHARD CARLETON: Nobody needs introducing to Peter Garrett. It was Midnight Oil who protested the world's worst oil spill by performing outside Exxon's world headquarters in New York. Now Garrett wants the world to know that, as he sees it, voices like Bjorn Lomborg's can do great damage too.

PETER GARRETT: I mean, there's a great quote from Winston Churchill. He says a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on, and that's sort of what's happened here, but fortunately we're putting our pants on.

RICHARD CARLETON: So who are simple people like you and me to believe? We all care about the environment. We just want to do the right thing. But what is the right thing? We arranged a video conference between Copenhagen and Sydney; greenie versus heretic. Peter, let me put this proposition to you, that given the technological progress of the last century and the like, we are going to leave behind for our children a much better world than we've inherited?

PETER GARRETT: All environmental criteria, with some small exceptions in some rich countries, are worsening, not improving. In terms of forest loss, in terms of habitat, in terms of fresh water access around the world, in terms of fisheries which are experiencing problems in many different countries, the problems are immense, and it doesn't mean there aren't solutions. And you know what? Conservation and environmental organisations want to work towards solutions. I didn't see much about solutions in Professor Lomborg's book, but it's something we're fully committed to.

BJORN LOMBORG: It's going to be better. You said that people are not going to be better off. You're just simply wrong statistically.

PETER GARRETT: Well, look, statistically, professor, you're flying in the face of reality. If we continue to do what we're doing now — don't downplay the problem to sell a few copies of a book, but recognise its seriousness and apply our resources fully, not by putting up false straw dogs of fresh water or saving forests, but apply our resources and our minds and our imaginations fully to it. Then people could be better off.

RICHARD CARLETON: Lomborg's relaxed even in the face of the roughest attacks and he's not a pretentious man, either. The T-shirt belies the fact that he's just been appointed to a senior post in Denmark's environment ministry. Now, that entitles him to a government car and a government bike. He prefers the bike.

BJORN LOMBORG: I've always been biking, yeah. I mean, the point is in Denmark we have like 180 percent taxes on cars. I think that's a great idea. It mainly means that people who really need cars will buy a car, but it will be very expensive and the rest of us can go on bikes and actually have a good time. It's okay sometimes to use up environmental resources but then you should just pay for it. And that's what we basically make people do.

BJORN LOMBORG: I am agreeing, but I also care about people, I care about poverty, I care about development. Basically I want to make sure that we don't just do something that feels good, but something that actually does good. It's really important to understand that you cannot solve all problems and you really do have to prioritise, and that prioritisation is only helped by getting the right information, and that's why I'm simply saying ...

PETER GARRETT: No, sorry, I just want to come in here because you've made this point a couple of times now. And the key issue is this: what you fail to mention, professor, is the simple fact that the world now spends on armaments … you can tell me the figure because you're the statistician. It spends enough on armaments and weapons of war to deal with all the problems that you and I are talking about. So why possibly put up an argument that says we won't spend money on environment programs because we want to save fresh water … but the real moral issue of spending money on weapons of war, on weapons of mass destruction which most countries have, including my own, and not spending money looking after people and our environment.

BJORN LOMBORG: The real and scary part here is to the extent to which you're willing to say, "No, no, let's not think about the figures, let's just do everything I like." I honestly think that we should focus on the best problems first, the most important ones first, and there the information and the statistics really do matter.

RICHARD CARLETON: Lomborg says that most criticism of him is just knee-jerk: he's too young, too controversial, not across the issues. He simply asks that his critics, like Peter Garrett, listen to the facts. It's alright for you — this is practically the wealthiest country in the world. I mean, we're not bad off in Australia either. There's plenty of food. I mean, I've been to Rwanda, I've been to Zaire, I've been to parts of the Middle East where people are hungry, no matter what you say.

BJORN LOMBORG: Oh, totally, and one of the important points I try to make is that there are still a lot of problems. There are really hunger problems, but we also have to figure out that things are actually improved. There are actually fewer people starving, even in absolute numbers. The outlook is good, but it doesn't mean that there are no problems. It just means we need to focus on solving the real problems.

RICHARD CARLETON: The outlook is good? I've been brought up to believe the outlook is crook.

BJORN LOMBORG: Yep. And that of course both puts you in a situation where you're likely to say, "Oh, what the hell, it's not going to work anyway." And it also actually makes you focus on the wrong problems.

PETER GARRETT: The real guts of the issue is that there will be significant numbers of people who do not have access to food and who effectively will be hungry as there are now.

BJORN LOMBORG: Right, I'd like to just first hear you say that there are fewer people also in absolute numbers that are starving today than there was in 1970, right?

PETER GARRETT: Well, I don't think the statistics actually back you up, Professor Lomborg. All those experts who study these things in their complexity, in their depth, basically dissent from your findings. They don't agree with what you say in respect of just about anything.

BJORN LOMBORG: You're wrong. The UNFAO, the food and agriculture organisation, have put out figures since 1970 and until today and it's shown a dramatic decrease from 35 percent to 18 percent, from 900 and I believe it's 47 million people now down to 840 million people. Now, this is not an issue that you can debate over. I'm willing to bet you right here and now whether this is a true figure or not and we can have this ...

BJORN LOMBORG: This is the problem I have with this kind of argument. You think you're so right that you can also just deny the numbers that we all understand and that we all agree to.

RICHARD CARLETON: As well as the verbal attacks, there was one physical one … from another academic. It happened when he was launching his book at Oxford, in England.

ENRAGED ACADEMIC: That's for everything you say about the environment which is completely bullshit.

BJORN LOMBORG: And this guy comes up and basically pies me and I find it very odd that an academic and a person who should presumably be able to confront my arguments with other good arguments feels the need to resort to a pie.

BJORN LOMBORG: Totally, because people are so emotionally involved that they forget what are the rational and what are the most sensible arguments. You really need to have a sort of return to reality and say, "Listen, we all want to do the best we can for this world but the question is do we do it here or here or here?" We can do pretty much anything we want, so we should be sure that we make the right decisions, that we make the really best decisions first.

Thanks for the text, I'm sorry I missed seeing that report.

Lonborg has done a lot to undermine the environmental movement. The pathetic attempt by the formerly reputable Scientific American to discredit a book that hasn't sold *that* many copies is a clear sign that he's on to something.

Interesting. This is the first I heard about Lomborg, but I believe him. I took an Environmental Science college course about 10 years ago. (It was an easy 3 credits). The professor himself was great. Before teaching science, he worked for SETI. Right away, he said the doomsday predictions about "global warming" and so on were false. He said the greatest threat was overpopulation, especially in Third World countries. Two students in the class accused him of racism right there, but he just laughed them off.

Interesting...will check out his book, for sure. I believe we have made the environment cleaner over the decades thru greener policies. The Hudson River in Gotham certainly is and there's now even free kayaking on it during the summer.

Still...840 million people starving? Damn. I've understood that the Earth can provide more than enough for the current population. What's up with this?

PETER GARRETT: Quite clearly whether it's 800 million people or four million kids who are suffering from starvation now it's still a problem for us and we haven't solved it in the world and to argue anything else is a statistical lie.

BJORN LOMBORG: This is the problem I have with this kind of argument. You think you're so right that you can also just deny the numbers that we all understand and that we all agree to.

No priorities, just fix it all NOW. Like any four year old. I like Midnight Oil's music, but their politics are the worst of knee-jerk. Get to book. The first section on prosperity will make your day.

In other words, damn the facts if they get in the way of my opinion. Garrett should stick to singing, because he, like most libs, has no comprehesion of the concept of diminishing returns.

Skeptical Environmentalist - great book. It is so simple for anyone to go back a few years, read some of the prominent doomsday predictions from the enviro's and come to the realization that they have no problem with completely making things up if it suits their needs. The main stream media is, as usual, willfully ignorant

why things are so out-of-kilter

Two main reasons:

Corruption. Entities allegedly responsible for dealing with the situation are rife with corruption which comes mainly in the form of theft - the food or the funds, stolen or redirected.

Political Agendas. Persons or organizations that simply don't want the problem solved. They don't want the starving masses to, well, not be starving masses. Hunger and religion are the two most powerful motivators for enacting political change. This is why there is opposition to genetically modified grains in Africa, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that they pose any risk, and plenty to the contrary.

they have no problem with completely making things up if it suits their needs.

Another anecdote (I just have to tell it): My husband used to be pretty "green", and he still is to a point. Not long after Election 2000, he bought a membership to an environmental group. As a result, his name must've been sold to every liberal group out there, as we were receiving junk mail from many different environmental groups, the ACLU, and so on. The envelopes would make incredible claims, like: "Pierce Brosnan wants you to help save the whales! Sonar is killing the whales!" And, "Another species nears extinction..." I guess they assumed that if he joined an environmental activist group, he must be a Democrat because the letters would address other issues and say: "We need your help now, more than ever, now that Pres. Bush is in office... yada yada yada."

When we ignored their phone calls and letters, they just kept sending the junk mail week after week. Hello? I thought they wanted to save trees. The paper was glossy, and often they sent free address labels, too. Talk about creating trash. That was a wake-up call right there. We care about the environment, too. I'm one of those annoying people who brings her own bags to the supermarket. We recycle everything we can. But, obviously these groups are only trying to make money by making alarmist claims.

"something's broken"

Oh, surely there are inefficiencies and stupidity as in any bureaucracy (or aggregate thereof), but the problems are, by and large, demonstrably the result of greed and corruption.

It's pretty sickening to think that the US alone could produce enough food to provide for all the starving people in the world, but that most of it would go to waste before it ever got to them.

Snippets on hunger from the book. World population doubled since 1961, worlds average per person calorie intake up 24% on global basis and up 38% in developing countries....China manages to feed 20% of worlds population on 1/15th of the worlds farmland.....Globally, since 1970, by UN's definition,(UGH)proportion of starving people has fallen from 38% to 18% today, and is expected to fall to 12% by 2010.

GREAT article. Thanks.

I particularly like this argument when Lomborg says that in actual numbers, starving people have dramatically decreased, and the Greenie says:

PETER GARRETT: Quite clearly whether it's 800 million people or four million kids who are suffering from starvation now it's still a problem for us and we haven't solved it in the world and to argue anything else is a statistical lie.

So typical of the Left! What you just said doesn't matter because people are still starving, so I'm not going to even discuss with you that starving people have decreased because people are still starving.

Typical liberal. They do that on EVERY argument, not just the environment.

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