Do you care about global warming? Yes? Liar. You still drive and fly. Your
house lacks solar panels and windmills. You drive to super-stores where you
buy food laden with air miles. You only recycle after Zac Goldsmith has been
on television. And, speaking of Zac, his oh-so green proposal to charge for
parking in out of town supermarkets had to be laughed off by George Osborne
at the Tory conference. The shadow chancellor said he’d be off his trolley
to do such a thing. Well, quite, because listen up Zac and all your
eco-pals: nobody really cares about global warming, they just talk about it.
“The vast majority,” says Bjorn Lomborg, “are along for the ride. They’ve kids
to pick up from day care, jobs to get on with, marriages to work on. This is
a background phenomenon to many of these people.”
To statisticians and political scientists – Lomborg is both – what people say
is trivial compared with what they do. Lomborg is, unquestionably, one of
the most important living thinkers. Time magazine listed him in the world’s
100 most influential people; he was named as the 14th most influential
academic in the world and a “young global leader”.
He doesn’t look like any of these things; he looks more like a tennis player
or possibly a designer for Bang & Olufsen. In the lobby of a fashionable
London hotel, he is wearing jeans, a polo shirt and black trainers. His hair
is blond and the fixed gaze of his blue eyes is downright disturbing. His
voice is deep and he is very talkative.
He is seen by the deep greens as the most appalling apostate – he was once a
member of Greenpeace – and by the hard deniers he is seen as a secular
saint: the man who pulled the rug out from under the whole climate change
conspiracy. The latter will take particular delight in his latest book, Cool
It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.
He says that polar bears – the poster beasts for the greens – are not dying
off as the ice pack melts; in fact, they are increasing in numbers. He
accepts that rising temperatures will result in more heat deaths, but there
will be far fewer deaths from cold. And Al Gore’s vision of a flooded
Florida as sea levels rise by 20ft within the next century is treated with
derision. The Kyoto accord on limiting emissions, meanwhile, will achieve
almost nothing and cost billions.
But Lomborg is neither saint nor apostate. He believes global warming is
happening and humans are causing it. He just doesn’t think it’s that
serious. Moreover, he thinks – as does the US government – technology is the
answer. Attempting to cut emissions is as futile as expecting the Tories to
charge for supermarket parking.
“There’s a huge difference between what people say and what they do,” observes
Lomborg. “Look at all the websites where you can take a flight and offset
your carbon. Only about 1% do it. Likewise this goes for most politicians
who say they will cut emissions dramatically. Blair said in 1997 that he’d
reduce carbon emissions by 15%; we’ve seen an increase of 3% since then.”
This all began in February 1997. Lomborg was in Los Angeles and he read an
article in Wired magazine by the late Julian Simon, an American right-wing
thinker, trashing the eco-catastrophists. He went back to Denmark and with
his statistics students set about the task of proving Simon wrong. Except
for a few details, they failed. By the end of the year, he had concluded
that Simon was right and the green case was a wild exaggeration. In
right-on, PC, left-wing, green Denmark this was heresy. But Lomborg had been
trained in heresy.
He was born in Copenhagen in 1965, the only child of a school-teacher mother
and a father who was a musician and a priest in the liberal Catholic church.
This is a strange blend of Christianity and theosophy.
“From a fairly early age I was used to being a little unusual. Denmark is a
fiercely nonreligious country. In any questionnaire people tend to put
religion under “hobbies”. But I would actually be a mass boy every Sunday,
that kind of thing. I was brought up slightly weird, but I got used to the
idea that just because you’re different doesn’t necessarily break you.”
He’s also gay, but he’s reluctant to include this as an aspect of his outsider
status. “Well, I guess it taught me to be different in one more aspect and
still be okay.”
He retains many vestiges of his upbringing and of PC Denmark. He is a
vegetarian like his parents. He doesn’t drive a car, preferring to cycle
round cities, and he retains a religious conviction. “I have this deep sense
that there probably is a meaning to life and there probably is a God. But
it’s not a big thing. It’s not as important as being a good person and a
humanist.”
In 1998 he went into print in Denmark with his view on greenery, and in 2001
The Skeptical Environmentalist appeared in English. Next came Global Crises,
Global Solutions. This was a collection of ideas from distinguished
economists on the best ways to spend $50 billion on improving the human
condition. Fighting global warming came low on all the lists.
The environmentalists were incandescent. His findings were assaulted on all
sides. Scientific American magazine ran a feature in which scientists queued
up to list ways in which he was wrong. The big accusation was that he was
not an earth scientist. His defence was that he wasn’t doing earth science,
he was simply analysing the figures on which the greens built their case.
A Danish government committee found him guilty of scientific dishonesty, a
charge that was later withdrawn. “You were supposed to have good reasons for
saying that, and they didn’t even provide a reason.”
Lomborg was further accused of being a shill for the Bush administration.
After all, Bush and latterly Con-doleezza Rice insist that technology, not
emissions controls, are the solution. Lomborg could have been writing the
script. He acknowledges this but insists he retains his fundamental
left-wing beliefs. He may tell the American government it is right about
green technology, but he also tells it to divert resources to Aids and
malaria in Africa. Does this really make him left wing?
“The way I see it, to be left wing is to care about people and making sure
there are fewer inequalities and saying that what the market comes out with
is not necessarily the right outcome. I actually thought I have always been
historically left wing. This comes from the French revolution. These were
the guys who believed in progress but also believed in facts against
old-fashioned thinking. That’s what we are supposed to be about.”
His first two books put global warming in the context of other big problems,
Cool It focuses solely on the environmental issue. His conclusion is that
the best way to deal with warming is to set up an international research
fund of $25 billion annually to seek solutions. This is, he calculates,
about what the problem is worth. If the signs get worse, the sum could be
increased. But the vast sums involved in cutting emissions are wasted
because they are disproportionate to the problem, they will not work and
they are politically futile.
I happen to think, on the basis of many other conversations, that he’s wrong
about the seriousness of global warming. But I don’t doubt he’s right about
the futility of emissions controls and the deep gulf that divides what
people say and what they do.
Lomborg is plausible, persuasive and intellectually passionate. He regards
most of the criticisms as pitiably weak on logic. There is, however, one
criticism that cuts deeper. “The clear implication,” says the philosopher
John Gray of Lomborg’s thought, “is that there is no need to restrain human
ambitions in order to protect the environment; it can look after itself. In
effect, this is a recycled version of the technological utopianism that’s
always been popular in the US, and explains why it is so feted by big
business.”
Lomborg looks startled when I put the charge of utopianism to him. He sees
himself as a pragmatist. He believes in progress, but sees where it can go
wrong. But the deep green and antihumanist intuition – most beautifully
expressed by the American biologist EO Wilson – that we are utterly
dependent on the earth and must, therefore, approach nature with reverence
and humility, means nothing to him. He cycles only in the city, not in the
forests. And if, in spite of your own hypocrisy, you feel uneasy about that
then you are right to do so.
