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'The Greens are hurting the poor in Third World'

Skeptical environmentalist, Dr Bjørn Lomborg believes ecological groups are misleading us iwith their doomesday predictions. Roger Highfield reports

What's the future for planet Earth?

GREEN activists may do more harm than good in the developing world by focusing on "phantom problems" at the expense of real ones, according to a forthcoming book.

The White House, taken aback by the global outcry at Bush's rejection of the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, is developing a new strategy to present at the July climate negotiations in Bonn.

But in The Skeptical Environmentalist, Dr Bjørn Lomborg of Aarhus University, Denmark, points out that the treaty will, at best, delay warming by a few years by the admission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.

Dr Lomborg accepts that global warming is real, but says that the marginal benefits of the Kyoto Treaty would cost around £100 billion annually, possibly twice as much, when half this sum could give all Third World inhabitants access to the basics of health, education, water and sanitation.

For all the talk of global warming as a catastrophe by green groups, "the catastrophe seems rather in spending our resources unwisely on curbing present carbon emissions at high costs instead of helping the developing countries and increasing the use of non-fossil fuel," said Dr Lomborg.

Global warming will mostly harm the Third World, while an initial warming of a few degrees would probably benefit the First World. "Kyoto makes us feel good, but if we really want to do good, we would do better to give the money Kyoto would cost to the Third World," he said.

Calculations by the IPCC show that the cost of the cure is much greater than the illness, he said. "If the world focuses on economics alone, it will make around £600 trillion (thousand billion) in the 21st century.

"If it focuses on environmental considerations, that profit will fall by £67 trillion. But the total cost of global warming is estimated to be only about £3.3 trillion, with or without Kyoto, said Dr Lomborg, whose views have triggered a national debate in Denmark about the widely-held beliefs that the environment is in a state of terminal decline.

In The Skeptical Environmentalist, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in the autumn, the lecturer in statistics is critical of the way in which many environmental organisations make selective and misleading use of scientific evidence to portray an ecological catastrophe.

"An old Left-wing Greenpeace member", Dr Lomborg was provoked to look into the state of the planet by the claim by an American economist, Julian Simon, that many doomsday predictions were false.

But his follow-up investigation provided support for Simon's scepticism over "the Litany" preached by organisations such as Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature: the environment is in poor shape; resources are running out; we kill off more than 40,000 species every year.

"We know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring," said Dr Lomborg. "There is just one problem: it does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

Dr Lomborg said the Worldwatch Institute, which annually reports on the state of the world, makes "blatant errors with unfortunate frequency."

Studying specific cases, such as GM crops and pesticides, Dr Lomborg shows how many central arguments used by green groups "are based on myths".

Well meaning and compassionate environmentalists are convinced that pesticides cause cancer. Yet the link is tenuous and these chemicals may well have decreased the incidence of cancer by boosting production of fruit and vegetables, the consumption of which cut cancer risk.

Rather than lose between a quarter and a half of all species in our lifetime, the real figure is closer to one per cent, Dr Lomborg calculates; acid rain has not destroyed our forests, as was often predicted two decades ago; poverty has declined more in the last 50 years than in the preceding 500; 35 per cent of people in developing countries were starving in 1970 and that percentage fell by half by 1996; in 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years and today we live for 67; and "infants no longer die like flies".

"Mankind's lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator," said Dr Lomborg, though he stresses that "this does not, however, mean that everything is good enough," citing how in 2010 there will still be 680 million people starving, even though more will be adequately fed than ever before.

Stein Bie, director general of the International Service for National Agricultural Research in The Hague, said: "Lomborg suggests that there is growing evidence that we may not have got our priorities right and that poor people may suffer." We are morally on thin ice, he said, if the flawed analysis used by Greens leads to the world's rich becoming more concerned about butterflies than they are about the world's poor.

-- Anonymous, June 15, 2001