I have just come across this interview with Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who has rained on the parade of eco-gloomsters to memorable effect, but it is worth a read despite this rather sniffy sign-off:
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.
I imagine he looked “startled” because the suggestion is such utter crud, to be blunt about it. Lomborg does not, as far as I can tell from his writings, contest the idea of man-made global warming as an issue, nor does he dismiss concerns about such things as some pro-capitalists are wont to do (although I can see why they do so). What Lomborg keeps banging on about is that if we use or sacrifice resources to combat such threats, then those resources cannot be used on other things, which might be just as important from the point of view of human wellbeing, such as clean drinking water, sanitation, health care, etc. Lomborg has had the temerity to remind people that resources are scarce and they have alternate uses. Nothing remotely utopian about that.
Appleyard also refers to the late Julian Simon, the economics writer, as a “right-wing” thinker. Oh please. So to be a broad optimist about technology and Man’s ability to deal with supposed terrors like population growth is now “right wing”, is it? It shows how one almost misses those old-fashioned socialists of the Eastern bloc with their posters of smiling factory workers standing in front of a building belching out smoke. What Appleyard and others don’t seem to quite grasp – or perhaps they do and are not letting on – is quite how reactionary a lot of the Green agenda is.
Here’s Lomborg’s latest book, Cool It. I like the title and have ordered a copy.
