Skeptical of the Skeptical Environmentalist

The death of influential economist Julian Simon created a void in the world of self-appointed environmental doomsday de-bunkers. With his book The Ultimate Resource and numerous articles, the University of Maryland economist had firmly established himself as the preeminent high-priest in the Cult of the Rose Colored Glasses. For those not familiar with Simon, his thesis was essentially that environmentalists fail to account for the creative capacity of mankind to adjust and solve problems. For example, worries of mass starvation never materialized because of the Green Revolution, and Julian-the-ever-optimist had great faith that Man could conquer all future ills as well. Simon focused on statistics related to human well-being and attempted to demonstrate to the pessimists that (thanks to free markets) life on earth was actually getting better, not worse. Not surprisingly, Simon found a host of ready followers in corporate America happy to hear that the wealth they were creating was actually a part of the global environmental solution; further, any problems created along the way would be solved by the brilliant minds of those yet unborn. Sarcasm aside, Simon also provided an occasionally useful counter-balance to the sometimes hysterical claims of the green left.

Since his passing in 1998, a host of acolytes have tried, but Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg seems to have most effectively grabbed the Simon torch. Lomborg’s 2001 break out book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World garnered extensive press coverage and the catchy moniker promised a franchise of sequels. (Lomborg’s latest work focuses more extensively on global warming: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming)

Simon and Lomborg both argue from a “numbers don’t lie” mindset. To some extent I agree. Real data is always preferable to overblown generalizations. Yet, while numbers do not “lie” they rarely speak the whole truth. (Said somewhat less charitably, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”)

For example, in the opening pages of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg vaunts the role of statistics as a neutral arbiter of truth, even as his own bias distorts the data. After quoting the “damn lies” epithet above, Lomborg counters that “used judiciously statistics is the best source of information about our world.” (p. xx) On the next page, Dr. Stats then explains the importance of relative comparison: “[While large numbers may be mind-numbing,] when talking about the average daily waste per American, a change from 3 pounds in 1985 to 2.5 pounds in 2000 is readily comprehensible.”

Well, that would be a fine example if not for the pesky fact that it is not true. Flipping over to the chart on page 207, one sees that, in fact, daily “personal total waste” has increased from 4.0 to 4.5 pounds over that timeframe. It appears that Lomborg likely “meant” to reference the decline in daily “personal landfill waste.” Thus, while we waste more on a daily basis in the 21st century, Americans recycle or (more likely) burn more than we did in 1985. Perhaps it was just an honest mistake, but it demonstrates the inherent difficulty in filtering any data through one’s own biases and prejudices. A decline in waste fits his overall “things are looking up” thesis and so it provides the opening illustration, true or not.

A closer look, shows it is understandable that Lomborg misread his own graph: while the declining “landfill waste” line is in bold black, the ever increasing (and I would argue more important) “total waste” is charted as a white negative surrounded by faint gray. In other words, the graph is doctored to draw your attention to the stat that Lomborg finds most compelling.

The text for the chapter where the graph is found (entitled “Waste: running out of space?”) is even more telling. The issues surrounding the solid waste resulting from our increasingly disposable society are enormously complex. There are impacts to water quality, air quality, transportation systems, environmental psychology, and toxics. The Skeptical Environmentalist does not bother with such nuance and instead boils trash down to one easy to answer question: Are we about to run out of a place to throw this crap? Luckily, we are assured, all the United States’ waste for the next 100 years could fit in Woodward County, Oklahoma while still having lots of space left over.

This may well be true, but, again, it’s not the whole truth. While there is certainly plenty of physical space available, destroying that straw-man tells us little about the wisdom of our current rates of waste, or even the actual impacts from thousands of landfills dotting the country.

Pausing for thought, one wonders why a rural Oklahoma county was chosen for this exercise. Would not the example speak more clearly if it centered on Manhattan or Los Angeles---areas with which the book’s readers might actually have some familiarity? Perhaps, but only if the point was to make a century’s worth of trash seem real. Focusing on Woodward County, however, lets the problem seem far, far away. I dare say that the chances of most readers having any personal connection to this small piece of middle America are about 1 in 1,000,000 (and that may be generous).

So, since trash does not really present much of a problem after all, do we need to worry about all this recycling they keep talking about? The Skeptical Environmentalist closes the book on garbage by declaring, “[T]he current recycling level is reasonable, but . . . we perhaps should not aim to recycle much more.” (p. 209) Whew, luckily we have got it just right again. The few who follow endnote 1606 (wow, he must be smart if he uses that much small type) will find that this conclusion is based on the assumption that “the best recycling ideas have already been exploited and that yields from further recycling will be lower.” Funny how future technologies will solve so many other problems, but when deciding whether to finally walk our aluminum cans over to the recycle bin, we can just assume that things are pretty much as good as they will get.

Lest I get too caustic, there are indeed some worthwhile thoughts in the book. Some environmentalists do take anecdotes and extrapolate them into catastrophes. Greenies can be guilty of over-hyping emotional issues and misusing loaded words like “cancer” and “holocaust.” Some of the myths that get de-bunked are worth de-bunking. Still, the fact that society has averted disaster in the past, does not mean that the world was never on a path to ruin. In other words, the fact that environmentalists raised a frantic alarm leading to changes does not mean that the tree-huggers were improperly crying “Wolf!” in the first place. The danger of this Simonesque genre is that such books downplay the ecological bullets we have avoided to a point where society becomes convinced it need not even dodge anymore. Those bullets that have squarely hit the earth do not get a chapter, or they are quickly dismissed as “now improving” (so we need not count the cost inflicted). The Skeptical Environmentalist is worth a read. Yet, make it a skeptical read. Oh, and remember what they say about statistics.