Bjorn Lomborg on This Day in History

Today in History: Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg was born on this day in 1965. In 1997, Bjorn Lomborg read an interview with Julian Simon, an American economist who argued that much of our knowledge about the environment was based on preconceptions and poor statistics, and that the doomsday conventional wisdom about the environment was wrong. Lomborg, a one-time Greenpeace member and a vegetarian leftist set out to prove that Julian Simon was wrong. Bjorn Lomborg wrote a 500-page book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," boasting 70 pages of bibliography and nearly 3,000 notes, wherein he discovers that Julian Simon was mostly right. 

He writes: "in the US, the total number of car miles traveled has more than doubled over the past 30 years… Nevertheless, over the same period emissions have decreased by a third and concentrations much more… air pollution can be---and historically has been---combated and developed in the developed world. There is also good reason to belief that the developing world, following our pattern … will bring down its air pollution.” (Pg. 177)

He observes, “Air pollution has got worse in the developing world, mainly because of the strong economic growth. However, the developing countries are really just making the same tradeoffs as the developed countries made 100-200 years ago… the environment and economic prosperity are not opposing concepts, but rather complementary entities: without adequate environmental protection, growth is undermined, but environmental protection is un-affordable without growth. It is thus reasonable to expect that as the developing countries of the world achieve higher levels of income, they will… opt for and be able to afford an ever cleaner environment.” (Pg. 210)

He has over time pointed out that wildfires are not really increasing, and that climate change is not the devastating emergency many would like for you to think. 

"When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years."

"Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment."

"We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century."