Essential Reading on the Environment

Starvation? Mr. Lomborg points out that today less than 18% of people in developing nations are starving, down dramatically from 35%, 30 years ago. That's still too many people, but freer trade is feeding more, not fewer. Global poverty? "According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than in the preceding 500." Air pollution? It's "not a new phenomenon that has gotten worse and worse--it is an old phenomenon that has gotten better and better." A graph of sulfur dioxide and smoke in the city of London since 1550 makes the point. The 70-page chapter on global warming lays out the data, considers the consequences of atmospheric change on farming, air quality, weather, oceans and so forth, and concludes that there is a challenge but far from an emergency and that the carbon-dioxide increase is a small factor in a very complex atmosphere.

The point--illustrated with hundreds of graphs and verified through thousands of footnotes--is that environmentally, things are steadily improving--be it food production, population, forests or air quality. And Mr. Lomborg is an interesting analytical source. A Danish statistics professor and former member of Greenpeace, he set out to refute the optimistic environmental projections of scholars like the late Julian Simon, and ended up refuting the pessimistic calamity projections of environmental advocates like Greenpeace, Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich.