How Much Does Environment Matter? Lessons from the Lomborg Case

Résumé 0

The Skeptical Environmentalist. Measuring the Real State of the World, written under 18 months by statistician Bjorn Lomborg, has become famous in the world due to its significant sales and the polemics it aroused. Lomborg’s book intends to fight, with ironical eloquence and plenty of figures, the environmentalist “litany" (carried by media, organisations and scientists) which according to him wrongly blackens the favourable evolution of the world development toward progress.Yet as far as figures are concerned, many specialists have already pointed out different errors, some of which might not be entirely involuntary. Anyway, one can but observe the strange regularity with which facts confirm the arguments maintained and the fact that the data are often selected accordingly. The present article illustrates this observation by the specific study of the treatment of the problems of deforestation and acid air pollution. In the case of deforestation, the apparent stability of the forest surface is only apparent when one aggregates disparate, uncertain data, for all the Earth regions together, and above all neglecting differences of forest types value. In the case of air pollution, the relative and partial reduction which takes place at some stages of economic growth can neither be generalised (at global level this pollution increases), nor be considered spontaneous, even though the author suggests a spontaneist view of the improvements brought about by growth and technologies. Other presuppositions and problem framings by Lomborg are analysed in this paper with a view to understanding the reasons for fixing ecological debates in terms of dualistic oppositions.We also suggest some lessons to be drawn from the considerable influence of that case.