Here’s a must-read interview from the London Spectator with Bjorn Lomborg, one of the leading environmentalists of doubt.
It would be nice to think that the two main presidential candidates would be open-minded enough to take a look at what Lomborg has to say, but I’d be surprised if it will happen. McCain is too mulish. As for Obama, well, as his notion of “change” is, like that of the restored Louis XVIII, a return to the tired orthodoxies of the past. He’s unlikely, to say the least, to forego the opportunities for big government control represented by today’s carbon panic.
Anyway, here’s Lomborg on Screech Al and other inanities:
“Unlike proper climate change sceptics (who are the equivalent, George Monbiot has famously claimed, of Holocaust deniers), Lomborg says his views on global warming are broadly in sympathy with those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Where he thinks the green movement has got things badly wrong is in attempting to shut down any form of critical opposition. ‘You cannot have a conversation about the biggest policy argument of the day, and then say that one side isn’t allowed to debate,’ says Lomborg. He thinks the greens have also done their cause a great disservice by talking up the climate change threat. ‘You can overplay your cards and screech so loudly that you end up losing the argument.’ The battle for common sense, though, is far from over. His worry is that the next Kyoto update — the Copenhagen summit in 2009 — will prove yet another wasted opportunity where politicians set themselves ever higher pie-in-the-sky targets on carbon emissions. ‘The danger is not that we’re not going to meet these targets, because I take that as granted — of course we’re not going to meet them, just as we didn’t after Kyoto in 1997. What’s far worse, is that yet again, it will stop us focusing on all the incredible things we actually could do with that money. So we end up wasting another ten or 20 years.’”
Read the whole thing.