by Amy Ridenour (NAPSA)—You can tell you’ve won the debate when your opponent’s remaining intellectual argumentis to throw a pie in yourface. Bjorn Lomborg, a former Greenpeace supporter, experienced that happy and perhaps, tasty satisfaction during a talk at Oxford University when British environmental activist Mark Lynas threw a Baked Alaska pie in his face. “T wanted to put a Baked Alaska on his Global smug face,” Lynas Warming: said afterward, “in ame)ame solidarity with the eevee oative Indian and py Eskimo people in Alaska whoarereporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal andbirdlife.” Lomborg has become an anathema to manyof his former colleagues because, after studying the evidence, he no longer embraces what he sees as the environmental community’s shibboleths. An associate professorof statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, Lomborg, like Lynas, once believed the world was “going to hell,” transported there mainly by selfish Americans who insisted on running their air con- ditioners in summer, their snow- mobiles in winter and their SUVs year-round. Lomborg’s view of global warming began to change when he put aside his gut feelings and picked up the latest scientific evidence on the subject. Lomborg has analyzed those studies in a brilliant new book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” and concluded “we have more leisure time, greater security, less pollution, fewer accidents, more education, more amenities, higher incomes, and fewer starving people” than any other generation in history. Why do so many of us apparently believe otherwise? In large part, Lomborg says, because the challenges of climate change, deforestation, air and water quality and endangered species have been vastly overblown by advocacy groups in search of funding and a somewhat gullible media in search of headlines andair time. Readers of Lomborg’s book will find a tonic from the “the sky is falling” feeling that pervades muchof our culture. Consider: The percentage of people in the developing world with access to clean water has increased to 80 percent from 30 percent since the early 1970s. Life expectancy has followed an upward trajectory for more than 100 years with even those in the most impoverished countries now living longer than did most Europeansin the 1900s. * The average daily food intake hasincreased to 2,650 from 2,000 calories over the past four decades. Rather than have the United States commit what many see as economicsuicide by signing a Kyoto treaty that would cost it up to $350 billion a year to implement, and cause economic dislocations that would fall particularly harshly on the poor, Lomborg would prefer that the world community provide safe drinking water to the 1.2 billion humansthatstill lackit. Americans would do wellto follow his advice andcritically evaluate what Lomborg terms “the litany” of dire environmental messages that spring at us each day “on television, in the newspapers, in political statements and in conversations at work and at the kitchen table.” In short, thinking for oneself. Imaginethat. Amy Ridenour is president of The National Center for Public Policy Research, a non-partisan think-tank in Washington, D.C.
