Environmental Scepticism

Historical development

The economist Julian Simon made the intellectual case in The Ultimate Resource (1981). People are the ultimate resource, he argued, and scarcity solves itself through the invention it provokes. His bet in 1980 with Paul Ehrlich on the future prices of five metals, which Simon won, became the current’s emblem.

In the American West, the Wise Use movement was launched at a conference organised by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb in 1988. It brought ranchers, loggers, miners and property rights groups together against federal limits on land use and against the Endangered Species Act, following the earlier “Sagebrush Rebellion”. Free-market think tanks took up scepticism about regulation through the 1990s. Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), a statistician’s survey of environmental indicators, brought the argument to readers worldwide. From the 1990s on, climate policy became its main battleground.

Principal claims

• On many measures conditions have improved, not worsened. These include air and water quality in rich countries, life expectancy, food supply and the availability of resources.
• Human ingenuity, markets and growth are the surest sources of environmental improvement. Richer societies want cleaner environments and can pay for them.
• Environmental campaigns have repeatedly predicted crises that never came.
• Environmental regulation often imposes heavy costs, especially on the poor and on rural communities, for small or uncertain benefits.
• Decisions about land and resources belong to owners and national governments, not to distant agencies or international bodies.
• Policy should be judged by cost-benefit analysis against other uses of the same money, such as health or reducing poverty.

Policy implications

Environmental sceptics oppose binding climate treaties, carbon taxes and requirements to use renewable energy, or want much weaker versions of them. They support more fossil fuel and nuclear production. They want the Endangered Species Act and federal land designations narrowed and land returned to state or private control, and they call for cost-benefit tests on regulation. Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus ranks climate policy below measures such as micronutrients and disease control.

Internal disagreements

The deepest division is between “lukewarmers” such as Lomborg, who accept mainstream science but dispute the policies drawn from it, and those who dispute the science. A second division separates the rural property-rights populism of the Wise Use movement from the urban, statistical optimism of Simon and Lomborg. A third concerns adaptation. Some argue that wealth will let societies adapt to change, while others doubt that significant change is happening.

Criticisms and controversies

Scientists and environmental organisations argue that the current misrepresents the evidence, especially on climate change. In 2003 the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty ruled against The Skeptical Environmentalist, a ruling later annulled, which made the book a case study in the dispute. The historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, and the sociologists Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright, have documented funding of parts of the movement by fossil fuel interests. Critics also note that many improvements in rich countries came from the very regulation sceptics oppose.

Sceptics answer that their opponents treat disagreement as heresy and ignore what policies cost.

Relationships to other traditions

Environmental scepticism shares the property rights framework of libertarian environmentalism and ecomodernism’s faith in growth and technology. It differs from both in doubting that the problems they set out to solve are as large as claimed. Its defence of national sovereignty links it to environmental nationalism, and its ethics are centred on people. It is the direct opponent of reform environmentalism and of every tradition that treats the environmental crisis as urgent.