Muddying the air
One of the most incredible claims in Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2001) is that the environmental movement is not responsible for much of the improvement that he claims has taken place. On page 32 he writes:
Often we hear that environmental worry is an important reason why the environment gets cleaned up-essentially that many of the graphs in this book go in the right direction exactly because people worried in earlier times. However, this is often misleading or even incorrect. Air pollution in London has declined since the late nineteenth century (see Figure 86, p. 165), but for the greater part of the twentieth century this has been due to a change in infrastructure and fuel use and only slightly, if at all, connected to environmental worries expressed in concrete policy changes.
Lomborg goes on to claim that even when policy changes have brought environmental improvements, the resources could have been put to better use. He does not give any examples of where policy changes of brought improvements, or instances where he thought resources were ill spent.
There are several problems with Lomborg's claims. First, his example is a hasty generalization. If we check his figure 86 (p. 165) we see that it includes just two types of air pollution, SO2 and smoke (particulates). There is nothing on lead and other toxic chemicals, ozone, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen oxides. One would think that the reduction in lead pollution in particular, which Lomborg considers to be a significant problem (see Getting the lead out), is a success of environmental regulation. But Lomborg makes no reference to the Clean Air Act or other legislation. And Lomborg's data are for just one city, London, England. Are the trends the same in other cities? When we examine the legend for Lomborg's graph other potential problems are noticeable. He notes that the data for 1585-1935 are estimates based on coal imports. How accurate are these? And as sources he lists eight different reports from six different sources. Are these different sources all using the same definitions and measurements? When we look at the graph itself another strange phenomenon is apparent; for a time there are two curves for both particulates and SO2. Apparently this is an overlap of the early data from estimates and the later data from actual measurements. (Other Lomborg graphs also have multiple sources, and include overlaps and gaps.) This graph also ignores other events that were occurring in London and elsewhere, such as changes in population and motor vehicle use. These events would be expected to increase pollution levels if the were not offset by changes in pollution control. Another problem appears when we study historical events. There were a series of killer smogs in London. One of the last major ones, and perhaps the worst, occurred in December 1952, an event that Lomborg notes on page 164. While other events, such as weather patterns that trapped the pollutants, played a part in these disasters, it is hard to see how these smogs could have occurred if pollutant levels had been dropping for seventy years as Lomborg's graph shows.
And Michael Grubb, reviewing The Skeptical Environmentalist in Science (November 9, 2001), disputes this example (p. 1286):
The hugh improvements in London's air have been very much driven by policy. Most radically, the 1956 Clean Air Act banned raw coal consumption across large swaths of London, and a long series of domestic and European legislation governing vehicle exhausts has done much to clean up mobile sources. The dramatic impact evident from 1957 onwards is obvious in Lomborg's own graph. His denial of the fundamental cause is, at best, inexcusable ignorance, when the issue of cause and effect is so central to the case he tries to build.
As noted above, Lomborg claims that even when legislation has brought environmental improvements, resources might have been better spent on other causes. Of course how to use scarce resources, which includes not just money (as Lomborg seems to think) but also such things as time, raw materials and real estate, is one of the major problems of civilization. What Lomborg fails to consider is that other causes also have advocates, and that decisions are reached by consensus and not dictated by the Sierra Club.
Finally, I note that like many of the arguments in The Skeptical Environmentalist this one appears not to have originated with Lomborg. In this case it apparently came from The Doomslayer by Ed Regis, the article about Julian Simon that Lomborg says started him on the path to the "dark side". This is from page seven of the online edition:
In his rebuttal period, Simon presented a graph of his own. Whenever he presents any data, his practice is to present the figures going all the way back to day one, to the start of record-keeping on the parameter in question. You have to focus on aggregate trends over the long term, he insists, not just pick and choose some little fleeting data chunks that seem to support your case. So his own chart of smoke levels in London stretched back into the 1800s, and the line from the 1920s on showed a constant and uniform downward slope. "If you look at all the data," he said, "you can't tell that there was a clean-air act at any point."
Of course the data for smoke is not all the data, there are several other types of pollution.
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NEW Additional reading:
When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, Devra Davis, Basic Books, 2002. Among the topics covered by Davis are the killer smogs in Donora, Pennsylvania (where she grew up) and other cities.
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Written by Jim Norton
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