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The Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Review of Bjorn Lomborg’s Book

Old Hickory


Bjorn Lomborg -- you have to admit it's getting better..."

The reviewer signs off as ‘DG’ and the review is entitled “Sceptical about Doomsday?” He asks whether capitalism can adapt and whether it even needs to adapt.  In the 1960s the SPGB no more sided with the Greens than did Marx with Malthus in the nineteenth century.  But in the 1970s they tended to think that if ‘it’ is against capitalism then that is good enough.  It is rather like the fallacy that “my enemies enemy is my friend” but whether a common opponent is an ally depends on the particular components of each one’s creed.

The reviewer realises that the facts are not all that easy to see on the environment.  However, the Greens, like the SPGB, have a quasi-religious outlook that disapproves of human beings as they are.  It hopes that they might be better in the future.  It jumps from saying that we can all have more to saying that we will all be more careful in the new society.  The former idea hardly fits in with the Green outlook.  The anti-economist, Lester Brown, is cited from his book Eco-Economy thus: “our economy is slowly destroying its support systems, consuming its endowment of natural capital.  Demands of the expanding economy, as now structured, are surpassing the sustainable yield of eco-systems.”  This is typical Green bosh and it has been accompanied by bold predictions since 1965, all of which, like the charge of the Light Brigade, rode into certain doom. 

The Green track record is a list of predictions that have all been refuted in the event.  We are told that Bjorn Lomborg is a former Greenpeace campaigner.  Julian. Simon’s books which he said he found in second-hand bookshops converted him to an anti-Green position.  The result is his book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001).  The reviewer wonders how such different result as those of Brown and Lomborg could be reached.  His answer is that they differ on the facts and what should be done about the facts in any case.  Lomborg questions the idea that 40 000 species are becoming extinct each year and that pesticides are a great danger.  The actual reason is that the truth is not manifest and most of us are ignorant.  It is easy for a tyro to discover things unknown by an expert of many tears standing as the latter remains largely ignorant despite knowing quite a bit.   


Read this and feel good about the future

We are told that Lomborg has been accused of being selective by the Greens – the same accusation he has made against them.  He is said to overlook the point the Greens make about species of fish being on the decline by reporting a bigger global catch.  He does much the same on deforestation.  They are concerned that some trees have only recently been re-grown while Lomborg thinks that matters little to bio-diversity.  The reviewer feels that Lomborg is selective.  It is held that he does not take the call of wolf today seriously owing to there being no wolf in the past, but that is thought by the reviewer to be unwarranted.  Logically it is, but it is not a bad supposition and it is one that most long time observers of the Greens will tend to assume.  We should still check but we will certainly cease to panic.

Pollution has diminished in the past fifty years but the reviewer wants to say there is still lots to moan about there.  He feels it is profit that is to blame but that is not a topic he has thought critically about.  All this has occurred during a doubling of world population over the last 30 years and with a resulting expansion of economic activity.  It seems that both Lomborg and Brown overestimate solar and wind power.  There is, of course, lots of potential in capturing more energy from the sun.  It is said that all the fossil fuels only represent about ten days of sunlight landing on the earth.  However, there is no immediate shortage of oil, and with increasing usage the stockpiles in terms of years have gone up from 20 years in the 1930s to 47 years by the 1990s.  We are no more likely to run out of oil than the Stone Age ran out of stones.

The reviewer moans about vested interests and the fact that most research is in established areas of fossil fuels and nuclear power.  But why not research where it is likely to pay off?  The reviewer thinks that this is a reason for saying that any future expansion of renewables will not be a success for capitalism!  Well, as no post-capitalist society is due, capitalism will develop the renewables if they are to be developed at all.

Some might think that this doomsday syndrome dates from just the 1960s since when the BBC has been putting out about ten programmes a week featuring it.  But in fact the Tories were against the “industrial revolution” [as Toynbee called it in the 1880s] from the beginning.  So we do not just have 35 years of shouting wolf but about 200 years of it.  We still need to check but we can be relaxed about that duty.

The reviewer thinks that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming but the Greens are a bit fast to come to this conclusion when their main culprit, carbon dioxide, is still a trace gas being only from 0.02 to 0.04 of the atmosphere.  Water vapour is clearly a bigger factor as Philip Stott so often says to the Greens on the media.  Climate change is the norm.  Natural history shows plenty of it prior to life itself and, if anything, life has made its own nest of the atmosphere as the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock suggests.  There is no objective pollution.  One species’ meat is indeed another species’ food, even within the microbial domain.  Microbes are so polymorphous that perversion is alien to them, and that is about the only thing that is beyond them.  With the rise of Genetic Engineering, we are fostering their adaptive ability to use genetic information rather like we use literal information in language and thought.  Microbes usually do not need to wait fifteen minutes for another generation to adapt as they can do so by connecting.  We can use them to defend us against attacks from their own domain and to clear up pollution problems like oil spills.

The reviewer adds the Brown book to the supposed review of the Lomborg book as he favours this anti-economist.  After all, Marxism functions mainly as a form of anti-economics itself.  It is not an extra option to the Tory or Whig choice but firmly a Tory option and socialism always was the old Tory ideas with a new name.  Brown is for ecology over economics and this misanthropy is typical of the Green outlook.  They prefer less humanity and more non-human nature.  The reviewer rightly sees that capitalism puts profits above ecology but seems not to see that this puts humans first.  Instead, he thinks that profit is somehow not production for use, as it directly uses an economic criterion as to what is going to be useful in the form of money.  He is on Brown’s side but he is so confused, as is Brown also, that he has no idea of where that puts him.  He entertains the delusion that he is anthrophilic.  But he explicitly joins the “kind vision” of Brown in his quest to curb humanity greatly.  Most of the suggestions Brown has are hopeless but tend to follow the emotional plague rule that objective reality does not matter so long as the advocate means well.  The Marxists think themselves materialists but their whole case amounts to little more than the old adage that “it is the thought that counts”.

A case in point is the daft idea that public transport is a good idea when a more wasteful idea is not easy to find.  It means big vehicles running with few people on them all too often and they also usually run less economically.  Thus, even if these vehicles were all full up they would hardly match the average car carrying one person.  Maybe taxis are the solution for public transport but how many Greens have any idea of that fact? How many thoughtless politicians do?

The reviewer calls Lomborg simplistic for thinking that the progress made hitherto is an indication that it will continue, but that hypothesis might be right.  Anyway, it is ahead of the Green propositions based on bigotry and ignorance that the reviewer is inclined to favour, owing mainly to his own ill-thought-out Marxist dogma.  That is certainly simplistic and haply way more clearly so.  The reviewer notes that both Lomborg and Brown think that the state should uses subsidies but in reality there is no reason to think the Green recommendation have any merit and their track record up till now suggests it best to be critical towards their folly.  Lomborg ignores nuclear wastes says the reviewer but Beckmann did not so perhaps he should read The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (1976).  The reviewer rejoices in not being convinced by Lomborg that Brown is wrong but he clearly has not done much thinking on the topic and if he decides to debate it out then he may well learn something yet.  An extension of private property will ensure that the problems the Greens go on about will be costed, thus making the polluters pay their way and bringing economy into line with ecology in a completely free market.  The idea that the price system fosters inconsideration and irresponsibility is exactly wrong.  It is the major institution of civilisation in every sense of that word.

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Omnipotent Government
Von Mises, Ludwig
"Written in 1944, this is a ferocious critique of the rise of the Total State and Total War. "
Abebooks


 

 


The anti-economist, Lester Brown, is cited from his book Eco-Economy thus: “our economy is slowly destroying its support systems, consuming its endowment of natural capital.  Demands of the expanding economy, as now structured, are surpassing the sustainable yield of eco-systems.”  This is typical Green bosh and it has been accompanied by bold predictions since 1965, all of which, like the charge of the Light Brigade, rode into certain doom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


The reviewer moans about vested interests and the fact that most research is in established areas of fossil fuels and nuclear power.  But why not research where it is likely to pay off?  The reviewer thinks that this is a reason for saying that any future expansion of renewables will not be a success for capitalism!  Well, as no post-capitalist society is due, capitalism will develop the renewables if they are to be developed at all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


The reviewer calls Lomborg simplistic for thinking that the progress made hitherto is an indication that it will continue, but that hypothesis might be right.  Anyway, it is ahead of the Green propositions based on bigotry and ignorance that the reviewer is inclined to favour, owing mainly to his own ill-thought-out Marxist dogma.