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1 December 2001  

Dissenting Voices

It's disturbing how dissenting voices are being squelched so thoroughly by the establishment these days. Anyone who has an opinion outside the mainstream is vilified and ridiculed mercilessly. It's a situation that makes you almost afraid to speak up in defense of alternative ideas.

I am, of course, talking about how any criticism of environmentalist orthodoxy is met with outrage and harsh denunciation from the greens. (What's that? You thought I meant something else? Sorry for the confusion.)

The list of beleaguered questioners of the status quo includes:

• Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource. As an Amazon reviewer says, "Julian Simon was vilified in his life by the vocal ecology campaigners (special and dishonorable mention should be made of the egregious Paul Erhlich, he of the Population Bomb and other wholly fictitious disasters). Why did Simon attract this venom from people who dub themselves 'scientists'? Simply this: he dared to challenge the orthodoxy that human beings are an ecological cancer that is busy raping the planet and drowning in its own filth."


• John Stossel, ABC News journalist whose specials and 20/20 pieces seek to explode accepted myths, including environmental ones. Stossel got himself into hot water again this past summer with his "Tampering With Nature" special. It included a segment showing how schools are indoctrinating kids with environmentalist ideology. Parents who'd previously given permission for their children to be interviewed retracted their consent when they realized that the show would be using their statements to criticize environmentalism rather than promote it. Predictably, Stossel has been widely condemned for his temerity. (Others see it differently.)
  
• Art Robinson and his Access To Energy newsletter. The usually iconoclastic Andrew Sullivan recently took a swipe at an AtE article describing how the "demonization of asbestos, a very useful and safe substance" contributed to an increased death toll in the WTC atrocity.

Bjorn Lomborg is merely the latest to get himself into trouble by daring to dispute the validity of the science upon which environmental alarmists base their calls for drastic controls on industry. Lomborg is an interesting case, however, because he started out as a member of that mainstream he now finds himself being pilloried by. Once a member of Greenpeace, he began writing his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, with the intent of debunking the aforementioned Julian Simon. As described in an interview with Tech Central Station's James K. Glassman, in researching environmental data in order to refute Simon's claims, Lomborg instead found that the data largely supported them. "Wait a minute," he said to himself. "Why is it that [the statistical information] just does not match up with what we usually think?"

But as a more recent TCS article points out:

Suggesting to ideological environmentalists that the natural world is not about to collapse under the assault of a greedy and heedless humanity is akin to telling a convention of Southern Baptist preachers that gambling, drinking and dancing are not sins.

The World Resources Institue and the scientific journal Nature, among others, have come out with press releases and reviews harshly critical of Lomborg's book. There is even an Anti-Lomborg website. The site features a prominent picture of Lomborg after being hit with a pie at a bookstore appearance, along with a press release that explains:

Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg's comments on climate change. "I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face," said Lynas, "in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life."

But the TCS article does a good job of showing that Lomborg's scholarship is solid and that it's the environmental establishment that is blinded by a fervor that brooks no opposition to its dogma. The religious parallel is echoed in an heroic quote from Lomborg. Asked if he considered giving up when his research started showing that his initial theories were wrong, he answers:

No, not at all. That's why I'm an academic; I want to find out what is true. It's much more fun to be right on a controversial issue than to be right on a trivial issue. It's much more fun to say the sun is in the center of the universe, when everybody thinks the Earth is the center of the universe, than going around saying the Earth is round today, when everybody knows it is round.

Let's hope that one day soon our modern-day Galileos get the respect they deserve.

02:31 PM |