Posted by Jonathan Adler:
Ecologists vs. Economists:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_16-2007_09_22.shtml#1190207074
In a [1]column discussing the debate over [2]Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It
(which I reviewed [3]here), John Tierney notes that some of Lomborg's
sharpest critics have not been the best prognosticators themselves:
Yes, Dr. Lomborg thinks like an economist instead of a climate
scientist, and he doesn�t have a degree in climatology. His argue
that his lack of climatological expertise makes him an unreliable
guide for foreseeing the consequences of a warmer world, but I
think these critics are ignoring history. They claim to be taking
in the big picture, to be foreseeing great trends over the next
century, but they�re missing one of the most valuable lessons from
the past half century: when it comes to getting the big picture
right, when it comes to preparing for environmental catastrophes,
economists have a better track record than the scientists who
specialize in analyzing environmental trends.
Tierney notes that one of the experts who attacked Lomborg's Skeptical
Environmentalist in the pages of Scientific American, John Holdren,
conveniently ignored his own prior arguments on resource scarcity.
He reviewed Dr. Lomborg�s chapter on energy, which reviewed the
history of energy scares and predicted there would be not dire
shortages and dramatic price increases in the future. Dr. Holdren
began his critique by complaining that Dr. Lomborg was �asking the
wrong question� because environmentalists had known for decades
that there was no danger of energy being in short supply. This
struck me as as odd bit of revisionist history, given both the
�energy crisis� rhetoric of the 1970s and Dr. Holdren�s own bet
that resources would become more scarce. Then, in the rest of the
critique, Dr. Holdren faulted Dr. Lomborg for not paying enough
attention to the reasons that there could be future problems with
energy supplies.
I and others found Holdren's criticism particularly amusing because
Scientific American itself had recently published articles forecasting
the imminent depletion of energy supplies. When challenged on this
point, [4]SciAm's editor tried to explain that the articles were about
the depletion of "affordable" energy, not energy supplies themselves
-- yet this is the precise argument that Lomborg addressed in his
book.
References
1. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/economists-v-ecologists/
2.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGUxMGMyNzBkZjA4MTVjMWQyYmM0MzM0M2I3NDg1ZTg=
3.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGUxMGMyNzBkZjA4MTVjMWQyYmM0MzM0M2I3NDg1ZTg=
4. http://home.earthlink.net/~jhadler/sciam.html
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