Bjorn Lomborg Quotes
Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.
Environmentalists counter with the fact that the corporate and government interests in growth at any cost will, and have in the past, found a loophole in every reasonable compromise that has been made. Reasonableness is only a device they use to slow regulation until they can either figure out a loophole or use their great fiscal resources to shape public thinking to soften or eliminate the regulation. Therefore some environments argue that they must be as ideological about the environment as the corporations are about their rights to profit and not compromise even when a compromise appears reasonable. Besides, if the corporations always appear to win, the public will think opposing them is futile. So when they can be beaten on something that is unreasonable, they appear weaker and encourage more environmental public activism.
Bjorn Lomborg, Danish Scholar & Writer, Director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, “Lomborg Replies”, Foreign Affairs, September / October 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
Many developing counties have much of their population whose livelihood depends on use of resources and methods which are damaging to the environment, and the majority of the citizens of the country would rather damage the environment than not develop. Some leaders observe that the United States and most affluent nations historically developed in large part by destroying much of the environment, and they have a right to develop also.
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and President of the think tank, Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), in which he argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world's rising temperature.
