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Our friend the Reverend Paul Heyne was an unusual economist. He was an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church and earned a Ph.D. in ethics and social thought from the University of Chicago. His best-known work, The Economic Way of Thinking, went through nine editions between 1973 and Heyne's death in 2000. His approach puts people before profits. Paul became a celebrity (by academic standards) in Eastern Europe after the revolutions of 1989, and The Economic Way of Thinking sold 200,000 copies in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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I had the pleasure of meeting with Paul at the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment's (FREE's) programs on environmental policy analysis. Paul understood that all policy questions require choosing among competing values. The environment is no exception. Paul taught us that good intentions alone are insufficient to guide our decision-making. Consider climate change. Are we willing to give up inexpensive fossil fuel energy? Does climate change demand drastic and dramatic action now? If so, what are the costs and how do they compare to the benefits? These are the questions that drive Bjørn Lomborg's new book Cool It.
 Paul would be comfortable with the themes that Lomborg explores in Cool It. We have limited resources and face many opportunities to use them productively, for ourselves and for others. Here's a simple truth: The resources expended to combat climate change are not available for other beneficial projects, such as eradicating malaria, killer of 2 million people each year, 90 percent of whom are children under five. Those who believe climate change trumps all else ignore the reality that we face tradeoffs among competing values.
Lomborg burst onto the environmental stage in 2001 with his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. (In 2004, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.) In that book, Lomborg examined the "Litany," i.e., persistent pending claims of eco-catastrophes. He was inspired by a 1997 article in Wired magazine, "The Doomslayer," which profiled economist Julian Simon. The article began by describing the "Litany":
Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse … . We're trashing the planet … . The limits to growth are … upon us … . Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.
It's both unfortunate and instructive that these views still underpin much of modern environmentalism. The environmental movement has mastered the art of crisis entrepreneurship, and Lomborg's book was a direct assault on this carefully crafted narrative, which has been nurtured over decades, abetted by a compliant media, and digested by a largely scientifically illiterate public. The reaction from the environmental establishment was swift and ugly.
Critics demanded Lomborg's editor at Cambridge University Press be fired and that "all right-thinking scientists … shun the press." The past president of the American Academy of Science wondered how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." (The manuscript did pass peer review. The reviewers unanimously recommended publication.) Scientific American asserted the book was "rife with careless mistakes." In eleven pages of vicious ad hominem attacks (e.g., comparing Lomborg to a Holocaust denier), the magazine came up with nine factual errors. When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he put the critics' essays on his webpage and answered in detail, Scientific American threatened him with copyright infringement.
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