FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bj?rn Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace, challenges widely held beliefs that the world environmental situation is getting worse and worse in his new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues that feature prominently in headline news around the world, including pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect, and documents that the world has actually improved. He supports his arguments with over 2500 footnotes, allowing readers to check his sources.

SYNOPSIS

Everyday, various opinions are expressed in the media regarding doubts over the Kyoto agreement and the international community's ethical responsibility to the future of the environment. In his controversial new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Bjorn Lomborg, offers a fresh perspective to the debate and challenges the view that we are destroying our planet irrevocably by exploding the widely propagated myth tat the state of the environment continues to spiral downwards beyond our control.

Lomborg investigates a variety of issues, including:

Global Climate Change - Are we dealing with the problem in the right way? Resources - Are we living on borrowed time? GM Foods - Diaster or blessing? Waste - Are we running out of space? Forests - Are we losing them?

Lomborg answers such questions and stresses the need for clear-headed prioritization of resources to tackle real, not imagined, problems. The Skeptical Environmentalist is the result of extensive analysis of a wide range of statistical data and serves as a useful juxtaposition to the headline-grabbing examples used by advocacy groups and the media.

FROM THE CRITICS

Matt Ridley - The Daily Telegraph (London)

...he has put his conclusions in a remarkable book, probably the most important book on the environment ever written. Its importance lies partly in its relentless statistics. With 173 charts, nine tables and a staggering 2,930 footnotes, The Skeptical Environmentalist will be a source of reference for years to come. But it is also a readable, accessible and simple account of the state of the world, told as much in the illuminating charts as in the text itself. And it is a fascinating polemic, too.

Economist

This is one of the most valuable books on public policy not merely on environmental policy to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Bjorn Lomborg is an outstanding representative of the new breed of political scientists-mathematically-skilled and computer-adept. In this book he shows himself also to be a hard-headed, empirically-oriented analyst. Surveying a vast amount of data and taking account of a wide range of more and less informed opinion about environmental threats facing the planet, he comes to a balanced assessment of which ones are real and which over-hyped.  — Professor Jack Hirshleifer, Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles

Mark Ridley

The Skeptical Environmentalist should be read by every environmentalist so that the appaling errors of fact the environmental movement as made in the past are not repeated. A brilliant and powerful book.  — Matt Ridley, author of Genome

At last a book that gives the environment the scientific analysis it deserves, and provides understanding of the problem, the risks and the solutions. Essential reading.  — Professor Lewis Wolpert, Department of Anatomy and Biology, University College London