Bj¿rn Lomborg has posted on his Web page a long response to the critiques that appeared in Scientific American of four of the chapters in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, including my critique of his chapter on energy. No part of my critique escapes rebuttal. Perhaps Lomborg felt obliged to use all of the submissions he received in response to the appeal for help he broadcast to a long e-mail list after the Scientific American critiques appeared.¹ It is instructive that he apparently did not feel he could manage an adequate response by himself. (In this, at least, he was correct. But he could not manage it with help, either.) Just as the book itself betrays the seeming inability of its author to discriminate sensible arguments from nonsensical ones, so also does the posted response to my critique suggest that Lomborg just tossed in, uncritically, whatever replies popped into his head or into his e-mail "in" box.

As my review for Scientific American acknowledged, Lomborg¿s energy chapter does contain a number of propositions that are correct (such as the observation that there is large potential in renewable energy sources and energy-efficiency improvements). The problem with the chapter--and the rest of the book as well--is that, as a famously brief review of a long paper submitted to a professional journal once put it, "What is right in this document is not new, and what is new is not right."² The book is in fact a seemingly random admixture of points that are right and relevant (but not new), points that are right but not relevant (and still not new), and points that are wrong. Notwithstanding that the author is said to have been trained in statistics, the book shows no sign of the use of appropriate statistical conventions and methods--or any other systematic approach--to distinguish what is right and relevant from what is not.

Lomborg¿s rebuttal to my critique of his energy chapter is of even lower quality than the chapter itself, in that there is almost nothing in the rebuttal that is both right and relevant, beyond the two places where he concedes that the critique caught him in a mistake. Even there, he protests predictably that the mistakes are modest in number and unimportant in the context of the sweep of his argument. But, as will be shown here, the mistakes caught in my review are both more numerous and more important than he concedes. It must be added that the space allotted for reviews is always limited, as it was in this instance in Scientific American, making it impossible to mention, never mind to explain, every mistake that has been noticed. It should also be understood that, even if space were not limited, few reviewers would consider it their responsibility to explain every error that a deeply flawed work contains, once they have explained enough of them to establish beyond doubt that the author is not competent in the subjects he is addressing.

In what follows here, I identify some (again, not all!) of what specifically is wrong or irrelevant in Lomborg¿s rebuttal to my critique of his energy chapter, under the following headings: misrepresenting what I wrote in my critique; obfuscating what he wrote in the book; persistent conceptual confusions; offering vagueness where specificity was required; and offering illusory precision where only approximations are possible.

Misrepresenting what I wrote

In the first paragraph of my critique, I note that Lomborg spends most of his energy chapter attacking a view that few if any environmentalists hold ¿ namely, that the world is running out of energy. I then write:

"What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy but that we are running out of environment¿that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil, and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the impacts of energy extraction, transport, transformation, and use. They also argue that we are running out of the ability to manage other risks of energy supply, such as the political and economic dangers of over-dependence on Middle East oil and the risk that nuclear energy systems will leak weapons materials and expertise into the hands of proliferation-prone nations or terrorists."