Cool It!

From the Wall Street Journal, excerpts of Kimberly Strassel's review of Bjorn Lomberg's new book, Cool It, on inappropriate solutions to whatever global warming problem we have...

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers...On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.

He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.

Mr. Lomborg starts by doing what he does best: presenting a calm analysis of what today's best science tells us about global warming and its risks...

Mr. Lomborg's cost-benefit approach won't sit well with leftists who see global-warming programs as a proxy for other goals (say, reducing "materialism"). And his calls for taxpayer-funded R&D investments won't sit well with small-government conservatives who may be skeptical of global warming in the first place. But his analysis is smart and refreshing, and it may bridge at least one divide in our too divided culture. The dog and cat lovers will never get along.