AN Appeal to Reason

February 25, 2008
Former British energy secretary and chancellor of the exchequer Lawson succinctly lambastes global warming “hysteria” in this slim book. To Lawson, “save the planet” is “the most ludicrous slogan ever coined”; Al Gore's “tendentious” documentary, An Inconvenient Truth
, is a fanciful “cherry-picking of phenomena illustrating a predetermined alarmist narrative;” and the “new religion” of environmentalism “contains a grain of truth—and a mountain of nonsense.” Lawson's tone is occasionally shrill, but his insights are keen and refreshingly iconoclastic. He argues that “green protectionism,” the movement to restrict importing produce because of the incurred “food miles,” damages the global economy more than global warming ever could, and “the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world.” Lawson reserves his deepest contempt for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-winner with Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which he dubs an unethical, politically correct pressure group whose most recent report misrepresents the reality of man-made greenhouse gas emissions and fails to embrace the potential of humans to adapt to climate change. The conservative (and Conservative) author's contrarian synthesis of political thinking and economic analysis is notably well argued and well written—and sure to raise the hackles of those on the other side of the issue.