Brendan O'Neill: Academic Orthodoxy Closes Ranks Against Bjorn Lomborg
Famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist—in which he argued that, yes, climate change is a real thing, but, no, cutting back on economic growth won't help—Bjorn Lomborg has been a brilliant piece of grit in one-eyed green thinking for more than a decade.
The Australian government, headed by the semi-skeptical Prime Minister Tony Abbott, decided to offer a base to Lomborg for his greenish but pro-growth analysis and agitation. It asked him to bring his Copenhagen Consensus Center, the U.S.-based, Danish-funded not-for-profit think-tank he's been running since 2006, Down Under. It would now be based at the University of Western Australia.
Well, that was the plan, writes Brendan O'Neill. But it was scuppered by what can only be described as a ramshackle modern-day Inquisition, which found Lomborg guilty of the crime of denial—not of God, but of climate-change alarmism—and had him cast out of UWA.
