Review of
Environmentalism? Green?
Bjorn Lomborg: The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) 
Magnificent one-volume handbook-[Feb 2007: found this book while looking up views contrary to global warming CO2 story, including Nigel Lawson's piece. The book was variously described as massively impressive and dealing with multiple topics, to the exact opposite. Online is a collection of reviews published in Scientific American, and a reply by Lomborg, which they (S.A.) wouldn't publish].
2001 book, updated from a Danish book of 1998. As far as I can tell, there's been no new edition. Lomborg states that he will put addenda and corrections and replies to critics online, something cutting edge at the time. In fact he seems not to do this much now; his current website only replies to one person. Perhaps Lomborg got bored with controversy, after one Danish group overruled another which had castigated him; and after 'Scientific American', a joke publication, refused to allow him to reply. Incidentally Lomborg's voice is unaccented American English; so much so I thought he might be American.
Hefty 500-page volume, with endnotes all numbered sequentially. (If it's updated, I'd recommend new endnote numbers could be interleaved to leave the originals - 2345A style).
This is a magnificent one-volume handbook. It has double columns, graphs, with occasional half-tone grey boxes for commentaries. It's arranged by topics, and the writing style is spare and condensed (apart from historical material, usually selected to disparage the past, or at least deflate romanticised notions). When I say condensed, judge from: the 'Food and Hunger' section is about 8 pages. 'Forests' take about 7 pages, Energy and Water about 17 and 11. Garbage - think of Pete Seeger singing 'Garbage' about 1960 - about 4 pages. The longest is Global Warming - about 66 pages. Lomborg (and his helpers - spare a thought for people asked to e.g. check on deaths from cancer, related to foodstuffs etc etc) does a terrific job in trying to be rational. It's not just money; it's how things should be done. If a village spends its time doing this and that, their actions make little difference. If billions of people do things, it makes sense to try to assess their actions.
The exception to spare writing is the introductory material on things like statistics and fundamentals; he's not very successful in explaining where people get their ideas from, including the psychology of probabilities - overestimating unlikely events, and tending to discount likely ones. He does his best to tackle biases in research institutes. (NB for connoisseurs of this sort of thing, Lomborg hadn't twigged that AIDS is a fraud).
His sources are all fairly recent, and also fairly official. Popular books are underrepresented. I checked my own mini-library: out of 55 titles, from the 1960s on, only two are listed by Lomborg, who therefore has ruled out e.g. John Maddox, Barbara Ward, and Edward Goldsmith. I think Lomborg understates the huge swell and push from whole groups of post-WW2 authors, which must have been the main reason for the horror his book inspired. (See the one-star reviews!)
There are some problems: one is, he may well have missed out topics. I found 'desertification' is almost completely missing. (A 1995 book by Julian Morris, including the 'Myth of Man-Made Deserts', is strikingly similar in approach to Lomborg). Lomborg doesn't mention Lake Baikal, a huge inland lake, where the Soviet Union build a woodpulp mill - maybe they stopped, though. There's not much on radiation, I think probably rightly. He doesn't look at effects of wars, possibly because his sources are official: defoliation and resultant birth defects in Vietnam, for example, are largely censored even in supposedly accurate reference books. The possible link of diesel engine exhaust with lung cancer, and the possible link of very fine particles with asthma, aren't mentioned. He also assesses insecticides purely as possible cancer causing agents; organophosphates, having effects on the nervous system, *may* be a cause of multiple sclerosis and/or Alzheimers.
However there are plenty of subsidiary topics: oestrogen mimicking chemicals, quite a long section on GM foods (and flowers), nitrites, bird deaths, lead in petrol.
Another problem is foreseeing supplies of raw materials. Lomborg's presentation is a bit confusing; he notes that estimates of reserves current at any moment, are liable to future revision upward, depending on the value of the material. Tricky thing to graph dynamically. I don't find this entirely convincing; but it might well turn out to be correct. And Lomborg is a bit bullish about fertilisers.
There are quite a few statistical issues mostly to do with trying to find some sort of index number to represent complicated things: for example, Africa unlike China or India or Brazil is at present a patchwork of countries, so it tends to be overlooked as a possibly unit area. Another example is calories in food: maybe extra calories are unpalatable and uneatable?
The main problem is that he's very first world; as the emphasis on prices of raw materials shows. If the price of say petrol/gas stays stable, this still means billions of impoverished people can't afford it. So when he says things are getting better, this may only mean that someone in the huge slum of Dharavi may end up eating 20% more food at the end of life than at the start. He does not consider such questions as: is it possible for say ten billion people to all have a house, car, and electricity, as the optimists seem to think. Lomborg happily accepts the idea that population from now on will taper off; the UN has considered it and says so. Incidentally it seems to me Malthus was wrong; people died of illnesses, rather than the more spectacular famines.
Another issue Lomborg steers away from is how is it possible that lies have been thrust into circulation by the western media. These of course are mostly owned by Jews, so presumably they are following some Jewish agenda.
Lomborg believes in 'Global Warming'; I don't know if he knows one influence, a worthless computer model of the British Meteorological Office. At any rate, his advocacy seems odd, as it's rather obviously a scam, since China has many many coal fired power stations and yet is spared taxation.
Anyway - on the whole highly recommended. There are no pictures - what self-control he must have not to put in a satellite shot of Brazil, or some icebergs!