Dr Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician at the University of Denmark, Aarhus, was a Keynote Speaker at the AIE National Conference, in Sydney  in November 2001.
 
Dr Lomborg has achieved celebrity status following his invitation to write an essay for The Economist, which presages his book, just published: The Skeptical Environmentalist.  He wrote this book after he sought, as a self-confessed holder of "left-wing Greenpeace views", to debunk the position of the American economist Julian Simon, who has long doubted many of the claims of the more radical environmentalists.  These include the notions that we are exhausting the world's natural resources, the world's population is exploding, biodiversity is seriously threatened and pollution, not least by greenhouse gases, is out of control.
 
Dr Lomborg's research was exhaustive and comprehensive.  The result: he ended up agreeing with Simon.  Judging from his piece in The Economist, he is particularly critical of the Kyoto Protocol, seeing this as being extremely expensive and ultimately counterproductive in terms of its stated objective, the limiting of atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
 
His message in an energy context is an important one for Australia, given our stake in coal mining and export, the supply of LNG, and our competitive advantages in energy-intensive industries such as aluminium smelting.  He is not specifically doubting global warming, just the Kyoto-prescribed cure.
 
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