West Germany's 'Greens' fade as opponents go environmentalist

A tale of two Germanys

Editor—The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of the end of communism in eastern Europe and in eastern Germany. As McKee and Fister point out, certain constellations of epidemiological and demographic variables characterise the resultant process of political and economic transition: low or even decreasing life expectancy (especially for men) and higher prevalences of alcoholis...

The Skeptical Environmentalist

E R R Y E LL IS M in d en P ic tu re s conflict—they deserve full scrutiny. With that in mind, the book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn’t. As the book’s subtitle—Measuring the Real State of the World—indicates, Lomborg’s intentio...

Environmentalist of the Poor

The Berkeley Nobel Laureate George Akerlof once remarked of his fellow economists that if you showed them something that worked in practice, they would not be satisfied unless it was also shown to work in theory. This insight explains much about the dismal science, including why, as late as 1980, the M I T economist Lester Thurow could magisterially write: “If you look at the countries that are...

Genes, greens, and homocysteine.

Hopes fade

fossil fuels, however, would require the need to look beyond wood. Choren Industries claims that 20 million tons of straw are ploughed back into the soil each year, which could be turned into four million tons of BTL diesel, covering 14 per cent of current diesel demand. A further three to six million tons per year could be obtained from wood grown on currently unused agricultural land. Accordi...