In Australia, for John Quiggin’s leading enviro blog, a special guest named Charles Young brilliantly deconstructs prominent climate change-dismisser Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg is a statistician who convenes conferences in Europe to argue that climate change is a trivial problem compared to hunger and AIDS in Africa. (Though, as John Quiggin points out, he wasn’t outspoken about aid to Africa until he decided climate change was getting too much attention.)

Following his let’s-emit-like-crazy advice, the Wall Street Journal in an editorial last summer declared that global warming was "a problem that’s a few centuries off."

I’d say it’s the WSJ editorial page that’s a few centuries off.  They seem to be stuck in the 19th.

But never mind. Young’s is a terrific piece that takes on Lomborg point by point.

Here’s the crux:

Ought I to stop smoking? Or would it be better to donate some money to Oxfam? Certainly the immediate increase in global welfare would be much greater if I were to give some money to Oxfam. So I’ll have another cigarette.

Most of us will have no difficulty in seeing the flaw in this line of reasoning – and will recognise a type of casuistry at which addicts excel. However, if we substitute “tackle HIV/Aids” for “give money to Oxfam” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions for “stop smoking”, and if we get a number of eminent economists to confirm that the first gives more immediate benefits, then we have the message being conveyed by Bjorn Lomborg (“Climate Change can Wait”, 2/7/06) – and most of us are too overawed by the Nobel prize-winners to spot the flaw. This message, as Lomborg states it, explicitly suggests that inaction on climate change is acceptable for the present. Moreover it implicitly suggests – to those who are severely addicted, or very stupid, or a bit of both – that it is even misguided to take action on climate change, since doing so might get in the way of the other worthy goals.

The most entertaining of all nature writers is surely Ed Abbey, a pickup truck novelist and philosopher who pointedly refused to adopt "the lofty stance, the wise man’s tone" when it came to his desire to save the planet from rape and pillage.

Orion magazine has just published a sheaf of letters from Abbey not previously seen in print, and they’re characteristically delightful; funny, sharp, brilliant. He even snaps at fellow writers like Annie Dillard and Edward Hoagland who write lovingly of the wilderness, but refuse to get out and defend it:

I despise the role of guru, or leader, or remote philosopher, earning easy money writing the right thing while the “troops,” the hundreds and thousands who actually stand before the bulldozers, spike the trees, lobby the politicos, write the tedious letters, lick stamps, staple leaflets, organize committees, attend meetings, hire lawyers and sometimes go to jail, do what they do with no fame, no public credit, certainly little or no pay (except Sierra Club bureaucrats etc), and no reward but the sense of having opposed the rich and powerful in the name of something more ancient and beautiful than human greed and human increase. The writer’s job is to write, and write the truth—but he also has the moral obligation to get down in the dust and the sweat and lend not only his name but his voice and body to the tiresome contest.

Abbey is most famous for his comic novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang," which some consider an apologist for what is now known in law enforcement circles as "eco-terrorism." In a l982 letter to the editor of the journal "Environmental Ethics," Abbey defends himself and his book:

The book does not condone terrorism in any form. Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence—for a political and/or economic purpose—carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism.

Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery, which is being used (e.g.) to deprive human beings of their rightful work (as in the case of Ned Ludd and his mates); sabotage (le sabot dropped in a spinning jenny)—for whatever purpose—has never meant and has never implied the use of violence against living creatures.

The characters in Monkey Wrench engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love against industrial terrorism.

They do this only when it appears that in certain cases and places all other means of defense of land and life have failed and that force—the final resort—becomes morally justified. Not only justified but a moral obligation, as in the defense of one’s own life, one’s own family, one’s own home, one’s own nature, against a violent assault.

It’s a strong argument, with one weakness: Sometimes environmental sabotage–such as spiking trees–can endanger not just "industry" but workers. (Abbey, in his confrontational  way, probably took on this objection somewhere, but if so, I haven’t found it.)

But in Sebastopol, a new "monkey-wrenching" tactic has emerged, requiring no tool more dangerous than a flower. On the site of a huge proposed development, a former elementary school principal found an endangered species, the Sebastopol meadowfoam, flowering merrily. This brought the development to a halt. The developer accused the former principal of illegally planting the flower. The principal, leader of a local preservation group, firmly denied the charge. California state wildlife officials, according to this AP story, say the meadowfoam did appear to have been planted last year, but after digging it up and relocating it, the flower returned this year, apparently from seed. Meanwhile the development has been halted, and negotiations with town officials resumed, according to a more colorful story from Marketplace, titled "Foamgate."

Abbey would love this. It’s a delightful story, awaiting a new comic novelist to fully bring it to life…and it’s a wonderful little plant. Three cheers for the Sebastopol meadowfoam!