ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS:
False Alarm over Environmental False Alarms
S. W. Pacala,* E. Bulte, J. A. List, S. A. Levin
A series of books, culminating most recently in B. Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, assert that environmental scientists issue too many warnings that subsequently turn out to be exaggerated or false. We evaluate this claim in the framework of a cost-benefit analysis of evidentiary standards in the environmental sciences. Is the sensitivity of our environmental alarm set too high? We conclude that marginal benefits currently far outweigh marginal costs, indicating that evidentiary standards for reporting hazards are too conservative, not too liberal.
S. W. Pacala and S. A. Levin are in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544-1003 USA. E. Bulte is in the Department of Economics, Tilburg University, Post Office Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands. J. A. List is with the President's Council of Economic Advisers; in the Agricultural and Resource Economics (AREC) Department and in the Department of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742-5535 USA; and at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pacala{at}princeton.edu
