BOOKS: A Cool Head in the Hot Air ; after Decades of Ecological Gloom, a Fearless Dane Argues That the Green Emperors Have No Clothes. Should We Believe Him? Up to a Point, Says Michael McCarthy, but That's No Excuse for Complacency; the Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg Cambridge University Press, Pounds 17.95, 544pp

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There is no doubt that one of the great attractions of environmentalism, or the environmental movement as it has emerged in the four decades since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, is that it has answered the hunger for values and meaning many people increasingly feel in a post-Christian world.

If not formally a religion, environmentalism has many of the aspects of one: God might be gone, but here is a another Higher Power, the Earth, whom we reverence infinitely and before whom we realise our own arrogance and our own limitations. Environmentalism has light and darkness; it has simple right and simple wrong; it has a great community of fervent …