Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most beautiful and, often, thoughtful reporters on energy and environmental issues. In the latest New Yorker, she turned a quite critical pen to the Super Freaky Economists with her review of SuperFreakonomics.
Kolbert opens with a discussion of the 19th century’s urban transportation..
In the eighteen-sixties, the quickest, or at least the most popular, way to get around New York was in a horse-drawn streetcar.
Kolbert highlights the mounting environmental challenge of dealing with the mounting piles of horse manure. The solution to the looming environmental catastrophe: technology.
almost overnight, the crisis passed. This was not brought about by regulation or by government policy. Instead, it was technological innovation that made the difference. With electrification and the development of the internal-combustion engine, there were new ways to move people and goods around. By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.
This story—call it the Parable of Horseshit—has been told many times, with varying aims.
Kolbert then turns to a substantive review of the book,
Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.
Even so, this isn’t what concerns Kolbert the most.
what’s most troubling about Superfreakonomics“>SuperFreakonomics isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier.
Levitt and Dubner entitled their climate chapter in an inflammatory way, attacking Al Gore. Kolbert pivots off this to discuss Gore’s new book, Our Choice, and notes:
Where Levitt and Dubner avoid climate scientists, Gore appears to have talked to just about every one of them.
Kolbert clearly lays out why Gore’s work is more worthy of respect than Levitt and Dubner, ending her review with this searing paragraph.
To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.