Skeptical guy

The Daily Reckoning - 14 August 2002
The Skeptical Environmentalist
By Bill Bonner

"Nature would stand by unmoved at the destruction of the entire human race." - The Marquis de Sade in Marat/Sade

"I've got to admit, it's getting better. It's getting better all the time." - The Beatles

Lester Brown is a humbug and a fool.

Over the years, Mr. Brown has sounded the alarm over and over again, warning that the world is going to hell. Fire, flood, famine, thirst...Mr. Brown's hallucination leaves nothing out:

"Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, range-lands are deteriorating, rivers are running dry, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying, and plant and animal species are disappearing," fantasizes Brown's Worldwatch Institute.

Brown preaches environmental calamity every time he steps up to the pulpit. A typical sermon invokes eternal damnation and all the torments of Beelzebub himself - the fiery furnace of global warming...sea-levels rising fast enough to worry Noah...and two-headed beasts with tails, born as a result of chemical pollutants.

Brown is not alone. Paul Ehrlich and a whole industry of Jeremiahs predict that unless modern civilization repents soon - the earth is finished.

But why worry about it? According to Brown and Paul Ehrlich you'll be dead of cancer, starvation and thirst long before rising tides float the bloated bodies of Ted Kennedy and Trent Lott out of their opulent offices along the Potomac.

In Paul Ehrlich's '74 book, The End of Affluence, he and his wife Anne wrote:

"It seems certain that energy shortages will be with us for the rest of the century, and that before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity in which many things besides energy will be in short supply... Such diverse commodities as food, fresh water, copper, and paper will become increasingly difficult to obtain and thus much more expensive...starvation among people will be accompanied by starvation of industries for the materials they require."

In the 1970s the scare-mongers were already warning of climate change. But, it was global cooling that worried them. A 1975 Newsweek Magazine article entitled "The Cooling World," told readers that "meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity."

Newsweek, Ehrlich, and Brown, were wrong about everything. Farmers produced more food than ever before. Commodities became so abundant that by the time the century ended many were selling for record low prices. In China, calorie intake per capita doubled in the last 30 years. And in America, rare is the man who starves to death in 2002, while there are enough fat ones to elect a president.

We recall these things, dear reader, not to embarrass the poor humbugs in the environmental industry...nor even to amuse ourselves. Instead, we write today with good news: The world as we know it will be around long after we are gone.

We had a copy of Bjorn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, with us on our trip to Aspen; we'll now give you the essential summary. Lomborg, a professor of Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, so upset the environmentalist's end-of-the-world industry that the man received death threats. We figured he must have something interesting to say. He did.

"Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape," began an article in TIME magazine two years ago. Another TIME piece told readers that "for more than 40 years, earth has been sending out distress signals..." yet "the decline of the Earth's ecosystems has continued unabated."

What "everyone knows" is usually wrong, we've noticed. For in order for everyone to know it, an idea has to be reduced to such a low common denominator that the sum sinks below zero. Whatever insight was contained in the original idea is stripped out so that the husk - light and portable - can be carried around like a campaign slogan.

An idea taken up by a mob of people is almost sure to be as empty-headed as a journalist and usually as dishonest as a psychologist. Environmentalism is no different. Flogged by Brown and Ehrlich, sensible people were soon eschewing disposable diapers and sorting their trash so it could be recycled. (Your editor recalls the smell of diaper pails in his bathroom in the hot Baltimore summers).

In nearby Washington, D.C., residents were encouraged to separate their trash even though it was all tossed into the same common landfill on the grounds that sorting - like praying, we imagine - was good for the soul.

People were even urged to alter their family plans by a puerile jingo - "2 for 2" - in order to avoid crowding the steppes of North Dakota or the back alleys of Baltimore with their own children.

And now comes Lomborg with the good news:

"We are not running out of energy or natural resources. There will be more and more food per head of the world's population. Fewer and fewer people are starving. In 1900, we lived for an average of 30 years; today we live for 67. According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the last 50 years than we did in the preceding 500, and it has been reduced in practically every country."

When will the earth run out of energy? Not for 5,000 years, says Lomborg. When will the globe become so crowded with humans that it can no longer support them all? Probably never, estimates Lomborg, pointing out that if current trends continue, in 100 years, most of the earth will have no more people than it has now. The huge mega-cities will get bigger...but the Alps, the Great Plains and other rural areas will remain about the same.

"The forests have not been eradicated," Lomborg writes. "Since WWII the global forest coverage has been almost constant." And, "water is a plentiful and renewable resource."

All the garbage produced in the U.S. during the entire 21st century could be put in a single little corner of Woodward Country, Oklahoma, he says, taking up less than 26% of the county's surface area.

And what about global warming? Lomborg thinks the earth really is getting hotter. But it "will not decrease food production," he guesses, "it will probably not increase storminess or the frequency of hurricanes, it will not increase the impact of malaria or indeed cause more deaths." For much of the world, global warming might even be a good thing, he concludes.

All in all, this strange old ball is in pretty good shape.

Bill Bonner, taking two weeks off to enjoy it.