Dear Colleague:

If you want a cleaner environment, promote economic growth rather than
wealth-destroying global warming lies.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
20 October 2006
Vol. 8, No. 41


300 Million and the Environment
By Joseph A. D'Agostino


Opponents of population growth almost always cite environmental concerns,
and this week's media coverage of America hitting 300 million in
population was not an exception.  I have written recently about other
myths connected to population growth, from suburban sprawl to immigration,
and this week it's time to talk about the environment.

Environmentalists' big problem is that by almost every measure, the
environment of the United States has gotten cleaner in recent decades as
her population increased by 50%.  Our population hit 200 million in 1967
and 300 million last Tuesday.  In those 40 years, America cleaned herself
up quite well.  At the same time, the supply of natural resources has
expanded, not contracted, as new discoveries and new technologies outpace
resource consumption.

Keep in mind that ever since Protestant clergyman Thomas Malthus in the
late 18th Century, doomsaying prophets have predicted that, due to the
increasing human population, the world would soon run out of some
resource, causing mass deaths and social collapse.  When Malthus launched
his jeremiads, the world's population was approximately 1 billion.  Today,
it is over 6.5 billion, and we are still waiting for the extinction of any
crucial natural resource.

Consider the following evidence for an ever-cleaner environment and more
abundant natural resources:

* In 1982, half of our nation's ozone monitoring stations detected levels
exceeding the federal health standard.  Twenty years later, only 13% did.

* Wrote Joel Schwartz in the Summer 2003 issue of Regulation, "Between
1981 and 2000, carbon monoxide (CO) declined 61%, sulfur dioxide (SO2)
50%, and nitrogen oxides (NOx)14%.  Only two among hundreds of the
nation's monitoring locations still exceed the CO and SO2 standards.  All
areas of the country meet the NOx standard.  For all three pollutants,
pollution levels are well below the EPA standards in almost all cases."
Indications are that our air has continued to get cleaner in the last
three years.  Emissions from cars and SUVs less than ten years old have
dropped to a fraction of older cars' levels.  As older cars get junked and
government-mandated clean technologies are implemented, car and SUV
emissions are expected to drop by a further 90% over the next 20 years.
Breathe deep.

* Water has become similarly cleaner, and the United States' drinking
water is generally considered the best in the world.  (I am not claiming
that our water supply is free of pollution, just that it is cleaner than
it was 30 years ago.)  Reports the EPA, "The Safe Drinking Water Act of
1974 has helped our citizens enjoy one of the safest and cleanest water
supplies in the world. . . . In the last 30 years, we have significantly
increased the number of individuals and communities receiving water that
meets public health standards.  More than 273 million people receive water
from 53,000 community water systems.  There has been a three-fold increase
in the number of contaminants regulated under the Act since it was passed
in 1974.  Close to 92% of the nation's water systems provide drinking
water that meets all public health standards, and state and federal
regulators are working to ensure that all systems meet standards."

* Worrywarts now emphasize that America's Western states could run out of
water if population growth continues.  It's true that Western water,
currently cheap even in most desert regions, could become modestly more
expensive over time as demand increases.  But running out is highly
unlikely.  California can prepare for growth in demand from 8.8 million
acre-feet annually today to the expected 11.4 million acre-feet in 2020.
For example: "It is anticipated that another 162 [water] recycling plants
will come on line this decade.  These projects, which are mostly in
southern California , are expected to produce up to 1 million acre-feet of
recycled water annually by 2020," says the Water Education Foundation.
Desalination plants, though expensive, could always provide more water for
California and other Western states near the coast.

* Proven oil reserves are at an all-time high of 1 trillion barrels.  Far
from running out, we keep finding more of it.  And in North America alone,
there are an additional 2.3 trillion barrels of oil in shale and other
forms currently too expensive to use.  Technology may soon make them
economically viable.  Plenty of alternatives to petroleum currently exist,
from liquefied coal to diesel from agricultural waste.  And nuclear power
is still there, ready to provide an almost inexhaustible supply of power
for any purpose if people ever get over their hang-ups about it.

* World food production is so efficient that many governments, including
our own, spend billions of dollars a year to pay farmers not to grow food
in order to prevent a food price collapse.  Barring some unforeseen blight
on world agriculture, there is no chance of the world's being unable to
feed itself.  Famines today are caused by distribution problems, usually
produced by war or deliberately inflicted by corrupt governments to
enhance their own power.

What of that massive political movement known as global warming, today's
fashionable secular substitute for the Biblical apocalypse?  Bored of
combating everyday environmental problems such as mercury in seafood and
hormones in drinking water, environmentalists invented something much
sexier: The imminent destruction of Earth unless you do what we say!  Why
trudge to local land-use meetings to lobby for preserving open space when
you can preach the salvation of the world like an Old Testament prophet?
One gains so much more social importance if people think you have the
answer to averting Armageddon.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but global warming theology produces the
same practical results as the socialism Western leftists have been forced
to abandon: An immense increase in the power of the political/regulatory
class and an immense reduction in the standard of living of ordinary
people.  Why have so many scientists jumped on the bandwagon?  Contrary to
popular myth, scientists are just as venal and fallible as anyone else,
and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

As Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute wrote in the Philadelphia
Inquirer on March 9, 2004, "Politics distorts science, particularly
environmental science, because 99.99% of those sciences' financial support
comes from the federal government.  Scientists distort science because
their careers depend on the money they bring to their university or their
laboratory.  Both the employees of the academy, and the academy itself,
must support a political process that results in the exaggeration of
threats.  In competition for a finite federal outlay, scientists present
their particular issues (global warming, cancer, AIDS) in the most urgent
light possible, threatening societal ruin if their work isn't funded."
And why wouldn't federal bureaucrats want to hear evidence of a massive
crisis that massively enhances their own power and budgets?

I've written about global warming hysteria before, so I will restrict
myself today to noting the following:

* The Earth's climate is always trending warmer or cooler at any given
moment.  There is no genuine evidence that any current warming trend (if
one even exists) falls outside the range of natural climatic variation.
* According to global warming hysterics' own studies, there is no
correlation between when the bulk of man-made greenhouse gases were put
into the atmosphere and warming.  In fact, temperatures declined for
decades during at least one of the most intense periods of
industrialization.
* Proponents of the Kyoto protocol, which would decimate the standards of
living of the common peoples of America and Western Europe, themselves
admit that it would have no significant effect on stopping warming.  They
want something far more radical and which would have to apply to the whole
world to work.
* The Western world continues to transfer its industrial capacity to the
Third World.  China and India, which together have over one-third of the
world's people, are rapidly industrializing and aren't going to stay mired
in poverty no matter what Western political hacks and their
bought-and-paid-for pointy-headed experts say.  Reducing the world's
overall greenhouse gas emissions is impossible.  Instead, it is as certain
as such a thing can be that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise
for decades to come, even if Al Gore becomes President of the United
States--unless affordable technologies that allow unfettered industrial
development but prevent greenhouse gas emissions are invented and then
adopted by the Third World.
* In the 1970s, it was fashionable to worry about "global cooling,"
supposedly caused by man-made pollution in the atmosphere blocking out the
sun's energy.  Fifteen years later, media-favored experts starting talking
about global warming supposedly caused by man-made pollution trapping in
the sun's energy.

There is no correlation between population growth or population density
and environmental degradation.  Instead, wealth correlates to
environmental degradation and then improvement.  When a country begins to
develop, her environment suffers.  But when she has reached a certain
level, between $3,500 and $15,000 in per capita income, her environment
begins to improve as people can afford (and demand) cleaner technologies.
And then the wealthier they get, the cleaner their environment becomes.
That's why ultra-poor subsistence-level areas, Western Europe, Canada, and
the United States all have the cleanest environments.  Getting China,
India, and other developing countries over the wealth hump is the surest
way to improve the world's environment.  Preserving America's economic and
per capita wealth growth is the best way of continuing to improve ours.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

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