Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 12:34:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Competitive Enterprise Institute To: Recipients of the CEI List Subject: CEI-List: True State of the Planet ENVIRONMENTALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY By Ronald Bailey [Note: The following essay is the prologue to the just-released CEI book "The True State of the Planet," edited by Ronald Bailey and published by the Free Press, a division of Simon $ Schuster (ISBN: 0-02-874010-6).] In 1970, the first Earth Day brought together more than 20 million Americans to launch the first wave of the modern environmental movement. Since then, public concern about the state of the planet has steadily grown. The membership rolls and budgets of leading environmental activist organizations have swollen by millions. The federal government has adopted thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Cities and industries are spending billions every year to clean up pollution. Activity on the international level has also increased. In 1992, leaders from more than 170 countries gathered at Rio de Janeiro for the first Earth Summit at which sweeping treaties dealing with global climate and biodiversity were signed. And in September 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development, sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund was held in Cairo. Again, more than 170 national governments adopted a sweeping twenty-year Program of Action, which, among other things, aims to restrain global population to a target of 7.27 billion by the year 2015. The first wave has scored some major successes in its twenty-five-year history: in the Western developed world, air and water are much cleaner; automobiles are far cleaner to operate; belching smokestacks are far fewer and generally more efficient than ever before. Clearly developed societies can come together to clean up much of the pollution produced by industries and cities. But the first wave has also turned out to be spectacularly wrong about certain things. The good news is that many of the looming threats predicted in the early days of the environmental movement turned out to be exaggerated. For example, the global famines expected to occur in the 1970s never happened. Fears that the United States and Europe would cut down all of their forests have been belied by increases in forest area. Global warming, despite so many continuing reports, does not appear to be a major problem. And it turns out that the damage to human health and the natural world caused by pesticides is far less than Rachel Carson feared it would be when she wrote "Silent Spring" in 1962. It is inevitable, perhaps, that the first wave would begin to run its course and give way to a new strategy. The problem with the past twenty-five years of environmentalism has been a simple one: a failure of theory. From Rachel Carson to the Club of Rome ("The Limits to Growth") to Paul Ehrlich ("The Population Bomb"), the leaders of the first wave all operated under a false assumption, Malthusianism. In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus in "An Essay on Population" argued that humanity has had a propensity to reproduce far faster than the food supply could increase. Thus, some portion of humanity would always be condemned to starvation. First-wave environmentalists embraced this notion, arguing that humanity and technological civilization are heedlessly and profligately using up the earth's resources. They liken our situation to that of deer uncontrolled by disease or predators whose burgeoning numbers will quickly overgraze their pasturage, bringing starvation to all. But they fail to take into account that people, unlike deer, can react and adjust their behavior using their intelligence to increase resources and modifying their activities to avert Malthusian disasters. In short, if the earth's population was once 1 billion and the earth's forests had been cut, say, 10 percent, it is a mistake to assume that 2 billion people would cut 20 percent or that 6 billion people would cut 60 percent. Instead, people have figured out how to use less wood. Malthus was wrong. This failure of theory has been compounded by failures of information gathering. Modern environmentalists have learned to question the efficacy of computer models to help set priorities and guide policies. The famous limits-to-growth computer model of the 1970s, for example,, has been drastically wrong in its predictions. Atmospheric models designed to estimate the effects of the refrigerants called chlorofluorocarbons on stratospheric ozone completely failed to predict the development of the Antarctic "ozone hole." More recently, the original global climate models that predicted significant global warming as a result of higher levels of human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere appear to have overestimated potential increases in global temperatures by as much as an order of magnitude. The earth's atmosphere has actually cooled by 0.10 degrees Celsius since 1979, according to highly accurate satellite-based atmospheric temperature measurements. Taking into account the effects of volcanoes and El Nino, scientists calculate that global temperatures are rising at only 0.09 degrees centigrade per decade -- or less than 1 degree centigrade per century. This increase is far less than the earlier predictions that sparked so many apocalyptic pronouncements. But even with accurate information and a recognition that behavior in the past cannot be extrapolated to the future, a major leap is required to exit the problems of the first wave, for hidden deep within Malthus's assumption about behavior is an even worse assumption about how to change it. Malthus assumed that past behavior would continue in the future. And if behavior does not change on its own, it can be changed only by force -- by direct orders from above, as, for example, with gasoline rationing. Americans were ordered to use less oil in the 1970s, and with disastrous results. People hoarded gas; they formed longer gas lines out of fear, and the energy "crisis" was thereby made worse. And consider the case of a dioxin-contaminated waste site in Arkansas. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) required the owner to burn the dioxin-contaminated wastes in an incinerator, but in a classic catch-22 situation, the incinerator cannot meet the EPA's standards for destroying dioxin. Consequently, the incinerator produces two barrels of dioxin- laced ash for every barrel that is burned. Under federal law, this ash cannot be put in a landfill, so it is stored in a $300,000 building, apparently forever. The greatest problem with the first wave has been its solutions, which involve the top-down imposition of laws and regulations, some of which, in turn, impair the capacity of people to change their behavior on their own. This seems paradoxical, but it is all to often true. A final problem with the first wave has been its priorities. For many pollutants, the industrialized countries have reached the point that Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer calls the "problem of the last 10%." We have taken care of the first 90 percent of the pollutants, but cleaning up the last 10 percent is exceedingly difficult and expensive It is at this point of diminishing returns that we must consider whether devoting resources to cleaning up the last 10 percent is better for the natural environment than directing those resources to other problems. Resources are being poured into areas that pose little harm to either the natural world or to human beings, while other more critical problems receive relatively little attention. Unfortunately, many decisions made at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the Cairo population conference were based on outdated scientific, demographic, and economic information. The Global Climate Change Treaty's call for a massive and costly shift in the world's economy from fossil fuels is based in part on a belief that the world's average temperature has increased significantly in recent years. It has not. Also, total fertility rates are dropping much faster than the negotiators at the United Nation's Cairo population conference assumed they are. And closer to home, the so-called Super-fund program is, at the cost of billions of dollars, forcing the cleanup of waste sites that scientists say pose no real risks to people or the natural environment. Meanwhile, our most serious instances of environmental degradation have proved hard to fix by law. The deplorable state of global fisheries is a case in point. Overfishing results in the all-too-familiar problem know as the "tragedy of the commons." The analogy to overfishing is overgrazing of lands held in common. When land is open to anyone who wants to use it, the tragedy of the commons in an almost inevitable result. In the case of commonly held grazing land, herdsmen have no incentives to restrain the number of cows grazing on the commons. In fact, the reverse is true. If a herdsman does not put a cow on the land, his neighbor will, and thus reap the benefits of raising an additional cow. This "logic" leads inexorably to overgrazing and the eventual destruction of the common pastureland. This is what has happened to many of the world's fisheries. First-wave environmentalists fail to realize that the problem lies in the commons, not in the herdsmen. They typically want to regulate the herdsmen instead of abolishing the commons. History shows that the better way to avoid the tragedy of the commons is through privatizing resource ownership. If individual herdsmen (or fishermen) can fence in portions of the commons and secure ownership rights and responsibilities, their incentives to protects the land (or sea) from overgrazing dramatically increase. This is precisely why second-wave environmentalists propose that private owners, individual or group, commercial or noncommercial, offer the best defense against environmental degradation. Simply by protecting their property -- trees, animals, fish, grazing areas, rivers -- they incidently protect the earth for the rest of us. While governments and interest groups spend a lot of time fighting about every last drop of "toxic" waste, the ecological systems of ocean fisheries have deteriorated far more than any damage that landfills have caused.Creative thinking must be devoted to figuring out what arrangements and institutions can successfully restore these imperiled oceanic ecosystems. As another example, indoor air pollution in the form of smoke and carbon monoxide -- the result of burning bio-fuels like wood and dung in houses in the developing world -- is one of the chief global threats to human health. It is also one of the least discussed. It is time for environmentalism's second wave. Second-wave environmentalists must recognize that people modify their activities to avert environmental crises and disasters. Humanity's growing store of knowledge about resources and nature can help us identify more clearly the problems and the opportunities for environmental improvements. First-wave environmentalists' concerns about running out of nonrenewable resources or poisoning the environment by overusing pesticides may not have been unreasonable two and half decades ago. But twenty-five years of research has dispelled many of the first wave's earlier fears. There has been a growing gap between the mounting scientific evidence about the actual status of environmental problems and the often bleaker views promoted by environmental activists. It is time to close that gap. Many conventional environmentalists advocate the "precautionary principle," which says that humanity must not interfere with nature until all the consequences of an action can be taken into account. But it is impossible to know all consequences of even the most trivial action. The second wave of environmentalism must recognize that following the precautionary principle can lead to greater environmental degradation. It is better to move forward using intelligent trial and error to uncover new knowledge. Moving forward can increase resources and wealth. Greater knowledge and wealth give human communities resilience, enabling them to respond flexibly and effectively to the unexpected. In other words, if something goes wrong, our increased knowledge and greater economic resources can be mobilized to solve the problem. This is why impoverished people in Bangladesh die by the thousands when cyclones strike their villages, while only fourteen Americans die when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida and Louisiana in August 1992. Better roads, housing, medical facilities, and emergency response measures made possible by American wealth make it far easier to weather storms in Florida than in Bangladesh. Modern smart environmentalism must avoid the "crisis of the month" media mentality, and it must beware the dangers of interest group politics. It must focus on setting priorities and dealing with the biggest problems first. It must recognize that all problems are not equally bad and that not all can be solved at the same time. The new, smarter environmentalism must also understand that there is no perfect solution to any problem; trade-offs have to be made. The good cannot be held hostage to the perfect. In the twenty-first century it will be clear that the preservation of natural resources and the expansion of human ones are tightly linked. This concept may be very hard for traditionalists to accept, but history has shown that environmental improvement depends directly on rapid economic progress. If poor countries do not adopt high-yield agriculture, for example, then their impoverished farmers will be forced by hunger to level millions of square miles of wildlands. Agricultural intensification is essential to forestall famine and the plowdown of massive amounts of wildlife habitat. Currently, more than 75 percent of the land on every continent except Europe is still available for wildlife. It is this "undeveloped" land in developing countries that is of greatest importance to conserving biodiversity over the long term. Modern forestry also helps preserve wildlife habitat. Although nearly 75 percent of total industrial wood production comes from industrialized countries in the Northern Hemisphere, the temperate forestlands of this region are expanding. With modern technology, the world's current industrial wood consumption requirements could be produced on only 5 percent of the world's total current forestland. Technology and progress are not the problem; they are the solutions. Technology has vastly increased the ability of couples around the world to choose their family sizes. Already total fertility rates are plummeting in most of the world. A recent report by the World bank and Winrock International concluded that global zero population growth will be achieved by 2035 and population will actually decrease throughout the rest of the twenty-first century. This forecast stands in stark contrast to those of world population growth relied on by conventional environmentalists at the Cairo population conference. In the developed countries, air and water pollution have been significantly cut in the last twenty-five years. For example, in the United States, sulfur dioxide emissions per capita are now down 60 percent from their peak in 1920. Both particulates and carbon monoxide emissions are down 79 percent and 53 percent, respectively, since the end of World War II. This steep reduction in air pollution makes it clear that as societies become wealthier, they use some of their wealth for environmental improvement. Impoverished societies have far fewer resources to devote to protecting and cleaning up their natural environments. Only if policymakers and citizens have access to sound scientific information and careful analysis of past policy successes and failures can they make the critical decisions about how best to preserve the world's natural heritage for future generations. "The True State of the Planet" is dedicated to providing that information. This book seeks to close the widening gap between environmental activists and environmental science. In these pages, eleven leading researchers present the latest facts about resource use and availability, environmental cleanliness, and other trends. They will puncture several first- wave illusions, but they will also refocus our priorities on the very real problems still to be faced. The key difference for the second wave is how to solve them: not by fiat but by freely available and accurate information; not by doomsaying but by developing new structures of responsibility that allow the vast human resources that we already enjoy to be employed for ensuring the safety and abundance of the natural resources we desire. RONALD BAILEY is producer of the national weekly public television series "Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg." He is the author of "Eco Scam: the False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse" (1993) and was a science and technology writer at "Forbes" magazine for three years. Mr. Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and was the producer of the national PBS series "Technopolitics." He is a contributing editor to "Reason" magazine. _______ __________ ___________ / | / | | | |__________ | | | | \ | | \ _______ |__________ ___________ COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1001 Connecticut Ave. NW #1250 Washington, DC 20036 202-331-1010, fax 202-331-0640 Permission to reprint must be obtained from the publishing journal listed above. Permission to copy granted as long as these lines are left intact. To subscribe to the cei list, send a message to CEI@digex.com. "The Virtual Hand: CEI's free-market guide to the information superhighway" is available for $5. CEI's monthly newsletter, "CEI UpDate," is free to contributors of $25.