Eco-pessimism and other maladies

Rendezvous With Destiny
By Daniel Waldman

With the recent announcement from scientists that it may in fact be a fluctuation of sunspots that is responsible for the less than one-half of one degree increase in the Earth's average temperature over the past 25 years, one more of the endless pessimistic predictions for our planet has been severely undercut. Add global warming to a growing list of impending disasters, including acid rain, overpopulation, and the ozone hole, that were supposed to--but never quite did--befall the Earth.

Amazingly, as their predictions become more malleable and "facts" seem more like opinion than truth, environmentalists are becoming even more inflexible and intolerant.

Confident in the righteousness of their cause, environmentalists see debate and facts as mere conveniences--or worse--inconveniences. For example, Stanford University's Stephen Schneider, while participating in President Bill Clinton, LAW '73, and Vice President Al Gore's Global Climate Change Roundtable last July, argued that it is "journalistically irresponsible to present both sides" when it comes to global warming. It is worth noting that 25 years ago, this same Stephen Schneider was all hot and bothered not by global warming, but by global cooling. In a paper in the Jul. 1975 issue of Journal of Science, Schneider denied that global warming was even possible. Instead, he believed the real threat was global cooling, which he said was caused by aerosol production. Schneider warned that this could lead to a "decrease of the mean surface temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees Centigrade," which if sustained over a period of years, would "trigger an ice age."

Schneider is wrong, but not alone. During the 1970s, global cooling was an en vogue, politically correct problem for environmentalists. The New York Times told Americans that the Earth was headed for "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" and "a full-blown 10,000 year ice age" [8/14/75]. Science Digest warned, "Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age" [Feb. 1973]. This led Gregg Easterbrook, a writer for the Washington Monthly, to propose a "Law of Doomsaying": predict catastrophe between five and ten years away so that the prediction is current enough to scare but far enough away so that it will be forgotten if wrong.

Many, however, have not forgotten. Some erroneous predictions have been so egregiously wrong that they can be considered nothing short of irresponsible. Take, for example, Stanford's infallibly wrong professor Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote that "The battle to feed humanity is already lost.... We will not be able to prevent large scale famines in the next decade."

Doomsday predictions such as this were extremely popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s. A popular one from Stanford economists was that the price of oil would rise to more than $100 per barrel in the 1990s due to human-induced scarcity. Such beliefs were based on the theory that humans were overpopulating the planet, depleting its resources, and thus would eventually face massive famine.

In the meantime, the price of oil has dropped to $16 per barrel. And in the three decades since Ehrlich's prediction, world grain production has increased 60 percent, far outpacing population growth. Ehrlich and his environmental kin-- like Thomas Malthus 200 years earlier--failed to take into account economics, human ingenuity, and technology.

Technological innovation allows food production to outpace population growth. Likewise, technology continually creates new precious resources, thereby making our natural resource supply infinite. Without technology, crude oil is nothing more than black goo. Oil is only a precious resource because of the technology that refines it into products used for fueling cars and heating houses. When oil becomes more expensive, consumers shift to a new source of fuel, and producers have an incentive to develop one, the entire process facilitating new technological developments.

The list of misplaced pessimism goes on and on. Remember acid rain? How about the hole in the ozone layer? All were unverifiable conjectures which were eventually proven false. However, when one recognizes that the aim

of such conjectures is to extend government's reach deeper into Americans' lives, things start to become more clear.

Tim Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs, made this obvious when he stated: "Even if global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it really means energy conservation, we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." This is why global warming and global cooling are interchangeable. Either way, they involve a change in American consumption and industrial production.

Environmentalism simply has very little to do with science and a lot to do with politics. Environmentalism, with its dislike for consumption and its desire to extend the government's reach far beyond where it belongs, is a microcosm of liberalism. Gore made this clear in his book, Earth in the Balance, in which he argued that our civilization is a "dysfunctional family" in need of a "wrenching transformation," and urged us to "make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization."

This attitude helps explain what happened in Kyoto. Although the Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution 95-0, which stated that any agreement on climate change must involve developing countries and cause no serious harm to the U.S. economy, just the opposite occurred. Gore instructed the U.S. delegation to sign an agreement which would seriously impair our economic growth by forcing huge cutbacks in American emissions of greenhouse gases while exempting developing countries from these restriction. Austere measures for a problem that scientists can't even prove exists. But then again, scientific fact has always been a subjective matter for environmentalists. Why should things be

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