I can’t say I held out high hopes for the man elected President last November. Let’s just say I’d been fooled before. But George W. has won my respect on at least one subject: climate change, or “global warming.”
Bush said during his campaign that he would oppose the Kyoto Protocol, a flawed treaty signed by the Clinton-Gore administration but never submitted to the U.S. Senate for approval, where it faced certain defeat. Bush meant what he said: His negotiators went to the latest conference of the parties to the treaty, held in July in Bonn, Germany, with clear marching orders to reject any compromise short of tearing up the treaty and starting all over again. And (gasp!) they did as they were ordered!
Bush’s proud moment has produced a great wailing from radical environmentalists. They say he’s putting the entire globe at risk so his capitalist buddies in the oil industry can make money in the short run by selling and burning fossil fuels. They say, in short, that he doesn’t care about the future.
I won’t pretend to speak for the President, but I suspect he has a better grasp of what the future will look like than any radical environmentalist, starting with climate change and extending to other environmental issues as well. Here’s what I think the President knows.
The Global Warming Scare
In their rush to convict capitalism of whatever crimes seem plausible, radical environmentalists have paid too little attention to the science of climate change, which increasingly points to two facts that contradict their catastrophic predictions.
The first is that the best forecast of global warming, assuming it occurs at all, is now just 1.4 degrees Celsius over the next half-century. This is much less than early forecasts of “possible” warming which activists still tend to cite. Agreement on this forecast in the scientific community was deliberately obscured by the executive summary of the latest report of the United Nation’s advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which hyped a higher upper-bound estimate, one that few if any of the scientists who actually wrote the study take seriously.
An increase of 1.4 degrees over 50 years, particularly if it occurs during the winter and affects only the planet’s coldest air masses (as seems to be happening), will be virtually undetectable by most life forms, human and otherwise. It is less than natural variations in weather that have occurred in the absence of any human activity.
The second scientific discovery is that carbon dioxide–demonized by anti-industry environmentalists because it is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels–is a boon for vegetation of nearly all types, and consequently for all types of life. Carbon dioxide is an invisible, odorless, naturally occurring gas that makes up a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (it’s measured in parts per million).
Carbon dioxide is harmless to humans and other animals, but it is fertilizer for plants. A doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide (from pre-industrial levels of about 330 ppm to 660 ppm), should it occur, would increase plant productivity by about a third. Far from being a curse, rising carbon dioxide levels will feed future generations and give shelter to expanding populations of wildlife.
This account of global climate change may differ from what you read in the newspapers, but then, there is no reason to believe scientific research that doesn’t lend itself to alarmist headlines or political agendas would be accurately reported there. Over 17,000 scientists have signed a resolution that reads in part, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” When’s the last time you saw that reported in a newspaper?
Population Growth
Before there was global warming, there was the “population explosion.” Paul Ehrlich and others became household names by predicting world-wide famines caused by runaway population growth. As it turns out, the alarmists were completely wrong.
World population has grown, but outputs of food and material goods have grown faster, resulting in falling prices for food and most commodities. A smaller percentage of the world’s population goes hungry today than at any time in the past. Indeed, according to distinguished agricultural economist D. Gale Johnson, “except where civil wars exist or despotic governments prevail, there has never been a time during the last two centuries when the people in the developing world were better fed or when their food supply was more secure.”
Global population reached 6 billion in 2000, but the rate of population growth has slowed significantly, leading experts to conclude world population will stabilize at between 8 and 10 billion around 2050. Some 83 countries and territories, representing nearly half the world’s total population, have fertility rates too low to replace their current population, meaning they rely on immigration to keep their populations stable or rising.
“Global population growth will decelerate markedly over the coming generation,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt, a policy analyst for the American Enterprise Institute. “By current projections, in fact, slightly fewer babies will be born worldwide in the year 2025 than at any point over the previous four decades.”
Abundant Natural Resources
Radical environmentalists still predict a world of vanishing natural resources, with the planet’s “limited supplies of fossil fuels” being the focus of special attention. But today, virtually all experts agree with the late Julian Simon that human ingenuity and new discoveries will meet our resource needs for the foreseeable future.
Estimates of oil supplies are constantly being revised upwards as new discoveries are made and new technologies invented to find or exploit new pools of oil. Superior location and assessment techniques using satellites and four-dimensional imaging coupled with computer-aided extraction processes have dramatically expanded estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves. Between 1948 and 1992, proven oil reserves increased more than 14-fold. Despite repeated warnings that supplies would run out, known reserves in 1990 exceeded one trillion barrels for the first time, and have continued to climb ever since.
Human civilization may eventually come crashing to an end, but it won’t be because we run out of fuel for our machines or materials with which to build our houses. That part of our future is secure.
The Future Is in Good Hands
Most of us grew up listening to the mantra that the rapidly growing world population would soon surpass (or had already surpassed) the planet’s “carrying capacity,” and that the consequences would include mass starvation and environmental destruction. Today’s kids are being taught much the same thing, with “global warming” and “endangered species” the crisis du jour.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and exposés of the environmental devastation that took place in the “worker’s paradise,” only the most partisan anti-market advocates still believe socialism is better for the environment than capitalism. Capitalism’s record is so compelling that even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the left-wing Natural Resources Defense Council, recently admitted in a letter to the editor printed in U.S. News & World Report that “the most efficient use of resources and, therefore, the best environmental protection occur in a true free-market economy. . . .”
Maybe George W. Bush and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are right about the positive relationship between capitalism and the environment. After all, it would be difficult to find another subject on which they agree.
