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09/05/01: Parca
Posted by: grundle2600@hotmail.com (grundle)
The media doesn't always mention Ehrlich by name. Instead, they usually just mention his ideas: the world is overpopulated, we're running out of resources, pollution is getting worse, economic growth is bad for the environment, we're running out of trees, we're running out of landfill space, the air and water are getting dirtier, etc.
As has been proven in Julian Simon's book "The Ultimate Resource 2," and Bjorn Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist," none of those doomsayer claims is true. Food production continues to grow faster than population. Ever increasing technology makes natural resources more abundant, for example, the silicon revolution turned worthless sand into computer chips worth trillions of dollars. Also, the prices of copper, gold, tin, iron, petroleum, etc, keep falling, because newer and better technology makes it easier to find and extract these things. Human creativity is indeed the most important resource. The early stages of industrialization do indeed make pollution worse, but once a country's per capita GNP passes $4,000, pollution levels start to go down, and, the richer the society, the cleaner its environment, because more wealth means better and cleaner technology. We have more trees now than 100 years ago. The air and water are cleaner now than 30 years ago. All our garbage over the next 100 years would fit it one landfill only 10 miles on each side.
The Earth Day 2000 issue of Time magazine is full of Ehrlich's ideas, and ignore's Simon's ideas.
The media is definitely biased on the environment. They are biased towards false information, and away from the truth.
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