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08/10/01: article in "The Economist": the environmental doomsayers were wrong
Posted by: grundle2600@hotmail.com (grundle)
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=7 18860
The truth about the environment
Aug 2nd 2001
From The Economist print edition
Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular
ECOLOGY and economics should push in the same direction. After all, the “eco” part of each word derives from the Greek word for “home”, and the protagonists of both claim to have humanity's welfare as their goal. Yet environmentalists and economists are often at loggerheads. For economists, the world seems to be getting better. For many environmentalists, it seems to be getting worse.
These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of “litany” of four big environmental fears:
• Natural resources are running out.
• The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
• Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers: forests are disappearing and fish stocks are collapsing.
• The planet's air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
Human activity is thus defiling the earth, and humanity may end up killing itself in the process.
The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient—associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution—the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming—does appear to be a long-term phenomenon, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem for the future of humanity. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.
Can things only get better?
Take these four points one by one. First, the exhaustion of natural resources. The early environmental movement worried that the mineral resources on which modern industry depends would run out. Clearly, there must be some limit to the amount of fossil fuels and metal ores that can be extracted from the earth: the planet, after all, has a finite mass. But that limit is far greater than many environmentalists would have people believe.
Reserves of natural resources have to be located, a process that costs money. That, not natural scarcity, is the main limit on their availability. However, known reserves of all fossil fuels, and of most commercially important metals, are now larger than they were when “The Limits to Growth” was published. In the case of oil, for example, reserves that could be extracted at reasonably competitive prices would keep the world economy running for about 150 years at present consumption rates. Add to that the fact that the price of solar energy has fallen by half in every decade for the past 30 years, and appears likely to continue to do so into the future, and energy shortages do not look like a serious threat either to the economy or to the environment.
The development for non-fuel resources has been similar. Cement, aluminium, iron, copper, gold, nitrogen and zinc account for more than 75% of global expenditure on raw materials. Despite an increase in consumption of these materials of between two- and ten-fold over the past 50 years, the number of years of available reserves has actually grown. Moreover, the increasing abundance is reflected in an ever-decreasing price: The Economist's index of prices of industrial raw materials has dropped some 80% in inflation-adjusted terms since 1845.
Next, the population explosion is also turning out to be a bugaboo. In 1968, Dr Ehrlich predicted in his best selling book, “The Population Bomb”, that “the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions—hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
That did not happen. Instead, according to the United Nations, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52% per person since 1961. The daily food intake in poor countries has increased from 1,932 calories, barely enough for survival, in 1961 to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people in developing countries who are starving has dropped from 45% in 1949 to 18% today, and is expected to decline even further to 12% in 2010 and just 6% in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800 food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according to the World Bank, prices were lower than ever before.
Modern Malthus
Dr Ehrlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas Malthus. Malthus claimed that, if unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food production could increase only linearly, by bringing new land into cultivation. He was wrong. Population growth has turned out to have an internal check: as people grow richer and healthier, they have smaller families. Indeed, the growth rate of the human population reached its peak, of more than 2% a year, in the early 1960s. The rate of increase has been declining ever since. It is now 1.26%, and is expected to fall to 0.46% in 2050. The United Nations estimates that most of the world's population growth will be over by 2100, with the population stabilising at just below 11 billion (see chart 1).
Malthus also failed to take account of developments in agricultural technology. These have squeezed more and more food out of each hectare of land. It is this application of human ingenuity that has boosted food production, not merely in line with, but ahead of, population growth. It has also, incidentally, reduced the need to take new land into cultivation, thus reducing the pressure on biodiversity.
Third, that threat of biodiversity loss is real, but exaggerated. Most early estimates used simple island models that linked a loss in habitat with a loss of biodiversity. A rule-of-thumb indicated that loss of 90% of forest meant a 50% loss of species. As rainforests seemed to be cut at alarming rates, estimates of annual species loss of 20,000-100,000 abounded. Many people expected the number of species to fall by half globally within a generation or two.
However, the data simply does not bear out these predictions. In the eastern United States, forests were reduced over two centuries to fragments totalling just 1-2% of their original area, yet this resulted in the extinction of only one forest bird. In Puerto Rico, the primary forest area has been reduced over the past 400 years by 99%, yet “only” seven of 60 species of bird has become extinct. All but 12% of the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest was cleared in the 19th century, leaving only scattered fragments. According to the rule-of-thumb, half of all its species should have become extinct. Yet, when the World Conservation Union and the Brazilian Society of Zoology analysed all 291 known Atlantic forest animals, none could be declared extinct. Species, therefore, seem more resilient than expected. And tropical forests are not lost at annual rates of 2-4%, as many environmentalists have claimed: the latest UN figures indicate a loss of less than 0.5%.
Fourth, pollution is also exaggerated. Many analyses show that air pollution diminishes when a society becomes rich enough to be able to afford to be concerned about the environment. For London, the city for which the best data are available, air pollution peaked around 1890 (see chart 2). Today, the air is cleaner than it has been since 1585. There is good reason to believe that this general picture holds true for all developed countries. And, although air pollution is increasing in many developing countries, they are merely replicating the development of the industrialised countries. When they grow sufficiently rich they, too, will start to reduce their air pollution.
All this contradicts the litany. Yet opinion polls suggest that many people, in the rich world, at least, nurture the belief that environmental standards are declining. Four factors cause this disjunction between perception and reality.
Always look on the dark side of life
One is the lopsidedness built into scientific research. Scientific funding goes mainly to areas with many problems. That may be wise policy, but it will also create an impression that many more potential problems exist than is the case.
Secondly, environmental groups need to be noticed by the mass media. They also need to keep the money rolling in. Understandably, perhaps, they sometimes exaggerate. In 1997, for example, the Worldwide Fund for Nature issued a press release entitled, “Two-thirds of the world's forests lost forever”. The truth turns out to be nearer 20%.
Though these groups are run overwhelmingly by selfless folk, they nevertheless share many of the characteristics of other lobby groups. That would matter less if people applied the same degree of scepticism to environmental lobbying as they do to lobby groups in other fields. A trade organisation arguing for, say, weaker pollution controls is instantly seen as self-interested. Yet a green organisation opposing such a weakening is seen as altruistic, even if a dispassionate view of the controls in question might suggest they are doing more harm than good.
A third source of confusion is the attitude of the media. People are clearly more curious about bad news than good. Newspapers and broadcasters are there to provide what the public wants. That, however, can lead to significant distortions of perception. An example was America's encounter with El Niño in 1997 and 1998. This climatic phenomenon was accused of wrecking tourism, causing allergies, melting the ski-slopes and causing 22 deaths by dumping snow in Ohio.
A more balanced view comes from a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This tries to count up both the problems and the benefits of the 1997-98 Niño. The damage it did was estimated at $4 billion. However, the benefits amounted to some $19 billion. These came from higher winter temperatures (which saved an estimated 850 lives, reduced heating costs and diminished spring floods caused by meltwaters), and from the well-documented connection between past Niños and fewer Atlantic hurricanes. In 1998, America experienced no big Atlantic hurricanes and thus avoided huge losses. These benefits were not reported as widely as the losses.
The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only the area of a square, each of whose sides measures 28km (18 miles). That is just one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.
Ignorance matters only when it leads to faulty judgments. But fear of largely imaginary environmental problems can divert political energy from dealing with real ones. The table above, showing the cost in the United States of various measures to save a year of a person's life, illustrates the danger. Some environmental policies, such as reducing lead in petrol and sulphur-dioxide emissions from fuel oil, are very cost-effective. But many of these are already in place. Most environmental measures are less cost-effective than interventions aimed at improving safety (such as installing air-bags in cars) and those involving medical screening and vaccination. Some are absurdly expensive.
Yet a false perception of risk may be about to lead to errors more expensive even than controlling the emission of benzene at tyre plants. Carbon-dioxide emissions are causing the planet to warm. The best estimates are that the temperature will rise by some 2°-3°C in this century, causing considerable problems, almost exclusively in the developing world, at a total cost of $5,000 billion. Getting rid of global warming would thus seem to be a good idea. The question is whether the cure will actually be more costly than the ailment.
Despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. The effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the climate would be minuscule, even if it were implemented in full. A model by Tom Wigley, one of the main authors of the reports of the UN Climate Change Panel, shows how an expected temperature increase of 2.1°C in 2100 would be diminished by the treaty to an increase of 1.9°C instead. Or, to put it another way, the temperature increase that the planet would have experienced in 2094 would be postponed to 2100.
So the Kyoto agreement does not prevent global warming, but merely buys the world six years. Yet, the cost of Kyoto, for the United States alone, will be higher than the cost of solving the world's single most pressing health problem: providing universal access to clean drinking water and sanitation. Such measures would avoid 2m deaths every year, and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill.
And that is the best case. If the treaty were implemented inefficiently, the cost of Kyoto could approach $1 trillion, or more than five times the cost of worldwide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global-aid budget today is about $50 billion a year.
To replace the litany with facts is crucial if people want to make the best possible decisions for the future. Of course, rational environmental management and environmental investment are good ideas—but the costs and benefits of such investments should be compared to those of similar investments in all the other important areas of human endeavour. It may be costly to be overly optimistic—but more costly still to be too pessimistic.
Bjorn Lomborg is a statistician at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who once held what he calls “left-wing Greenpeace views”. In 1997, he set out to challenge Julian Simon, an economist who doubted environmentalist claims—and found that the data generally supported Simon. His book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, will be published in English by Cambridge University Press in a month's time.
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08/10/01: article in "The New York Times": the environmental doomsayers were wrong
Posted by: grundle2600@hotmail.com (grundle)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/science/earth/07GREE.html
AUG 07, 2001
Bjorn Lomborg: A Chipper Environmentalist
By NICHOLAS WADE
The news from environmental organizations is almost always bleak. The climate is out of whack. Insidious chemicals taint food and drink. Tropical forests are disappearing. Species are perishing en masse. Industrial poisons pollute air, earth and water. Ecosystems are being stressed to the breaking point by the greedy, wasteful consumption of the Western lifestyle and its would-be imitators.
So it is a surprise to meet someone who calls himself an environmentalist but who asserts that things are getting better, that the rate of human population growth is past its peak, that agriculture is sustainable and pollution is ebbing, that forests are not disappearing, that there is no wholesale destruction of plant and animal species and that even global warming is not as serious as commonly portrayed.
Strange to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed economist at a conservative Washington think tank but a vegetarian, backpack-toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a 36-year- old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Dr. Lomborg arrived at this position, much to his own astonishment, through a journey that began in a Los Angeles bookshop in February 1997.
Dr. Lomborg was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and started reading an interview with Dr. Julian L. Simon, a University of Maryland economist who argued in several books that population was unlikely to outrun natural resources.
But Dr. Simon, who died in 1998, is more widely known for his solution to the airline overbooking problem (having airlines pay passengers to take a later flight) and for a 1980 bet with Dr. Paul Ehrlich, president of Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology. Dr. Lomborg bet that any five metals chosen by Dr. Ehrlich would be cheaper in 1990; Dr. Ehrlich lost on all five.
Dr. Lomborg felt sure that Dr. Simon's arguments were "simple American right-wing propaganda," though presented with enough seriousness that they would be worth rebutting. Back in Aarhus, he started nightly study sessions with his statistics students to debunk Dr. Simon's contentions, using figures drawn from reports of the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the International Panel on Climate Change and other gatherers of official facts.
"Three months into the project, we were convinced that we were being debunked instead," Dr. Lomborg said. "Not everything he said is right. He has a definite right-wing slant. But most of the important things were actually correct."
Dr. Lomborg has presented his findings in "The Skeptical Environmentalist," a book to be published in September by Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of analysis with almost 3,000 footnotes, are statements made by environmental organizations like the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. He refers to the persistently gloomy fare from these groups as the Litany, a collection of statements that he argues are exaggerations or outright myths.
Dr. Lomborg also chides journalists, saying they uncritically spread the Litany, and he accuses the public of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst.
"The Litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long," Dr. Lomborg writes, "that blatantly false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet still be believed." This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which is balanced and competent, he says, but rather of "the communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs."
To understand the world as it is, Dr. Lomborg says, it is necessary to look at long-term global trends that tell more of the whole story than short-term trends and are less easy to manipulate.
For example, the Worldwatch Institute, in its 1998 "State of the World" report, said, "The world's forest estate has declined significantly in both area and quality in recent decades." But the longest data series of annual figures available from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization shows that global forest cover has in fact increased, to 30.89 percent in 1994 from 30.04 percent of global land cover in 1950. The Worldwatch report goes on to claim that because of soaring demand for paper, "Canada is losing some 200,000 hectares of forest a year." The cited reference, however, says that "in fact Canada grew 174,600 more hectares of forest each year," Dr. Lomborg writes.
Janet Abramovitz, Worldwatch's forest expert, said the world forest cover had shrunk significantly in the last 20 years. She based that contention on a different, shorter series of Food and Agriculture Organization statistics but declined to cite a percentage. The institute's figure on Canadian forest loss was an error, she said.
In its report for 2000, the Worldwatch Institute cited the dangers it had foreseen in 1984 — "record rates of population growth, soaring oil prices, debilitating levels of international debt and extensive damage to forests from the new phenomenon of acid rain" — and lamented that "we are about to enter a new century having solved few of these problems."
But in his book, Dr. Lomborg cites figures from the United States Census Bureau, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Environment Agency to show that the rate of world population growth has actually been dropping sharply since 1964; the level of international debt decreased slightly from 1984 to 1999; the price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is half what it was in the early 1980's; and the sulfur emissions that generate acid rain (which has turned out to do little if any damage to forests, though some to lakes) have been cut substantially since 1984.
In an interview, the president of the Worldwatch Institute, Christopher Flavin, agreed that progress had been made in the four problems cited in the institute's 1984 report, but he said that had been mentioned in other institute reports. "If you read through our materials as a whole," Mr. Flavin said, "many of these improvements are acknowledged."
Dr. Lomborg has also been unable to find strong support in the official statistics for the regular predictions of disaster from Dr. Ehrlich. "In the course of the 1970's," Dr. Ehrlich wrote in "The Population Bomb," published in 1968, "the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions — hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."
Although world population has doubled since 1961, Dr. Lomborg writes, calorie intake has increased by 24 percent as a whole and by 38 percent in developing countries.
Dr. Lomborg also takes issue with some global warming predictions. In assessing how waste gases could warm the world's climate, he says, there are four wild cards that affect the climate change models.
One is the multiplier effect of carbon dioxide — as it heats the atmosphere a little, the air can hold more water, and that heats the atmosphere a lot more. How much more is in question, but Dr. Lomborg cites satellite and weather balloon data that seem to weaken the case for a strong multiplier effect.
The other three wild cards, Dr. Lomborg says, are the role of clouds, the effect of aerosols and the effect of the sunspot cycle on earth's climate.
Dr. Lomborg believes that when it comes to computer models of climate change, the International Panel on Climate Change deals all four wild cards in a way that exaggerates the effect of greenhouse gases. This means, in his view, that the actual warming will be at the cooler end of the panel's predicted range.
He contends that the internationally agreed Kyoto targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions will impose vast costs for little result. A more effective approach, according to Dr. Lomborg, would be to increase research on alternative sources of energy, like solar and fusion.
But Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said that new satellite data were likely to point toward a strong multiplier effect for carbon dioxide.
And while Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, an expert on global warming at Environmental Defense, agrees that clouds and aerosols are still weak points in the climate models, he says Dr. Lomborg's contention on the effects of the sunspot cycle is not widely accepted. As to Dr. Lomborg's policy recommendations, Dr. Oppenheimer said that investing in technology alone was "like betting the farm on a policy in which we have less confidence than emissions reduction." In his view, a broad- based technology push would turn into a pork-barrel program and be far less efficient than the technology that would develop in response to a requirement to reduce emissions.
"The Skeptical Environmentalist" portrays several other elements of the Litany as little more than urban myths. One is the prediction that the world's forests and a large number of species are headed for catastrophe.
Dr. Lomborg believes that forest loss has been less serious than is often described — only 20 percent since the dawn of agriculture, not 67 percent, as stated by the World Wildlife Fund. He also puts the present annual rate of loss at 0.46 percent, as calculated by the Food and Agriculture Organization, rather than at 2 percent or more, the figure cited by many environmentalists.
Given that the forests are not doing that badly, he is skeptical of claims that the world is about to lose half or more of its species. The often quoted figure that 40,000 species are lost every year comes from a 1979 article by Dr. Norman Myers, an ecologist at Oxford University. But this figure, Dr. Lomborg says, was not based on any evidence, just on Dr. Myers's conjecture that one million species might be lost from 1975 to 2000, which works out to be 40,000 species a year.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which maintains the Red Book of endangered species, concluded in 1992 that the extinction figures for mammals and birds were "very small" and that the total extinction rate, assuming 30 million species, was probably 2,300 species a year.
Nonetheless, Dr. Lomborg says, Dr. Myers repeated his estimate in 1999 with a warning that "we are into the opening stages of a human- caused biotic holocaust."
Dr. Myers confirmed in an interview that the figure of 40,000 extinctions a year had come from his estimate. He said that it was an illustration used to make his argument clear and that he gave figures only "when I am speaking to a political leader or policy maker who says that in order to sell his message, he absolutely must have some number."
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's estimate was too low, Dr. Myers said, because it considered a species extinct only after none of its members had been sighted for 50 years. "All I am trying to do is to demonstrate that we are in the opening phase of a mass extinction," he said.
Though no longer a member of Greenpeace, Dr. Lomborg still counts himself as an environmentalist and portrays his critique as based on the outlook of a leftist. "I'm a left- wing guy," he says, "and a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals — you can't play the `he's right- wing so he's wrong' argument."
He believes that the environment must be protected and that regulation is often necessary. But exaggerating problems distorts society's priorities, he says, and makes it hard for society to make the best decisions.
Writing about environmentalists, he says, "The worse they can portray the environment, the easier it is for them to convince us that we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, child day care, etc."
Those who abandon long-held faiths are often strident advocates of their new views. But Dr. Lomborg displays little of the convert's zeal. His aim is not to preach free-market solutions for every problem or to deny that threats to the environment exist.
His motive, he says, is simply to document that the facts, in his view, tell a far brighter story than the Litany. Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population growth was certain to outrun food supply. As Dr. Lomborg sees it, Malthus's gloomy predictions still hold an iron grip over many minds, and are still wrong.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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