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So-called "sustainable growth" is based on the belief that human beings are parasites who simply consume resources. According to this belief, economic growth is bad for the enviornment.
But this view is in error. In reality, human beings create resources through invention and technological innovation. And it is the rich countries that are best able to invent and adopt solutions to enviornmental problems.
Here are 3 articles that explain the errors of "sustainable growth."
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http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/printjg2002 0828.shtml
Jonah Goldberg
August 28, 2002
'Sustainable growth' is not sustainable solution
President Bush's absence at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg has a large fraction of the international environmentalist community mad enough to kick a panda. But, while it may make the rest of the world angry, Bush is doing the right thing. In fact, the world leaders who choose to attend the summit are in all likelihood doing the wrong thing.
Few groups, aside from the Flat-Earthers and fans of Carrot Top, have been more consistently wrong in their basic assumptions and predictions than the sustainable- development crowd.
The philosophical assumption undergirding sustainable growth -economic growth without depletion of natural resources -has a very old pedigree, dating back most famously to the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus, who claimed the world would starve because food production could never keep up with human population growth.
Perhaps the most famous modern Malthusian is Paul Ehrlich, an academic scare-monger who's still cited by the establishment press as a reliable expert. He predicted in 1968 that the "population bomb" would result in the mass starvation of billions of people, including some 65 million Americans by the 1980s.
Of course, Ehrlich, like all Malthusians before and since, was proven laughably wrong. But the idea endures that we must live within our means or die.
Malthusian thinking fails to grasp that human beings are "the ultimate resource," in the words of the late hero Julian Simon, who wrote a book by the same name. Human beings solve problems through creativity and ingenuity.
Take food. Today, humans are producing more food than ever before in history, easily enough to feed the whole world. Indeed, thanks to improved crops and farming techniques, the developed countries of the world actually produce way too much food at prices that are too low.
In America, the political reward for politicians to subsidize unneeded agriculture -i.e. the farm vote -far outweighs the economic or material benefits from propping up superfluous farmers.
Meanwhile, America has abandoned millions of acres of inefficient farmland over the last decade, much of it reverting to the wild, including much of the Great Plains, which is today supporting the largest buffalo population since at least the 1870s. Indeed, the plains states have become so depopulated that the Census Bureau is reclassifying much of the land as "frontier" or simply "vacant." Meanwhile, the East Coast is covered with more forests than it has been in more than a century, largely because we stopped using wood for fuel and construction.
Such trends should make the sustainable-development people happy, not just because we can feed more people, but because technological advances mean fewer precious habitats, like rainforests and grasslands, have to be destroyed to feed hungry mouths around the globe.
But the Johannesburg crowd prefers such things as "organic" crops, which are grown without the aid of biotechnology, modern pesticides and fertilizers. That's fine, except science can find no special benefits to organic food, while there are many obvious drawbacks to inefficiently growing less food on more fertile soil -namely global deforestation and hunger.
But such blinkered thinking is typical of the sustainable- growth people. They say we must live within our means, but they want to determine the means by which we live.
Fossil fuels, they claim, are destroying the Earth's atmosphere, but they reject the use of nuclear energy, which generates no greenhouse gasses. They rightly decry the state of world fisheries, but they don't like modern fish-farming techniques that would alleviate the pressure of overfishing in our oceans, just as domesticating livestock solved the problem of overhunting thousands of years ago.
They bemoan wastefulness, even as they champion recycling, which in the words of John Tierney, writing in The New York Times Magazine a few years ago, "may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."
The true-believers in the Johannesburg crowd have an almost religious faith that Western-oriented capitalism is destructive to the environment, while "indigenous peoples" live in harmony with the natural world.
Alas, this is a dangerous myth. Sure, plenty of environmental horrors have occurred under capitalism, but they have occurred under socialism, monarchies and, yes, even the gentle indigenous peoples of the world. There's a growing consensus among anthropologists and biologists, for example, that Native Americans radically transformed the natural landscape long before Europeans arrived, including helping to drive the woolly mammoth to extinction.
What makes capitalism special is not the problems it creates but its ability to fix them. That's why the United States has cleaner air and water than it has had for generations. President Bush is right not to attend the Johannesburg boondoggle, because if he went he would have to compromise with those who are part of the problem, not the solution.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a TownHall.com member group.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp? ref=/comment/comment-taylor082802.asp
August 28, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
Unsustainable
Its the third world, not the West.
By Jerry Taylor
As the U.N.'s "World Summit for Sustainable Development" got under way this week in Johannesburg, South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki welcomed the 12,600 attendees with the warning that "unsustainable patterns of production and consumption are creating an environmental disaster that threatens both life in general, and human life in particular." The root of the problem, according to Mbeki, is that the international economic order is "constructed on the basis of a savage principle of survival of the fittest." And thus, the U.N. conference got off on a predictably wrong foot.
First, blaming Western industrialized nations for producing and consuming too much is misguided. If the West didn't produce as much as it does, standards of living in countries like South Africa would be lower than they are today. If the West didn't consume as much as it did, we'd join those countries in their pool of human misery. Nobody in the United States has to apologize for living in nice houses, eating well, investing in education, spending money on health care, or enjoying life. Despite what the U.N. would have us believe, those things did not come at the expense of the third world or the global environment.
Tropical rainforest deforestation, for instance, has little to do with Western consumption. Less than ten percent of the harvested timber is exported. Most of that wood is burned for fuel, and most of the cutting takes place to clear the way for third-world farmers who lack the capital to increase yields in any other way save for putting more land under the till. Third-world poverty not Western affluence is the problem.
Pollution, moreover, is likewise primarily a problem in the developing not the developed world. As anyone who's traveled can attest, air and water quality in the West is far better than it is in countries like South Africa and continues to improve at jaw-dropping rates. Western nations aren't the ones exporting "brown clouds" to the Third World. It's the Third World that's exporting brown clouds to the rest of us.
President Mbeki ignores the fact that the West doesn't simply consume natural resources. It also creates them. Natural resources are simply that subset of the earth's "stuff" that we can harness profitably for human benefit. As knowledge and technology expands, our ability to harness new and different sorts of inert matter for human use expands along with it. It's the only way to square the fact that no matter how you measure the availability of fossil fuels, minerals, or foodstuffs they're becoming relatively more abundant, not scarcer, even in the face of growing consumption.
Second, Mbeki's slur against Western capitalism as a "primitive" and "self-destructive" ethos of "survival of the fittest" is insipid. First, the lesson of the 20th century is that no other economic system is as capable of producing wealth and bettering the lot of mankind than capitalism, a fact that should be clear to president Mbeki of all people.
Third, virtually every serious analyst is now well aware of the link between economic growth and environmental quality. Once per capita income reaches a certain point (somewhere between $2,500 and $9,000, dependent upon the pollutant), ambient concentrations of air and water pollution begin to decline in real terms. Analysts have also found a link between poverty and deforestation, between poverty and land degradation, and between poverty and environmental-health threats.
That latter point deserves more attention. Approximately two million people across the third world die every year because they rely upon dung and kerosene to heat their homes and cook their food, a practice that generates deadly amounts of indoor air pollutants. Another three million people a year die in Africa alone because they rely on lakes and rivers for drinking water that has been contaminated by untreated sewage and other wastes. Yet both electrification and water treatment requires capital investment that the third world can't afford because, well, they're more interested in redistributing wealth to fight "jungle capitalism" and following every trendy environmental fad that crosses their path than in promoting the economic freedoms and private-property rights necessary to facilitate economic growth.
Unfortunately, President Mbeki and most of the rest of the attendees are largely interested in getting a handout from the West. And they believe that guilt-tripping Europeans and Americans for their excessive consumption and economic success is the way to get it. Other attendees see the conference as yet another front in their war against economic liberalism. To the extent that either party succeeds, sustainable development will be hobbled, not helped, by the Johannesburg conference.
Jerry Taylor is director of natural-resource studies at the Cato Institute.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp? ref=/moore/moore082802.asp
August 28, 2002 9:00 a.m.
Real Aid
Save the planet with capitalism.
By Stephen Moore
Whenever delegates from countries around the world get together it is almost always bad news for freedom and capitalism. The earth summit on "sustainable development" that is currently being held in South Africa is no exception.
So far the conference has been an all-too-predictable bashing of rich nations for holding back the poor nations. The rich nations (the United States) are asked to do more to alleviate AIDS, more to reduce global poverty, more to protect the earth's natural resources, more to feed the hungry, and more to stop mythical global warming. All that was left off the list. Instead, we hear the familiar refrain from self-righteous-and-yet repressive leaders of poor nations that the U.S. with five percent of the world's population uses 25 percent of the world's resources. (No mention that the U.S. also produces more than 25 percent of the world's output of AIDS drugs, food, vaccines, infant formula, humanitarian aid; the list goes on.)
There is an overall false message of doom and decline at the earth summit, as if the earth's ecosystem is on the verge of collapse and that human beings are worse off now than in the past. It isn't true. Sure, in some of the heartbreakingly repressed nations of Africa things are getting worse. But in the rest of the world things are almost universally getting much better in terms of health, in terms of material progress, and in terms of a cleaner environment.
Here are some of the most encouraging trends that you will not hear about among the elite gathered in South Africa this week.
Life Expectancy: In the rich countries life expectancy the broadest measure of health and a safe environment has increased by 30 years over the past century. Even in poor countries life expectancy has risen at an astonishing pace. The average resident of a poor nation can expect to live nearly twice as long as his or her 19th-century counterpart. Most of humanity enjoys better health and longevity than the richest people in the richest countries did just 100 years ago.
Health: Parents should reflect long and hard on one statistic whenever they think life isn't treating them well these days: The death rate of children under 14 has fallen by about 95 percent since 1900. The child death rates in just the past 20 years have been halved in India, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Korea, Israel, and scores of other nations. Almost all of the major killer diseases prior to 1900 tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, whooping cough, polio, malaria to name a few, have been nearly eradicated thanks to medical progress, most it coming from the evil capitalist United States.
Nutrition: Nutrition and diets have been improving the world over. Gale Johnson the agriculture expert at the University of Chicago has discovered that fewer people worldwide died from famine in the 20 century than in the 19th century not just as a percentage of the population, but in absolute numbers. That is a spectacular achievement in our ability to feed the planet, given that the world population is some four times higher today than 100 years ago.
Education: The world's inhabitants are better educated than previously. Illiteracy has fallen by more than two thirds in the U.S. and by an even greater percentage in many poor nations.
Environment: Economic development is the best way to clean the environment. Poverty is the biggest impediment to clean air and water. Consider the U.S.: Smog levels have declined by about 40 percent, and carbon monoxide is down nearly one third since the 1960s despite nearly twice as many cars. Some of the most impressive advances in cleaning the air have been recorded in the dirtiest cities, including Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Airborne lead is down more than 90 percent from 40 years ago. Contaminated drinking water killed hundreds of thousands of Americans annually 100 years ago, versus very few deaths today.
Natural Resources: By any measure, natural resources have become more available rather than more scarce. Consider copper, which is typical of metals: The cost of a ton is only about a tenth of what it was 200 years ago. There is evidence that oil the most worrisome of resources because it is mostly burned up and therefore cannot be recycled has actually been getting cheaper to produce.
What has been the driving force behind this miraculous progress? Three words: free-market capitalism. If only the intellectual elite and the power holders in South Africa this week would go home and deregulate their economies, cut tax rates, expand democracy, and cut government rules and bureaucracies, we could blaze a path to alleviating world poverty in a generation or two. If only markets, not governments, controlled the price and usage of natural resources, we would see a further abundance of food, minerals, and energy enough for the entire world to share in the bounty.
The earth summit is based on a cancerous and discredited creed of limits to growth. It is insane to hope that people who believe in limits to growth will create the conditions that nurture growth. Even the term "sustainable development" is offensive and suggests that economic development and improving the environment are somehow incompatible which is precisely the opposite of the historical record. Where there is economic development and capitalism, there is clean air and water, well-educated citizens, abundant resources and low disease rates. Where there is no capitalism, there is an abundance of these maladies.
It really is all that simple.
The only real limits to growth are created by wrong-headed conferences populated by unthinking do-gooders.
Freedom will save the planet if only governments will allow it.
Stephen Moore is president of the Club for Growth.
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