Living in a Vacuum

In the Sunday New York Times, Thomas Friedman has another of his typical columns about the environment and the economy. Friedman preaches that future economic growth has to be based not on consumption (which would increase pollution) but rather on "green" achievements. The economy has to grow by cleaning up pollution. The alternative, according to Friedman is a despoiled world of smog, poisons and pollutants. Indeed, Friedman points out that there will be another 2 billion humans in the next 40 years, so we have to act quickly.

It really amazes me that someone who claims to be so intelligent can be so blind to reality. Let me recall for you some relevant history.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's a movement began in the USA to reduce pollution. Earth Day began in 1970. The EPA was created. Presdient Nixon, who the left still loves to hate, proposed a national drive to reduce pollution with the result that the federal government began funing all manner of sewage treatment plants. Limits were placed on particulate emissions from plants that had previously spewed pollutants haphazardly into the air. The results were astonishing. When I first moved to New York in 1975, there were days in the Summer when the sky looked green due to the high levels of pollutants. The Hudson River was dead and if, by chance, any fish actually made it into the river to be caught, they could not be eaten without risking being poisoned. By 15 years later, the air was much cleaner and the river had also been reborn. That trend continued. Nationally, the level of particulate emissions from plants into the air was reduced by nearly 98%; water pollution was also drastically reduced.

That brings us to the last decade. By 1995, we had an EPA that had accomplished its original mission. So we had a bureaucracy that needed something to do or -- heaven forbid! -- it might see its budget cut. As a result, the EPA began to focus on the remaining 2% of particulate emissions and the remaining instances of water pollution. The problem, of course, is that while the first 98% of the pollution could be eliminated for a certain price, the last 2% could not be removed even by spending five times as much. So, the EPA began forcing decisions with high costs on industry; the latest are the new rules that are forcing old coal fired power plants to close. At the same time, the environmental groups which backed the cleanup have gone on fighting for further "cleanups". They have also bought into the big new danger to the environment: carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

From 2000 to 2009 all that we heard over and over was that the earth was warming and that it was due to man's carbon emissions, another name for the carbon dioxide that normal living produced. We were told that there was much evidence to support this conclusion and that there was a scientific consensus that it was true. Those who opposed that conclusion were heretics, flat earthers, or troglodytes. Not surprisingly, in the face of this consensus, politicians who were not scientists bought into the global warming theme. We saw Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi together on the couch calling for something to be done to combat climate change. We had a presidential election in 2008 with both candidates clearly accepting global warming dogma. It was all beyond question.

Then the wheels came off the global warming bandwagon. It began for real with so-called Climategate. E-mail from researchers at the University of East Anglia were hacked and posted on line. East Anglia is the home of all the climate research that formed the basis for the global warming theory. The e-mail, however, showed that the researchers appeared to be modifying the data to fit their theories of global warming. It was as if a parent learned that when she took her infant to the pediatrician she was told that the child had a high fever (when he did not) just so the pediatrician could justify saying that the baby was sick. Then, in rapid order, the warming trend clearly ended, other theories for warming were advanced, and experimental results from CERN proved, in part, the theory that solar activity was the main predictor for global climate. In short, man made global warming was reduced to a theory without support in the data and which did not explain the valid and actual data as well as other competing ideas.

I am not going to rehash the whole global warming debate. My point is that the accepted wisdom of the environmental left which was treated as an "inconvenient TRUTH" turned out to be wrong. The same is the case with Friedman's lamentations.

The real truth is that the wealthiest societies are the ones where the environment is best treated. In poorer countries, the people do not have the luxury of worrying about the environment; they are too busy trying to survive. Think of it this way: can you imagine American farmers burning down forrests to clear new farm land? It would never be allowed. Those fires, however, happen every day in Brazil where subsistence farmers are buring down the Amazon rainforrest to get land on which to grow crops. Or, can you imagine the Germans or the English building a new power plant that burns coal and spews particulates out into the air with no cleaning system? It would never be allowed. Such plants are rapidly being opened in China where the need for more power far outweighs the concerns about the environment. Remember, China has a huge economy, but the Chinese people are extremely poor compared to their Western counterparts.

The truth is that what Friedman and his Malthusian friends really want is to keep the third world countries poor and undeveloped and to bring down the standard of living around the world in the hope that making people poorer will actually increase their concern for the environment. Like with global warming, they have gotten it not just wrong, but completely backwards. The best way to keep the planet clean is the improve the standard of living around the world. Give people something that they wish to preserve, not a life in which they must constantly struggle to get by. Give people the luxury of focusing on the health of the planet rather than on the need to find food or shelter for their families.