Citing the British model, Cleveland, Ohio, is taking a giant step toward a similar scheme of compulsory recycling. In 2011 some 25,000 households will be required to use recycling bins fitted with radio-frequency identification tags (RFIDs)—tiny computer chips that can remotely provide information such as the weight of the bin’s contents and that allow passing garbage trucks to verify their presence. If a household does not put its recycle bin out on the curb, an inspector could check its garbage for improperly discarded recyclables and fine the scofflaws $100. Moreover, if a bin is put out in a tardy manner or left out too long, the household could be fined. Cleveland plans to implement the system citywide within six years.

Extreme recycling programs are nothing new, even in American cities. In San Francisco recycling and composting are mandatory; trash is sorted into three different bins with compliance enforced through fines. New York City has a similar program.

Neither are RFID bins new. They were introduced on London streets in 2005 ostensibly to track the amount of trash households produced and to discourage “overproduction,” but they have also had trials in American cities. Earlier this year, Alexandria, Virginia, approved such bins, which were to be placed with households this autumn.

Cleveland is particularly important, however, because of its size. Cash-starved local governments will be watching to see if an American city as big as Cleveland can use RFID bins to increase revenues. The revenues would flow from three basic sources: a trash-collection fee that could be increased, as in Alexandria; the imposition of fines; and the profit, if any, from selling recyclables. The last source should not be dismissed. Recycling programs are not generally cost-efficient, but much of the reason is that collections need to be cleaned and re-sorted at their destination.

If households can be forced to assume these labor-intensive tasks, then selling recyclables—especially such goods as aluminum cans—is more likely to be profitable. (Perversely, the demand for volume recycling may hit the poor the hardest; in the wake of recession, it is becoming increasingly common for people to hoard their aluminum cans in order to turn them in for cash.)

The British Model

Since the British system is praised as a model, it is useful to examine its specifics.

An estimated 2.6 million Britons now have RFID bins monitoring how and when they sort garbage from recyclables. Implementation varies from borough to borough since trash collection, as in America, is under local jurisdiction. But the basics of the scheme are the same, with fines for noncompliance ranging up to £1,000 (over $1,500).

Councils routinely employ “rubbish police,” who fine households that commit offenses such as producing “excessive” trash. For example, Oxford employs “waste education officers” who go through household bins and instruct the owners on proper sorting and disposal; the officers also fine residents 80 pounds if the trash overflows the 240-litre bin, which is emptied fortnightly. Of course, this makes trash from a large party or other events like Christmas problematic. (Such a fine differs from a fee for additional service in at least two ways. The “customer” is unable to cancel the service and go to a competitor, and the fine is absurdly high, especially given the extremely low service provided.)

The policing of trash bins is also enforced by surveillance cameras; this practice became evident in a recent controversy when a Coventry woman was captured on video throwing a cat in a trash bin.

The British system also mandates how trash is to be sorted. The U.K. website Green Launches explained gleefully:

The next time you dump your garbage in a bin, make sure you have it sorted well and dropped in the correct bin. Or else, you’ll probably burn a £1,000 fine in your pocket. Household waste like food scraps, tea bags etc in the wrong bin will have the family penalized. This forces families to use up to five different types of bins for waste separation and encourages picking up of recyclable products. This will also include the compulsory use of slop buckets to get rid of food waste.

The Orwellian intrusion into the lives of peaceful Britons is justified primarily on the same grounds used by Cleveland: It is a “green” measure to preserve the environment. Green Launches continued, “Environment secretary, Hilary Benn came up with this idea that will help reduce green house gas emissions. These strict and hefty rules are sure to raise a cry amongst taxpayers and residents. But these rules will also help increase the production and use of greener energy resources and at the same time, decrease those mounting piles in landfills.”

Cleveland echoes the environmental justification.

In It for the Money

The British also justify the draconian trash system on financial grounds. Benn once exclaimed to the press, “What sort of a society would throw away aluminium cans worth £500 a ton when producers are crying out for the raw material?” Generally speaking, however, the Brits downplay the government’s financial motives.

Here Cleveland parts company with its British counterparts and makes it abundantly clear that money is a driving factor. City waste-collection commissioner Ronnie Owens, who perhaps remembers the municipal bankruptcy of the 1980s, says, “The Division of Waste Collection is on track to meet its goal of issuing 4,000 citations this year.” In short the goal is revenue enhancement not perfect compliance. Indeed, the two stand in conflict with each other. Bloggers have widely speculated that the recycling scheme is an excuse to create noncompliance and thus maximize the payment of fines.

Bankrupt cities across North America will be watching the Cleveland experiment. At the first indication of success—that is, of revenue enhancement—debates on mandatory recycling will break out in a multitude of city council chambers. It is not enough to hope that the Cleveland experiment will be a debacle; it almost certainly will be one but, nonetheless, debacles are often profitable to those who conduct them.

Perhaps, unlike the British, Americans will object to an RFID chip monitoring their garbage on privacy grounds. This objection may well be valid but it does not touch on the motives of local governments that consider mandatory recycling schemes. Nevertheless, it may well be the strongest defense that can be mounted.

The problem with this view is that “government” is an abstraction. In practice everything done in the name of government is done by government employees, ordinary human beings who can be, well, as fallible as anyone. To support this point we need only look at one of the cases Fahrenthold and Mui cited in buttressing their idea that government needs to protect us: the careless spraying of insecticides like DDT.

In the 1950s airplanes flew over swamps and suburbs, fields and forests, drenching everyone and everything with a rain of DDT and other insecticides. It was a triple fiasco: 1) it failed to control the target insect pests (such as the spruce budworm, the imported fire ant, and the gypsy moth, among others); 2) it cost a lot of money; and 3) the spraying slaughtered living things on a vast scale. It killed some farm and domestic animals; it killed hundreds of species of beneficial insects and nematodes; and it killed wildlife, including foxes, raccoons, rabbits, fish, and birds, turning affected areas into—in the eyes of a sensitive environmentalist—an eerie wasteland.

Who carried out this irresponsible madness? Rachel Carson fingered the culprits in her celebrated 1962 book, Silent Spring. The point is often overlooked today, but Silent Spring was not so much a critique of pesticides but a condemnation of their irresponsible use. In case after case, the organizations that drenched land and wildlife with poisonous insecticides were . . . wait for it . . . government agencies! For example, in 1958 the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a campaign to spray 20 million acres in nine southern states in an attempt to eradicate fire ants. The department won congressional approval for the program by making the unsupported assertion that fire ants were dangerous to livestock and crops, when in actuality, as Carson documented, they were no significant threat to either. The spraying did not control the fire ant, but it did cause massive kills of wildlife, especially fish and birds. The program was, said Carson, “an outstanding example of an ill-conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of insects.”

In New York State the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined forces with the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets in a futile attempt to eradicate the gypsy moth. In 1957, Carson continued, they “showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They sprayed the quarter-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her. . . . Birds, fish, crabs, and useful insects were killed.”

In Michigan, in an attempt to control the Japanese beetle, government agencies joined forces to dust the suburbs of Detroit with aldrin, a pesticide 100 times more toxic to birds than DDT. The first offender in this debacle was the Michigan state legislature, which gave state agencies the power to spray indiscriminately, without notifying landowners or gaining their permission. The spraying was carried out by the Michigan Department of Agriculture, backed by the pesticide-tropic U.S. Department of Agriculture. When worried citizens reported dead birds and sickened humans and animals, Carson reports, government agencies stonewalled. The Federal Aviation Agency, the Detroit Department of Parks, and the Detroit police all vouched for the safety of the operation even though they had no evidence on the point.

Silent Spring—the gospel of the environmental movement—abundantly demonstrates that government can be an irresponsible, insensitive polluter. This raises an interesting question: Why has this point been forgotten?

My explanation of this blindness is that these reporters—and environmental activists in general—are victims of the “watchful eye illusion.” Human beings have a disposition to believe in authority and to ascribe godlike wisdom and maturity to it. This orientation probably begins in childhood when parents are viewed as wise and capable. As children grow up, many transfer this faith in authority to government, producing the watchful eye illusion: the belief that government is wise and responsible. This illusion will lead people to forget about—or repress—all the evidence demonstrating that government officials are often unwise and irresponsible.

The 1950s spraying scandal hasn’t been government’s only environmental miscue. For another, look at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington, where the federal government’s radioactive spills are now expected to cost taxpayers $50 billion to clean up. In just one type of pollution at that site, the feds deliberately vented 725,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131. This was over 36,000 times as much radioactivity as was released in the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in which naughty private interests were supposedly “taking risks in search of a payoff.”

Just as government can be an irresponsible polluter, it can also be an ineffective regulator. Many people don’t grasp this reality because, again, they are blinded by their faith in authority. With naive confidence, they propose, for example, that “government should regulate oil drilling,” thinking that this will prevent oil spills. If they could overcome the watchful eye illusion they would realize that they need to put their proposal more carefully: “Assuming that the government employees doing the regulating are alert, thoughtful, energetic, and responsible, and never lazy, complacent, uninformed, irrational, careless, corrupt, or paralyzed by red tape, government should regulate oil drilling.” Thus stripped of illusion, the idea that government can protect the environment loses much of its luster.

In the final analysis, overcoming environmental abuse is not likely to be achieved by governmental dictation. Instead, it is a process of social learning that includes everyone: friends and neighbors, reporters, pamphleteers, teachers, researchers—and companies too, as they discover how pollution hurts their image and their bottom line.

Curious about what is so bad about gasoline that it was necessary to warn children, I bought it and found myself in an alternative universe of dreary ecological disasters. This was a far cry from the world of the classic picture books, such as what is undoubtedly today considered the criminally polluting tale of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. Nor did it resemble the brightly colored and fantastic world in the books I read to my kids in the early 1990s. Even more depressing, when I dug further it turned out that What’s So Bad About Gasoline? is part of a series of “science” books aimed at elementary school kids that tell a tale of ecological catastrophe. These include Oil Spill! by Melvin Berger and Where Does the Garbage Go? by Paul Showers.

If these books are what kids grow up with today, we should hope they spend their time on video games instead of reading. The books are troubling because by ignoring economics and by focusing on eco-politics, they get the solutions to environmental problems wrong.

Worse, in the world these books present things don’t get better. We must always do more to repent for our environmental sins. As economist Robert Nelson observes, environmentalism in America has evolved into “environmental Calvinism.” Even worse, Nelson notes, it is “Calvinism without God,” as bleak a vision as one can imagine since we’re left only with an impersonal environment as the object of veneration. (Nelson’s The New Holy Wars: Economic vs. Environmental Religion is a great read.) Presenting consumption as ecological sin without showing the vast improvements in people’s lives produced by growing wealth ignores the great success of market economies and entrepreneurs.

Finally, the vision of the world these books present lacks human agency as anything other than motivating the mindless consumption that leads to ecological catastrophes. Not only is this a world missing entrepreneurs and inventors, there’s also no excitement to its vision of the future. Although I am still waiting for my personal jetpack, the world of the The Jetsons promised a future of excitement and fun rather than a grim time in which we merely replace our cars with hybrids. The optimism that prompted Julian Simon to term humanity “the ultimate resource” is missing from this literature.

Oil Spill! was first published after the Exxon Valdez event. It opens with a dramatic scene of the tanker hitting the reef in Prince William Sound. Missing from the story are the broken sonar system that should have alerted the crew to the impending collision, the overtired third mate in the wheelhouse because the union-protected captain was sleeping off a drinking binge, and the lack of sufficient crew. The spill just happens. Indeed, humans are a minor presence in the book—appearing on just eight of 29 pages of illustrations, only as a cleanup crew hosing down a beach, a family on a beach, people using energy, and a child writing her congressman. Oil Spill!’s solution to the devastation of nature is political action.

Kids reading Oil Spill! aren’t likely to be ready for a fact-heavy discussion of oil-transportation risks versus the benefits of energy consumption, the natural underwater oil seeps that could be reduced by offshore drilling, or whether using less electricity will really reduce oil spills, as the book suggests (oil-fueled sources account for under 2 percent of U.S. electrical generation).

Children do not learn that the profit motive is what drives inventors and manufacturers to improve products to reduce energy consumption. The U.S. economy has steadily become more energy-efficient: Per dollar of real GDP, energy use dropped by more than a third from the late 1970s to 2000. Compared to 1900 each unit of energy input in 2000 could provide four times as much useful heat, move a person 550 times farther, provide 50 times more illumination, and produce 12 times as much electricity. Moreover, oil spills like the Exxon Valdez or the BP disaster are exceptions rather than the rule and are more likely due to failures in regulatory schemes than to a lack of laws.

Where Does the Garbage Go? isn’t a new book, first appearing in 1974. Comparing the 1974 and 1994 editions reveals an interesting shift in environmental thinking. Originally, Where Does the Garbage Go? centered on a girl who went through her own trash to see what her family threw away. She found worn sneakers, potato peels, cans, bottles, and her old yoyo. She then visited her uncle on a farm, discovering that food scraps could be fed to pigs. The book generalized to the collection of garbage and its disposal in the ocean (showing children swimming in a polluted ocean), incinerators (children grimacing and rubbing their eyes from the smoke), and dumps (“a dirty place,” “a great big mess” with rats and “millions of flies”). After explaining recycling and showing crowds making more trash, the 1974 book concluded with the child narrator asking what the reader thought “we should do” about trash as she took her old yoyo from the trash and fixed it.

By 1994, however, the narrator was gone and the story was now presented as a school lesson. Dumps and ocean dumping were history. But, just as in 1974, “Waste never stops piling up.” Recycling and waste-to-energy plants could handle some of our trash, but “we must do more. We must stop throwing so many things away.” By the end children are depicted walking home from the grocery store holding string bags that “we never throw away” and use “over and over again.”

Set aside whether or not recycling makes economic sense, particularly in the forms advocated in Where Does the Garbage Go? No second-grader wants to read a cost-benefit analysis of curbside recycling programs. Let’s even forget whether there is a market for recycled products large enough to absorb our trash. The big problem in this book—and in the others as well—is the focus on making people feel bad about consuming goods because it creates “waste.”

Conspicuous Underconsumption

Consumption isn’t bad—it is how we are made better off by the goods and services we purchase. The great success of market societies is precisely that they make it possible for virtually everyone in them to consume at a rate greater than even kings and emperors did in even the recent past. It was Boris Yeltsin’s 1989 visit to a Houston supermarket, not a visit to a recycling center, that convinced him of the superiority of free markets.

Moreover, the bounty of a market economy is a relatively recent discovery. There was little change in consumption of calories anywhere in the world until about 1800 in western Europe. Only after the Industrial Revolution did the human condition experience a dramatic change for the better. The world’s most pressing problem is that there is too little consumption not too much. People living in poverty in societies that lack basic market institutions across the developing world need to increase their consumption not reduce it.

Simultaneously the worst and best thing about What’s So Bad About Gasoline? and its ilk is that they are excruciatingly boring. Boring is bad because energy isn’t a boring topic, and making it boring turns kids off to thinking about science and technology. To their credit the book’s author and illustrator try hard to make it interesting. The pictures are lively: glaciers melt and houses tumble into the ocean. But they aren’t enough because the eco-catastrophist version of energy is one in which people are passive and events inevitable.

That’s not how the world actually works, of course. Energy isn’t boring even for elementary school kids because it is crammed full of interesting discoveries, larger-than-life characters, and exciting events. The transformation of gasoline from a waste product into a valuable commodity is a series of exciting discoveries made by entrepreneurs and scientists who raised our standards of living and health. In transforming oil into gasoline, scientists repeatedly accomplished tasks no one believed they could—turning crude oil into hundreds of different products. Brilliant and interesting characters abound.

Unfortunately What’s So Bad About Gasoline? misses all this. There are no individuals in the story. A cast of anonymous people from the Middle East to China to the United States finds things to do with petroleum and gasoline, and then bad things happen because we’re using too much carbon-based fuel.

Presumably HarperCollins publishes books like Where Does the Garbage Go?, Oil Spill!, and What’s So Bad About Gasoline? because earnest parents want their kids to grow up with green values. They are just a small part of a large series from one publisher, and my search for these books soon had Amazon recommending dozens of other similar titles. Worse, it is not just in these books that a future of ecological gloom and doom is being taught. Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw’s Facts Not Fear: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment documented the extent of the problem of teaching children to fear the future environmental catastrophe. For kids between kindergarten and 12th grade the dominant message in schools is: “The earth is badly polluted, the rain forest is about to disappear, and global warming will submerge New York City with floods—to name a few of the imminent catastrophes,” all problems caused by their parents, who “have brought the earth to the edge of doom.” Scientists and engineers are not problem solvers who make life better but evil exploiters of the environment. Congressmen solve problems.

How do people who believe humanity is indeed the ultimate resource rescue the future? We’ve got two key advantages over the prophets of doom. First, our stories are more interesting. Free societies have room for people to do things—to discover new ideas and invent new products. Children are engaged in a process of discovery about the world around them and the narrative of discovery is more exciting than one of catastrophes. Active beats passive for almost everyone, and free markets are active. Freedom and free enterprise are just much more interesting than the alternatives.

Second, “environmental Calvinism” is even less fun than the original Swiss version. Given a choice, kids’ dreams are not going to be about sorting trash into recycling bins but about personal jetpacks. Because we’ve got a more interesting story, we’ve got a chance to capture young people’s attention. If you spot a neighbor’s or relative’s young kids glumly reading Oil Spill!, slip them a life of Thomas Edison or a even Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (still in print!) and most will opt for the excitement of markets, invention, and action over the gloom of environmental pessimism. If parents read stories of action, invention, and excitement, they might even think twice about their own gloomy outlooks.

The latest in environmental buzzwords is “sustainability.” Of every act we take with respect to the natural world we must ask: Is it “sustainable”? My university even has a position devoted to overseeing its environmental sustainability.

Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of sustainability. Even though it is rarely defined rigorously by its supporters, it seems to mean something like: “making sure we leave enough for future generations.”  That vagueness is a reason why it makes such a good buzzword: Who is against ensuring that we don’t exhaust resources and leave future generations with nothing?  Of course, libertarians have raised a number of objections to the means by which many environmentalists would try to ensure that we treat nature sustainably.  It’s not at all clear that free markets are the enemy of the natural world — and even less clear that government is its friend.

What is interesting is that environmentalists who are hostile to markets are blind to how they embody concern with sustainability. In a Freeman article awhile back I made a similar point about how economists and environmentalists talk past each other about the idea of scarcity. Much of that argument applies to sustainability.

Get Rich Quick

Many environmentalists apparently assume that owners of resources in a free market have an incentive to use them up as quickly as possible for short-run profit, with no reason to care about their long-term sustainability. What environmentalists miss is that in a competitive market the price system informs us if we are behaving in an unsustainable way and provides us with the incentive both to restrict our use of resources and to search for substitutes.  When the supply of a resource becomes more scarce relative to demand, its price rises.  This signals to users that the good is more scarce and provides an incentive for them to reduce their quantity demanded, which “sustains” the resource in ways that would not happen without the price signal.  The rising price also encourages entrepreneurs to look for substitutes, which will also make the original resource use pattern more sustainable.

Beyond that, the process of finding substitutes promotes “sustainability” by providing new ways of solving old problems.  One of the problems with the standard environmentalist view of sustainability is that it is overly static and seems to assume that our goal should be to ensure that current patterns of resource use are sustainable into the indefinite future.  The only way to achieve that goal would be to limit innovation and thereby dramatically reduce or reverse economic growth, impoverishing billions.  By contrast, the economist’s conception of sustainability is more dynamic and recognizes that the goal is not to sustain a specific pattern of input use, but to create an institutional environment in which human beings can respond to changes in the demand for and supply of resources in ways that ensure their wants can continue to be satisfied at progressively lower cost, leading to the enrichment of all.  It is free markets that create exactly this institutional environment.

One last aspect of sustainability has to do with the role of government.  Both Ludwig von Mises’s theory of interventionism and the Austrian theory of the business cycle have at their theoretical core the idea that government intervention in the market leads to patterns of activity that are not sustainable.  Intervention creates unintended consequences that tend to lead to more intervention, which itself creates more problems. Inflation creates a pattern of capital use — the boom of the business cycle — that will eventually collapse for lack of real resources.  The current recession is the result of government-caused unsustainability.

The lesson for environmentalists is that they should see free markets as friends of sustainability and at least consider that, at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels, government intervention is sustainability’s enemy.

At first, Lomborg’s book was greeted enthusiastically, and, as a vegetarian backpacker, he was hailed as a charming curiosity. Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Wade found it “a surprise to meet someone who calls himself an environmentalist but who asserts that things are getting better . . . and that even global warming is not as serious as commonly portrayed.”

But then the long knives were drawn. Prominent individuals, including scientists who have taken hard-line positions on environmental topics, apparently felt attacked by Lomborg’s impressive 515-page tome. They turned on him. An almost hysterical review by ecologists Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey asked why Cambridge University Press “would decide to publish a hastily prepared book on complex scientific issues which disagrees with the broad scientific consensus, using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than by peer-reviewed publications.”

When one actually looks at the book, it is difficult to see how anyone could honestly make such charges. To begin with, The Skeptical Environmentalist is written in a thoughtful, conversational manner, with little dogmatism and plenty of humility. The discussions are backed by solid data, often carefully organized into graphs and tables. For anyone who has scrutinized these issues dispassionately (as I have tried to do in previous writings, as have many others, such as Julian Simon, Ronald Bailey, Joseph Bast, P. J. Hill, Wallace Kaufman, Gregg Easterbrook, and Michael Sanera), Lomborg’s conclusions are reasonable and well-supported.

Lomborg’s chief goal is to identify broad trends, some strictly environmental (such as whether 40,000 species are becoming extinct each year, as some claim) and others relating more directly to human conditions (such as whether food production is outpacing population). He explains that one could “easily write a book full of awful examples” or,alternatively, a book “full of sunshine stories,” but both would be “equally useless.” In addition to assessing global trends, he analyzes specific environmental hazards.

For the most part, Lomborg relies on widely accepted source materials (which makes the Pimm/Harvey complaint ludicrous). These are respected (although imperfect) collections of data from organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. For U.S. data, Lomborg relies on sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture. What his critics are loath to admit is that these mainstream sources tell a story of steady improvement in human conditions and lessening of environmental risk. (In the case of global warming, which involves not so much factual material as predictions based on computer models, Lomborg relies on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], the best-known scientific organization dealing with global warming.)

Sometimes Lomborg takes issue with his source material — specifically, he questions some of the IPCC decisions — but for the most part he accepts the conclusions of governmental and U.N. organizations. For example, when the EPA claims that 15,000 to 22,000 people are dying in the United States each year from radon seeping into their homes, he does not dispute it, although many have. Rather, he points out that such indoor air pollution is often ignored under a welter of worries about far less serious problems uch as fears of cancer from pesticide residues on foods.

Undoubtedly, some of the reaction to The Skeptical Environmentalist stems from Lomborg’s criticism of a few luminaries among environmental doomsdayers, such as Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. Lomborg shows how Brown misuses short-term trend data so that they appear to support his pessimistic claims. For example, Brown selected the beginning and ending point of a recent historical period to give the impression that grain yields are falling. In fact, the longer trend shows them rising. Lomborg’s critique of Brown is unassailable, and he is not the first to level it. But Brown’s friends have chosen to circle the wagons. Perhaps because the book is such an impressive collection of statistical data, they feel they must knock it own if they can.

Eventually, the brouhaha will subside and The Skeptical Environmentalist will take its place on our shelves as a useful reference. Indeed, the book is already being cited as a source. For those more interested in facts than rhetoric, it will be valuable for years to come.

After all, Ehrlich made those claims in 1968, and that was a long time ago. But in 1990 he published The Population Explosion, a sequel to his first bestseller.¹ Yet again time has proven that Ehrlich’s premises, on which his projections are based, are severely flawed. If an excess of three decades worth of statistics contrary to his theories do not dent his reputation, then Ehrlich deserves the title Teflon Prophet.

It is not the facts that compel Ehrlich’s supporters as much as a fanatical adherence to his solutions: global central economic planning more ambitious than anything Marx ever dreamed of. Ehrlich says he “can’t really see any truly insuperable barriers to reorganizing our society so that virtually everyone could lead a more pleasant, productive, satisfying life.”² As he sees it, our choice is to abandon the market for an “orderly, planned way to a sustainable human life-support system or to be brutally forced into that shift by nature.”³ When he wrote so wistfully about “reorganizing our society” did he envision himself as one of the reorganizers?

Ehrlich recognizes that reorganization would mean “giving up many things that we now consider to be essential freedoms.” While the costs would be great, so would the supposed benefits, which include “avoiding the total collapse of civilization and the disappearance of the United States as we know it.”⁴ Ehrlich is serious, and he’s taken seriously by the anti-capitalist coalition. His perceived sainthood rests not on acumen or accuracy, but on the fact that the solutions he offers are ideologically in tune with his supporters.

The most recent major study to disprove the theories of Ehrlich came from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In its book Global Food Projections to 2020, the IFPRI looks back at the last 30 years of world food production—coincidentally the period since the publication of Ehrlich’s first book. With the advantage of hindsight the Institute finds “that most regions have made substantial inroads against poverty and averted widespread famine in recent years.”⁵ The result has been a significant drop in the numbers of malnourished children. In high-risk developing countries malnutrition rates declined from “an aggregate rate of more than 46 percent in 1970 to 31 percent in 1997.” That translates “into an absolute decline of 20 million malnourished children since 1967.”⁶

In 1990 Ehrlich had a very different view of Latin America. He lamented: “Since 1981, per-capita food production has also been lagging” there and that “population growth is already outstripping food production.” Yet the IFPRI says that per capita cereal production increased from 225.3 kilograms in 1967 to 253.4 kilograms in 1997. During the period of 1990–1997 cereal production was growing at an annual rate averaging 1.9 percent, compared to a population growth rate of 1.7 percent.⁷ Ehrlich’s book was already wrong by the time it was printed: per capita food production, instead of lagging, grew by 11 percent over the next decade and cereal production increased faster than the population.

What the IFPRI has to say is good news all around, but more so for the developing countries. Instead of heading toward global famine, food supplies are increasing for the vast majority of the world’s population. The IFPRI found:

• “caloric availability per capita rose in developing countries between the 1960s and the early 1990s by 400 kilocalories, reaching nearly 2,700 kilocalories per day by 1997″;⁸
• per capita cereal production, from 1967 to 1997, “rose substantially”;⁹
• per capita gains in cereal production “rose from 176 kilograms in 1967 to 226 kilograms in 1997, an increase of 28 percent.”¹⁰

No Malthusian Crisis

The IFPRI is not alone in its conclusions. Tim Dyson, professor of population studies at the London School of Economics, wrote in the British Medical Journal that “a global malthusian crisis is unlikely to occur during the next few decades.”¹¹ Dyson surveyed the various regions of the world and found a healthy scenario regarding food and population. He said that famines on the Indian subcontinent “will be things of the past” provided the region remains politically stable. In China he found “no cause for alarm,” and both “Latin America and the Middle East have a record of progress in feeding their people and this is likely to continue.”¹²

Ehrlich, who projected massive famines in his first book, ignored his original projections in his second book. Instead of admitting he was wrong he wrote: “Of course, [as if he knew this all along] food production worldwide has continued to increase somewhat faster than the population for the last four decades.” But while some people believe this will continue for the foreseeable future, he says, “all signs point in the opposite direction.”¹³

Dyson wrote that the trend, instead of reversing, has continued unabated: “Food production should be able to keep up with the growth in world population that is projected to occur over the next 25 years. An important reason for this is that the worldwide growth in cereal yield shows no sign of slowing down.”¹⁴

Data from the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) shows worldwide cereal yields to have increased from just over one ton of cereal per hectare in the early 1950s to about 3 tons by the late 1990s.¹⁵ And worldwide averages are significantly below those of the developed world, implying room for a great deal of growth.

Areas that Ehrlich once said were hopeless are today feeding their own people. In his 1990 book Ehrlich claimed that food production in India, which had increased contrary to his prior warnings, had finally “lost momentum.” But the IFPRI data shows Ehrlich to be inaccurate yet again. Instead of losing momentum, rice production in India grew from 3.7 metric tons per hectare in 1990 to 4.2 in 1997. In addition, wheat production increased from 2.2 tons to 2.6, and maize increased from 1.5 tons to 1.7 tons.¹⁶ India, which was importing over 9 million metric tons (mmt) of cereals in 1967 was exporting almost 2 mmt by 1997.

Ehrlich had even less hope for the entire South Asia region. Yet the Institute’s data show that its food production increased throughout the ’90s and surpassed India’s in percentage terms. In 1990 Erhlich said Vietnam, once “a rich food exporting region,” was suffering from ecological destruction.¹⁷

In 1967 Vietnam imported 1.5 mmt of cereal. By 1982 imports were down to 0.6 million, and when Ehrlich’s book was released, Vietnam was exporting 1.2 mmt. By 1997 exports were up to 2.8 mmt.¹⁸

There are two fundamental reasons that Ehrlich has consistently, and substantially, erred with his projections. All his calculations are based on two false factors: he assumes food production must decrease while population growth rates remain steady. As we’ve seen, food production has continued to increase for the three decades since he first sounded his warnings. But Ehrlich felt such declines were inevitable and said the “tragedy” would be compounded by the fact “that the world population seems committed to a growth rate of closer to 2 percent for the next few decades.”¹⁹ While “few” is indeterminate, it is safe to assume he meant more than a couple; say, 30 years—until 2020.

But instead of remaining near 2 percent population growth rates had already declined by the time Ehrlich wrote his book. Population growth peaked around 1970 at 2.1 per cent. By 1980 it was down to 1.73 percent, and when Ehrlich’s book was published it had dropped to 1.7 percent. In 1995 the Institute for Demographic Studies said the rate had declined even further, to 1.5 percent.²⁰ And it continued to plummet so that by 2000, at 1.3 percent, it was closer to 1 percent than to Ehrlich’s projected 2 percent. Even the United Nations, which usually overestimates population growth, says that growth levels by 2015 will be down to 1.03 percent.²¹

Point of Agreement

There is one area on which Ehrlich, Dyson, and the Institute all agree: sub-Saharan Africa. There cereal-production rates declined almost from the day the colonial powers pulled out until today. In 1967 per capita cereal production was 127.9 kilograms but by 1997 it had dropped to 124.6 kilograms. This production rate is only one-fifth that of the developed countries and is about half the average for the developing countries. In spite of being the least populated continent, perhaps partially because of it, Africa’s per capita food production is significantly lower than that of South Asia, the next poorest region in the world.²²

In August 2000 the FAO warned that 17 countries faced severe food shortages, all in sub-Saharan Africa.²³ But what is clear is that in the majority of these cases, 12 countries by my count, political problems and war are the main cause of food shortages. Almost all the “basket cases” of the world from 30 years ago are now well on their way to feeding themselves, but not Africa. That raises the question why. If we look at the successes we see some dramatic changes. From 1958 to 1962 an estimated 30 million Chinese starved to death under an artificial famine created by socialist economic and agricultural policies.²⁴ Market reforms were instituted after Mao’s death, and food suddenly became more plentiful. The late political scientist David Osterfeld noted that after reforms, food production increased by 40 percent.²⁵ Since the early ’90s, when Osterfeld wrote his book, cereal production in China has increased by a further 17 percent.²⁶ In addition, market reforms have vastly increased the wealth of nonfarmers in China, making it relatively easy for them to afford to import the surpluses of food being produced in much of the rest of the world.

India, which Ehrlich had written off, has also turned into a food exporter. Again market reforms predated the rise in production. The late Julian Simon noted in Atlantic Monthly that “Most price controls were lifted, and price supports were substituted for controls. Indian farmers had a greater incentive to produce more, so they did. They increased production by planting more crops a year, on more land, and by improving the land they had. They also introduced higheryield strains and improved fertilizers.”²⁷ Since Simon wrote those words cereal production in India has increased 50 percent further.²⁸

But Africa has continued down the road of state intervention. What market reforms have been instituted have been half-measures and often repealed later. In many cases, such as Zimbabwe, the government has waged war on private markets intentionally, undermining private property rights and the incentives to produce. Reforms in Africa have been so half-hearted that the IFPRI produced a paper on the subject titled The Road Half Traveled.²⁹

Throughout Africa state marketing boards often hold a monopoly on critical foodstuffs. Frequently these boards will pay farmers below-market rates and then sell the produce on the world market with all profits going to the government or to individuals in the government. It remains true that Africa is a bastion of state control over agriculture. But it is not enough that the state withdraw from agricultural matters. The rule of law and the sovereignty of individual property rights must be upheld. It is difficult for any business, let alone farmers, to plan for the future if they cannot enter into secure contracts or if they have no legal claim to the property they use.

Other factors that undermine agricultural production include the periodic influx of “food aid” to Africa, which destroys local production. Often such aid is given to the central government and is used to expand state activities that attract human capital from the private sector. Paradoxically, one factor in Africa’s lack of development may be that the continent, on the whole, is underpopulated. Agricultural production needs to get to markets, and for that to happen, infrastructure is needed. But infrastructure cannot be built if the numbers of people it will serve are few. One simply does not build multimillion dollar highways to villages of 200 people.

The battle to feed humanity is not over. And while the fight is still being waged, it does appear that, contrary to Ehrlich, humanity is winning. Throughout the world, market forces have vastly expanded the ability of mankind to feed itself. And as a result, food per capita has continued to grow for the last few decades. Nations that only a few decades ago were pronounced hopeless now produce surpluses because of market reforms. Endemic starvation is essentially limited to one corner of the world where markets are not embraced and where private property is not secure. Of course, this does not stop the anti-capitalist coalition from blaming capitalism. Nor does it prevent the coalition from suggesting new forms of socialism, on a global scale, as the solution.

But the evidence, which grows daily, indicates that the fight over food is more illusionary than real. Substantial progress is intentionally ignored and starving children are used as propaganda to persuade the world to adopt global economic planning. A phony crisis is being invented in the hope that it will persuade people to adopt a counterfeit solution.

1. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (London: Hutchinson, 1990).
2. Ibid., p. 184.
3. Ibid., p. 44.
4. Ibid., p. 181.
5. Mark Rosegrant et al., Global Food Projections to 2020 (Washington, D.C., International Food Policy Research Institute, 2001), p. 3; www.ifpri.cgiar.org/pubs/books/globalfoodprojections2020.htm. See also Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical
Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 9.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid., pp. 5, 8.
8. Ibid., p. 5.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Tim Dyson, “Prospects for Feeding the World,” British Medical Journal, October 9, 1999, p. 988.
12. Ibid., p. 989.
13. Ehrlich, p. 68.
14. Dyson, p. 990.
15. Ibid.
16. Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
17. Ehrlich, p. 73.
18. Rosegrant et al., p. 10.
19. Ehrlich, p. 109.
20. Jim Peron, Exploding Population Myths (Chicago: Heartland Institute, 1995), p. 35.
21. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, and Mark Rosegrant, The World Food Situation: Recent Developments, Emerging Issues and Long-Term Prospects (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1997), p. 28.
22. Rosegrant et al., p. 5.
23. Report can be read at www.fao.org/WAICENT/faoinfo/
economic/giews/english/eaf/eaftoc.htm.
24. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996).
25. David Osterfeld, Planning versus Prosperity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 64.
26. Based on data in Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
27. Julian Simon, “The State of World Food Supplies,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1981, pp. 72–76.
28. Based on data in Rosegrant et al., p. 22.
29. Mylène Kherallah et al., The Road Half Traveled: Agricultural Market Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, n.d). It can
be found at www.ifpri.org/pubs/pubs.htm#fpr.

But dramatic changes in the quality of life have occurred in recent history. Global life expectancy in the last century climbed from 30 to around 60. In the United States, life expectancy has reached 76. So many of the things we take for granted—hot and cold running water, health care, and a stable food supply—were unknown to mankind throughout most of history.

Why is it that in the last couple of centuries things have changed so rapidly, when for thousands of years life remained a struggle for survival? For one thing, free-market economies emerged, based on the principles on which the United States was founded. John Locke spoke of these principles as the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and estate.” Later Thomas Jefferson echoed these sentiments and helped make them central to the American way of life. Such basic liberties mean that we in America have the right to self-determination and the right to profit from our own ingenuity. From the onset of government based on fundamental rights, free-market economies emerged, wealth increased profoundly, and our quality of life improved by leaps and bounds.

Among the many achievements was the development of manmade chemicals, which have revolutionized how we live. They make possible such things as pharmaceuticals, safe drinking water, and pest control. Yet popular perception is that manmade chemicals are the source of every possible ill from cancer, ozone depletion, and infertility to brain damage. Ignoring that nature produces far more chemicals in far higher doses and that most chemicals are innocuous at low doses, activists capitalize on these fears. They scare the public by hyping the risks to ensure that the government passes volumes of laws and regulations all focused on the elimination of chemicals, thus jeopardizing our freedom without much regard for the tradeoffs.

Advocates of such limits say that we need to make sure every chemical is safe before exposing the public. In his recent book, Pandora’s Poison, Greenpeace’s Joe Thornton calls on society to follow the “precautionary principle,” which says we should avoid practices that have the potential to cause severe damage, even in the absence of scientific proof of harm. Thornton advocates a “zero discharge” policy, which calls for the elimination of all “bioaccumulative” chemicals. In particular, he has long called for the elimination of chlorine, about which he noted in Science magazine (July 9, 1993): “There are no known uses for chlorine which we regard as safe.” More recently, perhaps in recognition that this standard is politically untenable, he suggested that we continue using chlorine for “some pharmaceuticals” and some “water disinfection,” but only until other options become available.

Promoting such “precautionary policies” could mean halting all industrial activity, because nothing can be proven 100 percent safe. Hence, such policies carry dangerous tradeoffs. While chemicals may create new risks, they have been used to eliminate others—many of which wreaked havoc on civilization for centuries. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Fred Smith notes: “Experience demonstrates that the risks of innovation, while real, are vastly less than risks of stagnation.” Indeed, he asks, what would the world be like if we had never introduced penicillin because we could not prove it was 100 percent safe?

Essential Chemicals

While we don’t think much about it, manmade chemicals are essential to almost everything we do. They make our cars run; they clean everything from our teeth to our dishes; they reduce illnesses by disinfecting everything from our bathrooms at home to the operating rooms in our hospitals; they are used on food products such as poultry to eliminate E. coli and other deadly pathogens; and they keep our computers, televisions, and other electronic products running. Consider just a few of the critical functions they perform in making our lives better:

• Chlorination of water supplies has saved millions of lives. For example, since local engineers and industry introduced chlorination in 1880s, waterborne-related deaths in the United States have dropped from 75 to 100 per 100,000 people to fewer than 0.1 deaths per 100,000 annually in 1950.¹ Rather than curtailing the use of chlorination as Thornton suggests, we should be expanding access. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in the developing world diarrheal diseases (such as cholera and dysentery) kill about two million children under five every year because of such things as poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water. Nearly 85 percent of pharmaceuticals that we now use require chlorine in their production.
• Thanks to chemicals used for pharmaceuticals, combination drug therapy has reduced AIDS deaths by more than 70 percent from 1994 to 1997.²
• Fifty percent of the reductions in heart-disease-related deaths between 1980 and 1990 (total death-rate decline of 30 percent) are attributable to medicines and the chemicals that compose them.³
• Chemicals called phthalates (there are several kinds) are used in PVC—vinyl used for medical tubing, blood bags, and numerous other products. While environmentalists have tried to ban these,⁴ vinyl medical devices provide many life-saving benefits. PVC is a safe, durable, sterile product that can withstand heat and pressure, and produces tubing that doesn’t kink. It’s particularly beneficial for vinyl blood bags because it stores blood twice as long as the next best alternative and doesn’t break like glass alternatives. In times of blood shortages, PVC blood bags are an essential tool in maintaining and transporting supply.
• Thanks to modern farming with chemicals, food production has outpaced population growth—providing people in both developed and developing countries with more food per person. Per capita grain supplies have grown by 27 percent since 1950, and food prices have declined in real terms by 57 percent since 1980. The use of herbicides to control weeds decreases the need for tilling soil, which in turn reduces soil erosion 50–98 percent.⁵

Disregarding such benefits, most of the key U.S. environmental regulatory statutes follow the lead of groups like Greenpeace, focusing on the elimination of chemicals without much regard to the dangers of not having these technologies. The Clean Water Act (1972), for example, made this unattainable pledge: “it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.” While we can meet reasonable clean-water goals, we can’t meet a zero discharge without forcibly halting industrial processes that bring us lifesaving medicines, a safe food supply packaged to resist spoilage, and even clothing.

Likewise, regulations that the EPA issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974) actually set zero as the goal for certain chemical contaminants in drinking water—something that is virtually impossible and totally unnecessary for public-health purposes. With such goals, drinking-water standards for chemicals are extremely stringent. For example, one standard for a contaminant demands that drinking water not contain any more than 0.03 parts per trillion. The high costs of such onerous standards mean that financial resources are diverted from other more essential needs.

The Manmade Cancer Myth

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology last year, researchers from the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Public Health noted that “A typical commentary blamed ‘increasing cancer rates’ on ‘exposure to industrial chemicals and run-away modern technologies whose explosive growth had clearly outpaced the ability of society to control them.’”⁶ But their research finds: “There is no denying the existence of environmental problems, but the present data show that they produced no striking increase in cancer mortality.” They conclude: “When the mortality from all smoking-related cancers is excluded, the decline in other cancer from 1950 to 1998 was 31 percent (from 109 to 75 deaths per 100,00 person years).” Hence the increase in cancer at that time was not related to the use of synthetic chemicals or pollution, but to personal lifestyle choices.

The most recent report from the National Cancer Institute confirms that: “Cancer incidence for all sites combined decreased from 1992 through 1998 among all persons in the United States, primarily because of a decline of 2.9 percent per year in white males and 3.1 percent per year in black males. Among females, cancer incidence rates increased 0.3 percent per year. Overall, cancer death rates declined 1.1 percent per year.”⁷ Cancer among women increased slightly only because of better detection, which is good news because it means doctors are finding and curing more cancers among women.

In their landmark 1981 study of the issue, Sir Richard Doll and Richard Peto set out to determine the causes of preventable cancer in the United States.⁸ According to Doll and Peto, pollution only accounts for 2 percent of all cancer cases. They do note that 80 to 90 percent of cancers are caused by “environmental factors.” But while activists often trumpet this figure as evidence that industrial society is causing cancer, Doll and Peto explain that “environmental factors” simply means factors other than genetics. It does not mean pollution alone. Environmental factors include smoking, diet, occupational exposure to chemicals, “geophysical factors” such as naturally occurring radiation, manmade radiation, medical drugs and radiation, and pollution. Tobacco use accounts for about 30 percent of all annual cancer deaths, and dietary choices account for 35 percent of annual cancer deaths.

With so few cancers caused by pollution, how many could environmental regulation eliminate? With each regulation the EPA claims to save thousands from dying from cancer. Together, these would likely add up into the millions. But scientist Michael Gough demonstrates why we should consider such EPA claims suspect.

Gough analyzed the findings of the Doll-Peto study along with estimates of cancer risks in the EPA’s report Unfinished Business. He came to conclusions similar to that of Doll and Peto. Gough noted that between 2 and 3 percent of all cancers could be associated with environmental pollution. Determining such numbers helps us understand what exactly the EPA can expect to accomplish when regulating pollutants. Gough says that EPA action could only address a small percentage of cancers: “If the EPA risk assessment techniques are accurate, and all identified carcinogens amenable to EPA regulations were completely controlled, about 6,400 cancer deaths annually (about 1.3% of the current annual total of 435,000 cancer deaths) would be prevented. When cancer risks are estimated using the more realistic method employed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the number of regulatable cancers is smaller, about 1,400 (about 0.25%).”⁹

Faulty Rodent Tests

Given these realities, how does the EPA justify its claims? Many of the findings on
chemicals and cancer relate to faulty tests that entail administering massive amounts of chemicals to rodents bred to be highly susceptible to cancer. Then researchers extrapolate the possible effects of such chemicals on humans, who may be exposed to small amounts of the same chemical during their lives.

We should ask: Why are the impacts on rodents relevant to humans? Doll and Peto note that some chemicals found to be carcinogenic in humans have not produced cancerous tumors in rodents. In fact, for many years, cigarette smoke failed to produce malignant tumors in laboratory animals although tobacco is a leading cause of cancer in the United States. These discordant effects of chemicals in animals and humans underline the difficulty of relying on animal results to estimate human risks.

Moreover, Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold demonstrate why we need not be concerned about low-level exposure to “rodent carcinogens.”¹⁰ They found that such chemicals pose no more of a risk than that posed by many natural, unregulated substances that are common and accepted parts of a healthy diet. While 212 of 350 of the synthetic chemicals examined by various agencies were found to be carcinogenic at the massive doses given to rodents, 37 out of 77 of the natural substances tested were also found carcinogenic in rodent studies employing the same methodology. The average intake of natural rodent carcinogens in plant foods is about 1,500 mg per person each day, while the average intake of manmade pesticides is .09 mg per day.¹¹ Natural rodent carcinogens exist in apples, bananas, carrots, celery, coffee, lettuce, orange juice, peas, potatoes, and tomatoes at levels thousands of times greater than exposures found in drinking water.¹²

The free use and development of chemicals have proven a key to human progress, and ill effects on health from low-level exposures are small, if detectable at all. Continued progress demands the continuation of an unfettered marketplace in which firms can develop new products without having to meet an impossible or nearly impossible zero-risk standard. Such allegedly more “precautionary” approaches of the environmental activists actually risk a return to the world of Thomas Hobbes.

1. Michael J. LaNier, “Historical Development of Municipal Water Systems in the United States, 1776 to 1976,” Journal of the American Water Works Association, April 1976, p. 177.
2. Frank J. Palella et al., “Declining Morbidity and Mortality among Patients with Advanced HIV Infection,” The New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 1998.
3. M.G. Hunink et al., “The Recent Decline in Mortality From Coronary Heart Disease, 1980–1990,” Journal of the American Medical Association, February 19, 1997, pp. 535–42.
4. Bill Durodie, “Poisonous Propaganda: Global Echoes of an Anti-Vinyl Agenda” (Washington, D.C.: Competitive Enterprise Institute, July 2000).
5. Dennis Avery, “Saving the Planet with Pesticides,” in Ronald Bailey, ed., The True State of the Planet (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 52–54.
6. Brad Rodu and Philip Cole, “The Fifty-Year Decline of Cancer in America,” Journal of Clinical Oncology, January 1, 2001, pp. 239–41.
7. Holly L. Howe et al., “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer (1973 through 1998), Featuring Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, June 6, 2001, pp. 824–42.
8. Richard Doll and Richard Peto, “The Causes of Cancer: Quantitative Estimates of Avoidable Risks of Cancer in the United States Today,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, June 1981.
9. Michael Gough, “How Much Cancer Can EPA Regulate Away?” Risk Analysis 10, no. 1 (1990), pp. 1–6; and Michael Gough, “Estimating Cancer Mortality,” Environmental Science and Technology 23, no. 8 (1989), pp. 925–30.
10. Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, “Too Many Rodent Carcinogens: Mitogenesis Increases Mutagenesis,” Science,
August 31, 1990, p. 970.
11. Ibid.
12. National Research Council, Committee on Comparative Toxicology of Naturally Occurring Carcinogens, Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet: A Comparison of Naturally Occurring and Synthetic Substances (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996), Appendix A.

Equally important, Crichton wants to tear away the curtain of sanctimoniousness that hides the self-serving nature of the main “green” organizations. Their disregard for science and truth already imposes costs on people, with the heaviest costs falling on the poorest people. If the United States were ever so foolish as to embrace the “green” agenda in full, the result would be economic disaster of monumental proportions. Crichton accurately sees the radical greens as self-interested groups whose officers irresponsibly push fear and pseudoscience to drum up financial support.

When you put such an ambitious product in the hands of a bestselling novelist, you have the makings of a book with strong impact. That’s just what Michael Crichton delivers.

It’s important to bear in mind that while Crichton has made his career writing fast-paced “technothriller” novels, he has a strong scientific background that includes a medical degree from Harvard. Clearly, he has not lost the ability to think analytically about scientific claims. The greens’ incessant use of alarmist rhetoric, disinformation, and junk science has caused many scientists to speak up in protest. Crichton wants the general reading reading public to understand what scientists do and that environmentalists often play fast and loose with the scientific method.

The action in the novel centers around a fictitious (but very realistic) environmental organization called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) and its unpleasant, maniacal leader Nick Drake. NERF has been spending huge sums of money to covertly acquire some esoteric technology, a fact that comes to the attention of John Kenner, a cross between an MIT professor and a swashbuckling adventurer. Kenner gradually figures out what Drake is up to — the deliberate staging of environmental disasters, human casualties and all, for the purpose of hyping a big environmental conference and lawsuit NERF is planning. Kenner uses all his brains and guts to foil the plots.

Naturally, there is plenty of suspense, mystery, and action. What Crichton hopes is that readers won’t just go bouncing along with the plot, but will absorb some of the scientific information he frequently includes in the form of dialogues between Kenner and some environmental true believer. For example, Kenner responds to a flip comment by an environmental lawyer that Antarctica is melting due to global warming by printing out a list of scientific papers (all of them genuine) in which the researchers have found evidence for Antarctic cooling. The lawyer merely responds by saying that the studies were probably financed by the coal industry.

Kenner counterattacks by asking if the lawyer holds his views merely because his salary is paid by environmental groups. The lawyer becomes angry at the implication that he is just a paid flunky, and Kenner then bores in.

“Now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned by slimy characterizations such as the one you just made. Sanjong and I gave you a careful, peer-reviewed interpretation of data. Made by several groups of scientists from several different countries. And your response was first to ignore it, and then to make an ad hominem attack.You didn’t answer the data. You didn’t provide counter evidence. You just smeared with innuendo.”

State of Fear is chock full of important lessons like that. Once he gets rolling, Crichton is like a guy who, now that he has his chain saw out, figures he might as well cut up not just the downed tree branch in his backyard, but all the rest of the dead wood around. He goes after lots of other environmental pseudo-issues (such as that power lines cause cancer) and emphasizes the high cost of some environmental policies (such as the resurgence of malaria since greens managed to have DDT banned). By the book’s end, there’s a big pile of sawdust that used to be the environmentalist thought-world.

Of course, the book has been blasted by the greens and big-government interventionists who don’t want to see one of their prize justifications for the expansion of the state called into question. Their ire alone is almost enough to recommend State of Fear. Crichton’s brief essay “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous” (included as an appendix) is certainly enough to recommend it.

Sample this rarity — a best-seller that has something very important to say.

Given the euphoria over ethanol, it is hard to imagine that there could be a downside. Unfortunately, ethanol has numerous and significant problems.

For starters, ethanol is an inferior energy source. Ethanol has 35 percent less energy by volume than regular unleaded gasoline. One gallon of E-10 gasoline (which contains 10 percent ethanol) is 3.6 percent less efficient than pure gasoline (ethanol-free, E-0). In other words, as the percentage of ethanol in a gallon of gas goes up, the realized miles per gallon go down. As a result, E-15 is 5 percent less efficient than E-0 gasoline and E-20 is 7.7 percent less efficient. E-85 gas is between 25 and 30 percent less efficient than pure E-0 gasoline.

On average, E-10 gas is 10 cents per gallon cheaper at the pump than regular E-0 gas. E-85 is even cheaper—70 cents per gallon less. This cost-per-gallon comparison is, unfortunately, very deceptive. A more telling measure would be to compare the cost per mile driven for each fuel type. Craig Clough notes that a “flex-fuel” 2007 Chevy Tahoe (capable of handling any ethanol-blend fuel) averages 14 MPG on regular E-0 gas and 10 MPG on E-85 gas. What would it cost to go on a thousand-mile trip using these two different types of gas? The cost of the trip using regular E-0 gasoline (at $3.70 per gallon) would be $264.29. Using the cheaper E-85 gas (at $3 per gallon), the same thousand-mile trip would cost $300—that’s $35.71, or 13.5 percent, more. Translation: Because of the lower energy content in ethanol, consumers actually pay more because they will need more gallons to go the same distance. So if a gallon of ethanol burns cleaner than a gallon of regular E-0 gasoline, but you need to burn more gallons of the ethanol-blended gasoline to go the same distance, how does this result in less pollution? Or does it? Ethanol has another pollution problem. It is more volatile than gasoline (meaning it evaporates far more rapidly), making it a major contributor to smog.

Ethanol also has some nasty properties that politicians and the Big Corn lobby would rather not talk about. For starters, ethanol is corrosive to some metals, rubber, fiberglass, and plastic. This leads to higher maintenance costs and the need to replace parts sooner than would otherwise be the case. Older car engines, boat engines, motorcycles, snowmobiles, and small gas-powered tools (chain saws, snow blowers, lawn mowers, and weed whackers) are especially vulnerable to ethanol corrosion. Fine particles of rubber, plastic, or metal flow through the fuel system. These particles eventually clog the engine’s fuel lines, fuel filter, carburetor, and fuel injector. Ethanol can also cause an engine to burn out because it runs hotter.

Later-model cars and trucks were supposed to have been re-engineered to mitigate the corrosive properties of the E-10 ethanol-laced fuel. Ed Wallace, writing in Business Week, finds that this is not necessarily true. “Not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers.” He goes on: “It now appears that in just a few years since the government forced ethanol use on the country, engine and fuel system failures caused by ethanol are causing major damage to more and more new and used vehicles.” Wallace concludes: “Sadly, when a truly bad idea is exposed today, Washington’s answer is to double-down on the bet, mandate more of the same, and make the problem worse. Only this time around motorists will be able to gauge the real cost of ethanol when it comes time to fix their personal cars.”

Ethanol has two other properties that further complicate the process. Ethanol and gasoline do not bond chemically. They simply coexist in the fuel system in an “oil and vinegar” relationship. While ethanol may hate gasoline, it loves water. The term to describe this is “hygroscopic,” or “water soluble.” Ethanol attracts and absorbs water. As long as the amount of water in the fuel system is small, this can be a good thing: In the winter it limits the possibility of a fuel line freeze-up. However, as the water content gets higher, the new ethanol/water compound sinks to the bottom of the fuel tank. This process is called “phase separation.”

If we continually drive our cars (or cut our grass every week or so) these ethanol-unique characteristics will not normally be an issue. But after about 90 days (the shelf life of E-10 gasoline), problems begin to manifest. The result: “bad gas.” The engine won’t start or there will be “missing” or “sputtering” problems. This is the reason you don’t want to leave gas containing ethanol in the lawn mower over the winter.

Because of the separation and corrosion problems, ethanol cannot be transported through pipelines. It requires its own separate and costly distribution channel dominated by rail and trucks to keep it apart from the gasoline as long as possible before retail.

Unconscionable Burning of Food

Ethanol’s biggest problem is largely ignored. Burning food as an energy source is unconscionable in these circumstances. Using corn to feed humans and livestock, and to fuel cars, is having obvious negative implications. In 2007 we burned 15 percent of our corn crop as ethanol. According to the Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), “Ethanol and its subsidies amount to a hidden and nefarious tax on food. The higher use of ethanol accounted for up to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008.” Congressional mandates to increase the use of ethanol even more will only exacerbate this problem. To meet the massive artificial demand for corn created by this government energy program, we can either: 1) switch crops (soy to corn) and keep the cropland acreage the same (which will cause all food prices to skyrocket) or 2) increase the amount of acreage available through large-scale pristine habitat destruction. Neither is satisfactory.

According to IBD, “[I]t takes about 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. Each acre of corn requires about 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorous. Increased acreage means increased agricultural runoff, which is creating aquatic ‘dead zones’ in our rivers, bays, and coastal areas.”

Ironically, a case could be made that ethanol is not really “renewable green power” at all but rather a “fossil fuel” in disguise. You don’t just squeeze corn to make ethanol. The distilling process to convert corn starch to ethyl alcohol is energy intensive. According to Matthew Wald in the January 2007 Scientific American, to create 100 units of ethanol energy in the distillation process, you need 45 units of fossil-fuel (coal or natural gas) energy. Michael Wang, an environmental scientist at the Argonne Laboratory, calculated that the amount of fossil fuels is even greater if you look at the whole process (planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and distillation). According to Wang, to produce 100 units of ethanol energy, you need 74 units of fossil fuels.

Hide the True Cost

Given all these expenses—energy to make energy and a separate logistic system—how does the ethanol industry make any money? It doesn’t.

Were it not for the massive government tax preferences (a 51-cent-per-gallon tax break) and government protection (a 54-cent tariff on imported ethanol), this industry could not survive. That’s in part because countries like Brazil—the world’s largest ethanol producer—can produce it more efficiently using sugar cane. On a yield-per-acre basis, the amount of ethanol produced from Brazilian sugar cane is nearly double that derived from U.S. corn.

Even with all this help, the industry asks for still more. Last year the ethanol producers’ association, Growth Energy, petitioned the EPA to allow ethanol blends as high as 15 percent. For the majority of the cars and trucks in the United States, the highest ethanol level allowed by the EPA is the 10 percent blend. Anything above that could void existing car warranties. The exceptions are flex-fuel/dual-fuel vehicles, which can use E-85 gas because they have special stainless-steel fuel tanks and other upgraded fuel system parts. Besides the overused environmental and energy independence angle, Growth Energy claims that this change will create thousands of new jobs.

Revealingly, there is always one reason missing from the case for ethanol. We always hear that it is good for the environment, or it’s good for family farmers, or it creates jobs. But no one ever says that ethanol is good for the consumer. That’s because it isn’t. At the pump the consumer pays more to get fewer miles per gallon than with gasoline. Behind the scenes the consumers’ tax dollars are used to shore up a failing industry that drives up the cost of food and of maintenance of all engines that ethanol touches. It is time to admit that promoting ethanol as a fuel source has been a catastrophic mistake. We need to cut our losses and let the free market, not the government, determine winners and losers in the energy sector.

I would have been convinced by 10 or so.

FEE Timely Classic:
“Environmentalism: The Triumph of Politics” by Doug Bandow