Thomas Friedman agrees in his New York Times column “The Earth is Full” (June 8, 2008), in which he says, “[P]opulation growth and global warming push up food prices, which leads to political instability, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, and so on in a vicious circle.”

In his article “What Nobody Wants to Hear, But Everyone Needs to Know,” University of Texas at Austin biology professor Eric R. Pianka wrote, “I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.”

However, there is absolutely no relationship between high populations, disaster, and poverty. Population-control advocates might consider the Democratic Republic of Congo’s meager 75 people per square mile to be ideal while Hong Kong’s 6,500 people per square mile is problematic. Yet Hong Kong’s citizens enjoy a per capita income of $43,000 while the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a per capita income of $300. It’s no anomaly. Some of the world’s poorest countries have the lowest population densities.

Planet earth is loaded with room. We could put the world’s entire population into the United States, yielding a density of 1,713 people per square mile. That’s far lower than what now exists in all major U.S. cities. The entire U.S. population could move to Texas, and each family of four would enjoy more than 2.1 acres of land. Likewise, if the entire world’s population moved to Texas, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, each family of four would enjoy a bit over two acres. Nobody’s suggesting that the entire earth’s population be put in the United States or that the entire U.S. population move to Texas. I cite these figures to help put the matter into perspective.

Let’s look at some other population density evidence. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, West Germany had a higher population density than East Germany. The same is true of South Korea versus North Korea; Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore versus China; the United States versus the Soviet Union; and Japan versus India. Despite more crowding, West Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, and Japan experienced far greater economic growth, higher standards of living, and greater access to resources than their counterparts with lower population densities. By the way, Hong Kong has virtually no agriculture sector, but its citizens eat well.

One wonders why anyone listens to doomsayers who have been consistently wrong in their predictions—not a little off, but way off. Professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, predicted major food shortages in the United States and that by “the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted the starvation of 65 million Americans between 1980 and 1989 and a decline in U.S. population to 22.6 million by 1999. He saw England in more desperate straits: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Expert Poverty

By a considerable measure, poverty in underdeveloped nations is directly attributable to their leaders heeding the advice of western “experts.” Nobel laureate and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal said (1956), “The special advisors to underdeveloped countries who have taken the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the problem . . . all recommend central planning as the first condition of progress.” In 1957 Stanford University economist Paul A. Baran advised, “The establishment of a socialist planned economy is an essential, indeed indispensable, condition for the attainment of economic and social progress in underdeveloped countries.”

Topping off this bad advice, underdeveloped countries sent their brightest to the London School of Economics, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale to be taught socialist nonsense about economic growth. Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson taught them that underdeveloped countries “cannot get their heads above water because their production is so low that they can spare nothing for capital formation by which the standard of living could be raised.” Economist Ranger Nurkse describes the “vicious circle of poverty” as the basic cause of the underdevelopment of poor countries. According to him, a country is poor because it is poor. On its face this theory is ludicrous. If it had validity, all mankind would still be cave dwellers because we all were poor at one time and poverty is inescapable.

Population controllers have a Malthusian vision of the world that sees population growth outpacing the means for people to care for themselves. Mankind’s ingenuity has proven the Malthusians dead wrong. As a result we can grow increasingly larger quantities of food on less and less land. The energy used to produce food, per dollar of GDP, has been in steep decline. We’re getting more with less, and that applies to most other inputs we use for goods and services.

Ponder the following question: Why is it that mankind today enjoys cell phones, computers, and airplanes but did not when King Louis XIV was alive? After all, the necessary physical resources to make cell phones, computers, and airplanes have always been around, even when cavemen walked the earth. There is only one reason we enjoy these goodies today but did not in past eras. It’s the growth in human knowledge, ingenuity, and specialization and trade—coupled with personal liberty and private property rights—that led to industrialization and betterment. In other words human beings are immensely valuable resources.

What are called overpopulation problems result from socialistic government practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe, house, and feed themselves. Underdeveloped nations are rife with farm controls, export and import restrictions, restrictive licensing, price controls, plus gross human rights violations that encourage their most productive people to emigrate and stifle the productivity of those who remain. The true antipoverty lesson for poor nations is that the most promising route out of poverty to greater wealth is personal liberty and its main ingredient, limited government.

Apparently that is not the case. Ron Bailey of Reason reports on a study showing that the more familiar people become with the scientific literature, the more firmly they hold the position they started with — no matter which position it is! And what tends to determine people’s position? Their general values orientation.

“Confirmation bias is everywhere,” Bailey writes.

HT: Shikha Dalmia

Now before Greenpeace hones a quill for a sharply worded reprimand, let me clarify: I am not dismissing concerns over anthropogenic carbon emissions (or nineteenth-century wolf-phobias for that matter), but wondering aloud whether or not our policy choices will have similar long-term unintended consequences. The amateur historian in me thinks the likelihood high that we will come to regret large-scale managed “solutions” to what ails us, whether the dragons we slay come slavering at night or quietly in the air.

A Pause for Reflection

Battling grievous menaces to public welfare ought, by all reason, to be supported at public expense. Or so the prevailing wisdom goes. Take wolves for instance. The long-running nationwide government wolf extirpation program has lasted for longer than our history as a nation. It continued for well over a century after Lincoln’s firsthand experience, and Jefferson himself had recalled state wolf bounty programs more than a century earlier. By 1914 the program really got down to business, and Congress gave the U.S. Biological Survey primary responsibility for wolf eradication, insisting that a third of its budget be used to kill wolves and their ilk (“survey” had an apparently different connotation in Great War America). Federal trappers killed the last two wolf pups in Yellowstone National Park in 1926, and wolf killing was being done from the air by Fish & Wildlife rangers as late as 1948.

And no, it wasn’t for lack of romantic attachment that wolves were removed from the habitable continent. Ernest Thompson Seton wrote with vivid prose lingering and sympathetic accounts of wolf trapping from the turn of the century (who can forget “Lobo” and “Blanca”?) Aldo Leopold writes with some dismay in Thinking Like a Mountain of his experience killing wolves as a forest ranger in Arizona in 1909. Qualms or not, however, wolves were a threat to progress. Government, clearly in the business of promoting progress by this time, was harnessed to do the dirty work and was, not surprisingly, rather successful at it.

Obviously Kevin Costner films weren’t yet in vogue. Or perhaps wolf imagery hadn’t quite made it onto the t-shirt scene. Either way, government bureaucrats weren’t privy to the sort of enlightened ecological sensitivity that even a grade-schooler possesses today.

Today Is Different

Well of course, you say, that was a darker, dumber era now firmly behind us. We ought now to rest easier, allowing officials license to focus their efforts on solutions to today’s clearly pressing concerns to the public welfare. Things like carbon pollution. Since the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has deemed carbon emissions a “clear and unmistakable threat to the public welfare” and since an awful lot of experts seem to agree on this point, why buck the facts? Oh sure, there are a few misgivings by a few cranky troglodytes, but there are always some crackpots who won’t get with the program. I mean, when was the last time a panel of experts was wrong? Ignore for the moment Galileo’s interrogation proceedings, eighteenth-century European naturalists on the new world’s “stunted” growth, the Royal Society’s views on geologic superposition, the science of eugenics, socialism as a masterpiece of human happiness, the Population Bomb and Snowball Earth madness of the 1970s, Y2K, and more. There were probably even a handful of skeptics who claimed that killing all the wolves was a bad idea in 1816. Imagine.

Plans to reduce (and eventually eliminate) carbon dioxide emissions are not all that different from the plans to reduce (and eventually eliminate) wolf populations. A reward, of sorts, is given for each unit of reduction—be it a cash bounty for wolf heads, or a “credit” to keep a carbon emitter from having to pay a stiff fine. These credits, under a veneer of “free-marketism,” can be traded or sold to someone else who wasn’t as successful at reducing emissions as they were told. In Lincoln’s era, it was optional to hunt wolves, but today we are approaching a point where we are all coerced into the hunt for carbon credits. Even if you don’t happen to be a large-scale carbon emitter yourself, your consumption of things (electricity anyone?) will inevitably draw you into the chase.

Whether wolves or carbon, activity is being driven by central decision-makers as to what constitutes the proper way to handle things.

Again, it is not my intention to argue that carbon emissions aren’t important, or even to question whether or not they represent a public menace (they may well be as threatening as wolves!). My only purpose is to cast a jaundiced eye on the proposed solutions to the crisis du jour. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, now has the power to regulate carbon emissions and by all indications appears intent on restricting the output of the dangerous stuff. Does anyone else feel another “survey” coming on?

What Lurks Beneath

Society’s tastes and mores are in constant flux, driving the inexorable drift of the tectonic structures we erect to “improve things.” And while norms can change radically and quickly (Hula Hoops? birth control?), the plans, programs, bureaus, and institutions generally do not. In fact they generally continue along their predetermined paths, creating errors of Himalayan proportions. If we believe the myopic shortsightedness that nearly extinguished Canis lupus has been corrected, we are fooling ourselves. We know many more things, to be sure, and particularly in the fields of natural science and ecology. But to believe that we can remotely grasp, let alone master, the intricacies of global climate is surely hubris at its best.

When you ask government to get things done it generally does. And that’s precisely the danger. What is an unambiguously brilliant notion for one generation may not sit so well with the next. The apex of Progressive Era thinking in the 1930s gave us the magnificent damming projects of the arid west, projects now roundly decried (oddly enough) by heirs of the Progressive Left who now wish us to demolish these projects at taxpayer – oops — “government” expense. This sort of policy-pendulum is inevitable in a world marked by a less-than-perfect grasp on information.

The only way to mitigate this effect is to ensure that action keeps pace with the values and knowledge of the day. This can only be accomplished through the diffusion of power to an individual level, where actors with firsthand observations can react to dynamically changing situations.

I know we’re worried about global warming today. Nobody wishes to see Vanuatu slip under the Pacific. And maybe, for the first time in history, human-caused climate change represents “The Big Problem” that we need “The Big Fix” for. But I doubt it. Something tells me, deep inside, that managed overreaction to carbon emissions will lead just as surely to the kind of devastating policies that gave us wolves-as-an-endangered-species.

In fact, writing as I do from ground zero in the Gray Wolf reintroduction zone, I’d be willing to posit a bet. One hundred years from now (if carbon emissions are “solved” by the authorities), I give it better than even odds that governments will be requiring carbon emissions. Lincoln probably wouldn’t take the bet.

For example, a 1992 book Hollander edited, The Energy-Environment Connection, featured scientists such as Stephen Schneider, a well-known proponent of government control to slow down global warming, and John Holdren, who expressed alarm about the “folly of failing to stabilize world population.” Although it avoided inflammatory rhetoric, the book treated global warming as a severe problem and expressed pessimism about acid rain and air pollution.

Hollander has not repudiated his past work, but has shifted gears. It’s as though he sat down one day and completely rethought, without bias, the seriousness and extent of environmental problems. However it happened, he has come to the conclusion that poor people in developing countries suffer from the worst environmental problems: hunger, disease, and dangerously unsanitary water. Environmental problems in Europe and North American simply pale in comparison. “Reducing poverty throughout the world should be a top priority for environmentalists,” he writes.

The environmental crisis of poverty is the theme of the book, but another theme is inextricably entwined and almost more dominant. That is Hollander’s reassessment of the severity of environmental issues. For example, he doesn’t call global warming an imminent catastrophe. He says there are still many scientific uncertainties, and “if it turns out that human activity is adding to the natural warming, the amount will probably be small, and society can adjust to that as well, at relatively low cost or even net benefit.” In some circles, this is heresy.

Hollander is optimistic about reducing pollution from automobiles too. Already on the decline, this pollution is likely to disappear entirely, he says, as competition develops between the hybrids (electric and gasoline-powered cars) and cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. He predicts that the “worldwide deterioration of air quality that accompanied the rise of the automobile culture will be permanently reversed, and the world’s dependence on petroleum will probably be drastically reduced, as well.”

Nor does Hollander blindly support alternative energy, such as solar or wind power. He concludes that much effort to jump-start these alternatives is misplaced. The governments of such wealthy nations as the United States are subsidizing “large-scale renewable technologies for which there is little need,” yet ignoring solar applications that could help poor people in rural regions lacking electricity. He says that “poor countries have tremendous need for renewable energy sources, and a number of ingenious yet affordable technologies have been available for years.”

As these examples illustrate, Hollander has written a book that, like Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, offers upbeat views about issues usually treated as crises. Unlike Lomborg, Hollander doesn’t seem to be challenging the establishment. He is an insider telling it the way he sees it. Perhaps his moderate stance is one reason why this book hasn’t received as much attention as has the Danish statistician’s.

Hollander has made an effort to consider literature from both the doomsday and skeptical sides. I was, however, dismayed by his selection of a passage from Dickens’s novel Hard Times to illustrate air pollution in the nineteenth century. (“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it,” the passage begins). Dickens, a master of fictional exaggeration, is hardly a reliable authority on air pollution. I’m also a little surprised that Hollander is unaware of the growing literature (started by economists) surrounding the environmental Kuznets curve. This correlation between income and pollution shows that as countries become more wealthy their environments initially deteriorate but then become cleaner. Discussion of this would have underscored his point.

These are minor criticisms. Although it comes as no surprise to many of us that poverty is the environment’s number one enemy, at long last, thanks to Hollander, others may find it out too.

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.

And just how important are fossil fuels relative to so-called renewable energies? Oil, gas, or coal generates the electricity needed to fill in for intermittent wind and solar power and ensure moment-to-moment reliability. So renewable energy, ironically, is codependent on nonrenewable energy short of (currently) prohibitively expensive battery technology firming the flow of electricity.

As a component of all products and services, energy needs to be affordable, convenient, and reliable. To this end, public policy should respect consumer preference and allow energy producers to meet the demands of the marketplace. This requires a respect for private property rights and voluntary exchange to facilitate the global exchange of energy and its innumerable subcomponents.

Global energy supplies are primarily the product of government, unfortunately, not the free market. In state-run economies political elites make the decisions that otherwise would be made by the multitude. Win-win exchanges are supplanted by government-dictated win-lose transactions. Wealth is redistributed. Pure waste results from the intervention of (political) third parties into what otherwise would be mutually advantageous self-interested exchange.

For example, electric utilities may be forced to buy wind power, solar power, or another politically correct energy under state law. A mandate is required because a free marketplace would not support such expensive, unreliable—noncompetitive—supply.

Oil and gas producers may be unable to access offshore properties because of government constraint. In such cases, supply is not produced and higher-cost substitutes elsewhere pick up some of the slack. Consumers are left with less supply and higher prices. Economists have a name for this: inefficiency.

Government intervention may also give life to uneconomic projects. Such ventures may include carbon capture and storage, a “smart” electricity grid, or even a nuclear plant that requires a federal loan guarantee. Resources that go to these projects do not go to other, more economical projects (which may or may not be in the energy sector) as judged by the marketplace. Resources are again misallocated.

Proponents of government intervention cite “market failure” as the reason for regulating or subsidizing energy projects. Negative externalities created by self-interested exchange require the government to modify transactions in ways ranging from a prohibition to a tax, they say.

Nonmarket Failures

But there are two other types of failure that also must be considered before rushing to policy judgment.

One is analytic failure, in which the outside evaluator’s prescription for intervention (such as a per-barrel “energy security” tax on oil imports or a per-ton “climate change” tax on carbon dioxide emissions) overcorrects or undercorrects for the “real” problem. The error might be purely intellectual—or it might reflect the personal prejudice of the analyst. Fallible self-interest in the marketplace has a counterpart in the ivory tower.

Second, there is government failure, whereby even the “correct” analytical blueprint is altered and violated in the political process. Special-interest tinkering adds to or subtracts from the core proposal, and political actors resort to “logrolling,” where extraneous issues are added to the legislation just to win votes.

House passage of a cap-and-trade energy bill last year and health insurance legislation enacted this year are stark evidence of sausage-making in Washington, D.C.—and something scarcely recognizable in “we the people” textbooks.

Thus “market failure” does not automatically require a government correction. This suggests a different approach. Knowing that political solutions are likely to be as bad as or worse than the problems, alleged market failures should be scrutinized to see if they are really serious problems. And if so, can the real problems be addressed by novel voluntary approaches and reforms rather than by government dictates?

Intellectual and political debates over energy have revolved around four “sustainability” issues: depletion, pollution, security, and climate change. Whole books address these issues, most from the market-failure viewpoint, concluding that mankind is on a perilous path and government-engineered energy transformation is necessary.

But students of energy history and energy policy must ask: Has a political makeover of any industry ever worked well for consumers and taxpayers? Or has it had the opposite effect? Creative destruction—a market makeover from shifting consumer demand—is one thing; having government pick winners with carrots and sticks is quite another.

Free-Market Sustainability

The arguments for allowing free markets, rather than government planning, to address the four sustainability issues can be summarized as follows:

1. Estimated quantities of recoverable oil, gas, and coal have been increasing over time, according to the statistical record. Human ingenuity in market settings has and will continue to overcome nature’s limits, leaving in its wake errant forecasts of resource exhaustion. The resource challenge is political: restricting access and perverting incentives prevents the ultimate resource—human innovation and entrepreneurship—from expanding energy supplies and multiplying energy’s productive utilization.
2. Statistics of air and water quality in the United States show dramatic environmental improvement and, in fact, indicate a positive correlation between energy usage and environmental improvement. While improvements have been achieved by politicized, command-and-control environmental regulation, the results could have been achieved at lower cost through market methods.
3. Energy security in the electricity market is assured by abundant domestic coal and the fact that almost all U.S. gas imports come from Canada. Most of the oil needed for transportation comes from domestic supplies supplemented by imports from a variety of countries led by Canada and Mexico. Oil imports from unstable or unfriendly nations, such as Venezuela and those in the Middle East, can be more effectively addressed by privatizing U.S. oil and gas resources than by government penalties against oil imports that cannot distinguish between “good” and “bad” barrels. Even if the United States were to use the powers of government to pare domestic oil consumption, the resulting drop in world oil prices would encourage non-U.S. demand and subsidize foreign industry. The world oil market will continue to exist and thrive even with reduced U.S. participation, and this will become more true over time.
4. The global warming scare is plagued by open scientific questions, economic tradeoffs, and the reality that carbon-based energy is necessary for economic growth. Carbon rationing (via the Kyoto Protocol) is a failed policy for the developed world and a nonstarter for the developing world. Not only have targeted reductions proved to be elusive, the economic costs of carbon rationing are not unlike those from (postulated) deleterious climate change.

The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico raises an additional sustainability issue: unexpected setbacks that cause massive property damage and even fatalities. Short-run problems, however, can result in longer-term gains so long as the firm faces full liability and pays restitution to the victims. Accountability in private property settings encourages companies to square profits, people, and the environment—and avoid the financial losses that come from performance failure. Currently companies have their liability for damages capped by law at $75 million, though politics could potentially nullify the cap in any given case, as it apparently will in the BP Deepwater Horizon incident.

Rather than expand government, public policy should end preferential subsidies for politically favored energies and privatize such assets as public-land resources and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Multibillion-dollar energy programs at the U.S. Department of Energy should be eliminated. Such policy reform can simultaneously increase energy supply, improve energy security, reduce energy costs, and increase the size of the private sector relative to the public sector.

To Al Gore the “planetary emergency” is five billion to six billion people using oil, gas, or coal for most of their energy needs. But the real energy problem is that nearly one and a half billion people do not use modern forms of energy. Rampant statism in place of private property, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law is behind this problem.

Energy-impoverished people use dried dung and primitive biomass to stay warm and cook their meals, destroying their health and shortening their lives. Without electricity or machines, they do not have clean water, reliable lighting, or other means for comfortable, sanitary living. This here-and-now problem demands energy freedom and an end to debilitating energy statism.

The free-market vision stresses that these impoverished people should not be subject to energy rationing by government. Solar panels and industrial wind turbines can only generate a fraction of the energy produced by diesel generators or a conventional power plant—and are much less reliable. Energy brawn is needed, not inferior but politically correct energies that appeal to energy planners.

Property Rights vs. the Resource Curse

More fundamentally, these victims of statism need private property rights to in-ground minerals and ownership title to energy infrastructure. In this way, they can overcome the so-called resource curse whereby siphoned energy wealth underwrites government control and bad economic policy.

Countries worldwide should reject energy planning from a politically endowed elite. Government planners suffer from a “fatal conceit” that their knowledge and goals must override those of the masses. But on-the-spot energy consumers and energy producers, guided by prices and profit/loss, have much more collective wisdom than faceless bureaucrats commanding from on high. Top-down planning misdirects and destroys despite the best efforts of even well-educated, well-meaning bureaucrats.

Freedom—the use of reason and persuasion in place of coercion—is a worthy goal. In the U.S. energy sector, market reliance, though compromised by both pro-business and anti-business government intervention, has produced economic coordination, fostered economic growth, and democratized wealth. Government intervention, on the other hand, such as occurred in the 1970s with U.S. oil and gas price controls, has produced shortages, civil strife, and bureaucratic waste.

Markets are not perfect, inspiring some to devise and champion government intervention. But political solutions must contend with analytic failure, implementation problems, and public-sector (taxpayer) costs. Imperfect markets, in other words, may well be better than “perfect” regulation in the real world. The burden of proof, therefore, should be on government intervention, rather than on voluntary transactions premised on private property and governed by the rule of law.

But as I’ve pointed out before, I’m an agnostic. I’m no climate scientist, so I have no direct way to size up the conflicting scientific claims. But I do know one thing: It’s a bad idea to choose which scientists to believe on the basis of their political-economic beliefs.

So why do many skeptics make me uncomfortable? Because I sense that under the surface some of them are saying, “Global warming had better not be happening because if it is I see no way for the free market to fix it. Therefore I would have to accept major government intervention, and I don’t want to have to do that.” (For a critique of one amateur skeptic, see this.)

The first problem here is that anyone harboring this attitude is likely to be less than objective in assessing the conflicting scientific claims. The temptation to favor a weaker argument in your direction over a stronger argument in the other will be hard to resist. After all, much is at stake.

When I raise this point with free-market advocates, some interlocutors in effect throw up their arms and say there is no way voluntary efforts could address catastrophic global warming. It’s the standard case regarding public goods: Free riders and prisoner’s dilemmas would thwart voluntary remedial efforts. Each individual would rationally calculate that he can let others make the sacrifices necessary to bringing about the improvement while continuing to do what he has been doing. That way he’ll get the benefits for free. The problem is that if everyone, or most everyone, follows this strategy the public good is never produced.

To be specific, if we stipulate that catastrophic (but reversible) global warming is happening, why would anyone voluntarily change his behavior to mitigate it? One person’s effort would make no difference anyway, so why be the chump? Let the others do it.

We’re doomed.

Unless there’s something wrong with the public-goods argument, as I and others think there is. (See, for example, Gene Callahan’s Freeman article “How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming.”)

What About Government Failure?

It’s really odd to hear a free-market advocate resign himself to a government solution to the supposed global-warming “market failure.” In every other area where government is proffered as the fix for market failure, free-market advocates immediately fire back that government is itself riddled with free-rider problems. There’s a growing if belated literature on government failure. How can government be the answer to a public-goods problem when it suffers the same defect that allegedly plagues the thing to which it is supposed to be superior? How can government solve the public-goods problem when it itself is a public “good.” (I mean that strictly in the technical sense, of course.)

All the goods that government in theory is said to produce are public in nature; they would benefit most everyone. But that means the benefits would redound not only to those who contribute to their production but also to those who don’t, the free riders. Therefore, special interests should never fail to trump the general interest, since smaller groups are less affected by the free-rider problem than larger groups.

Income-tax rate cuts, for example, would benefit everyone, even people who did nothing to help achieve them, say, by contributing money to taxpayer organizations. In theory, then, income-tax cuts should be virtually impossible to achieve.

But income-tax cuts have been enacted in the past. In fact, far bigger things that should have been fatally plagued by the free-rider problem have happened, such as revolutions. They should have been impossible according to the theory. Everyone should have been hanging back waiting for everyone else to overthrow the oppressor. It’s a great way to gain freedom without taking any risks—except if everyone thought that way, no revolution would have occurred. But revolutions have occurred.

So in the political realm the free-rider problem can be overcome. We know it. It’s in the history books. But if it can be overcome in that realm, why not in others? It seems hasty to say it can’t happen. In fact, it has, for example in the effort to end the slave trade, which required a change in public sentiment. So global warming might be amenable to purely voluntary remedies, perhaps not via the traditional for-profit business plan but rather through a voluntary social movement that promoted an ethic encouraging and pressuring people and firms to cease their destructive activities.

The key is ideology, the set of explicit or implicit beliefs that motivates people to act one way or another in public matters even though individually they may reap minimal if any concrete benefits from their own marginal efforts. People are capable of acting to achieve things other than personal monetary profits. Homo economicus is an inadequate picture of the human race, a gross and misleading oversimplification.

“Ideology therefore becomes the wild card that accounts for public spirited mass movements that overcome the free-rider problem…, for ideology can motivate people to do more to effect social change than the material rewards to each individual would justify,” Jeffrey Rogers Hummel wrote (pdf) in another context.

Obviously there’s much more to say on the matter, but for now be aware that serious global warming would be no reason to abandon economic (or other) freedom. We can have our scientific objectivity and our liberty too.

Written in clear prose with only a hint of cynicism, Climate of Extremes provides an excellent source of scientific data for anyone more interested in climate-related facts than the usual partisan propaganda. Michaels and Balling present a comprehensive picture of earth’s ever-changing climate, with a keen eye toward historical facts. Their research-rich conclusion: Global warming is not a harbinger of doom, but rather the latest in a long history of natural, mostly innocuous, climatic shifts.

The authors begin with a primer on global-warming science, explaining that data indicate two pronounced periods of warming over the last century. The first lasted from about 1910 through 1945 and the second from 1975 through the available 2005 data. Crucially, there’s been no significant warming since a record-hot 1998.

But considerable problems arise when scientists try to project this global climate data forward. The vertical distribution of temperatures from the earth’s surface to the stratosphere above resides at the center of any projection. If the upper temperatures are consistently cooler—and recent measurements show they are—that means more clouds and rain, which in turn means less warming.

Citing a 2007 study, Michaels and Balling say all climate models, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have very real and quite pronounced discrepancies in vertical distribution. These invariably lead to a sizable overestimation of future warming.

“What’s more,” they write, “the fact that none of the IPCC’s midrange models generates a warming-free 15-year period in the 21st century, which is happening right now, is very disturbing.”

Climate of Extremes proceeds in subsequent chapters to explore the weather phenomena most cited by global-warming alarmists as indicative of future disasters. From hurricanes to sea-level rise, and from floods to heat waves, Michaels and Balling methodically challenge one climate claim after another.

In one particularly persuasive chapter, the authors analyze the “climate of death” hysteria following the record 2003 European heat wave. They cite a study that pegged the probability of such an event at a surprisingly high 1 in 333. Given the earth’s massive size, summer 2003 in France and Germany was then more a tragically bad roll of the dice than a precursor of doom.

Michaels and Balling then cite the European heat wave of 2006 as evidence that global warming—and our response to it—might actually save lives. People learned from the 2003 anomaly, they explain, and were better prepared in 2006 with air conditioning and action plans. A study in the Journal of Epidemiology confirmed this theory, finding the death toll from summer 2006 was much lower than models predicted.

Furthermore, studies have consistently shown that climate-related death rates are higher in cold climates than in warm. So as temperatures continue to rise slowly, it’s easy to see how an aging population might fare better with fewer bitterly cold nights and more moderate temperatures. Again, global warming might save lives.

Not that such good news is ever reported, say Michaels and Balling. More likely, because it challenges the global-warming status quo, it is ignored or buried. On writing for a copy of IPCC data used to calculate their temperature history, Australian researcher Warwick Hughes received this curt reply from IPCC-affiliated scientist Phil Jones, who in December stepped down as head of the Climate Research Unit while the University of East Anglia investigated the “climategate” email affair: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Most people believe science only works through the free exchange of theories and ideas. Climate of Extremes demonstrates this is clearly not the case with scientists and bureaucrats who have a vested interest in propagating global-warming hysteria and for whom fact suppression to further a predetermined agenda is paramount.

Michaels and Balling show global warming has become a sacred cow, the growing body of dissenting evidence be damned. That should be enough to prompt any concerned person to seek out the facts, even if it means getting a little hot under the collar in the process.

(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

HT: Brad SpanglerUpdate:I have been informed that this paper is crank-work that was debunked long ago. I don’t know. Here are the links that were provided me:http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-you-never-wanted-to-know-about.htmlhttp://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/open-thread-11/In particular this comment:http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/open-thread-11/#comment-29463http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/03/gerlich_and_tscheuschner_oh_my.phpand, what may end up being a peer-reviewed rebuttal:http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/04/reading-assignments-rabett-run-labs-has.html

“China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal.” (New York Times, Tuesday)

Could China save the world from global governance?

FEE Timely Classic:
“Global Politics, Political Warming” by Doug Bandow