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*Opinions expressed here may or may not reflect the views of the Fernley Republican Women. Blog posts should not be considered an endorsement from the FRW.

Earth Day Highlights Errors of Environmentalists: Part II

4/22/2020

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​April 22 was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Last week, I explained some basic errors of environmental and resource catastrophists highlighted annually by Earth Day.
Their major error is the Malthusian Fallacy.  It predicts catastrophe by making strong pessimistic assumptions about limitations on resource supplies, including environmental carrying capacities, and about future increases in demands (consumption), due to population and economic growth.  The result is future disaster, unless the supposedly inevitable trends are interrupted by prompt draconian governmental intervention.
Although the first such projection was made in 1798, this mechanism was still the primary model at the first Earth Day.  So it remains.  For alleged impending climate catastrophes, today’s disaster du jour, nothing less than collective coercion by many governments or a world government can stop future cataclysm, some people claim.
Their original Doomsday was projected as mass global starvation.  Now it’s runaway heating of the earth, threatening all life.  Where early goals were to avoid Silent Spring and to Save the Whales, we now must Save the Earth.
Early on, there were more scientific and sensible analyses than The Population Bomb, and competent analysts have for half-a-century debunked predictions of catastrophe.  Further, the measured results on the ground and in the air and waters have refuted such predictions.  This has not deterred many true believers from coughing up ever new nightmarish fantasies.
Julian Simon saw their key error: The only meaningfully limited resource is human creativity.  It mitigates pollution, finds resources no one imagined and extends supplies via technological change until substitutes are developed.  And higher population concentrations produce more creativity.
Government intervention stifles such creativity and exacerbates resource constraints and pollution.  Free people do much of this on their own, without central planning.  But catastrophists fail to foresee that, instead relying on their static, not broadly dynamic models.
Why?
One view is that people try to give their lives significance by placing themselves in a narrative arc.  Ronald Bailey explained recently in Reason magazine: “That arc typically traces civilization’s fall from a golden age through a current stage of decadence to an impending apocalypse—one that may, through the bold efforts of the current generation, usher in a new age.”
Frank Kermode, originator of these ideas in his 1967 book, The Sense of an Ending, said: “The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near.”  But because it never arrives, “the historical allegory is always having to be revised. … Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited.  That is part of its extraordinary resilience.”
A similar version is that extreme environmentalism is ersatz religion.  It posits a Garden of Eden that was primitive nature on Mother Earth before the ascent of man.  Man committed original sin by eating the apple of knowledge and then began to subdue the fields and forests, animals of the land, sea and air, and exploit heedlessly all resources and pollute everything.
Salvation is possible only via the contrition of forsaking the evil human and technological progress and returning to life at the only “sustainable” level: primitivism.  Thus will we save our sinning selves by saving Mother Earth.  In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
A third version is that environmentalism is political ideology.  In this view, adherents’ main goal is to control other people and events: the ultimate extension of progressivism.  The enlightened environmentalists and scientific experts know what’s best for we unschooled masses and for society as a whole.  That’s why they claim a monopoly on science, which they bastardize.  Their science involves not continuous searching, hypothesizing and testing, but instead consensus.
Bailey concludes: “The dire prophecies of the first Earth Day have been mostly proven wrong, but the prophets of an always-impending environmental apocalypse have not thereby been discredited.  Auguries of imminent catastrophe remain resilient, even as the world of 2020 is in a much happier state than the Catastrophists of 1970 ever expected.”
Ultimately, all these versions seek to explain why environmental doomsayers are quite willing to sacrifice the broad public interest of maximizing human wellbeing and fairness – our prosperity delivered via individual liberty, private property and market freedom – to their special interests.
Ron Knecht, MSc, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

On Earth Day, no less.  Enjoy and share. -- RK


Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
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Earth Day Highlights Major Errors of Environmentalists

4/14/2020

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​Next Wednesday is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Annually, Earth Day highlights some fundamental errors of environmentalists.
The first error is the Malthusian fallacy.  In 1798, the English cleric Thomas Malthus predicted population would grow at an exponential rate, while food production would grow at a linear rate – resulting in disaster.  I’ll explain.
Exponential growth means, by definition, population would grow by a constant percentage annually.  Hence, population growth numbers each year would be greater than the growth numbers of the previous year.  The linear growth of food available means the harvest each year would be a constant amount greater of crops and livestock than in the previous year.
With population growing by ever greater numbers per year and available food growing only at a constant annual quantity, the average amount of food for each person would decline until malnutrition and starvation would overtake many poor folks.
His population growth reasoning was that both human fertility rates and death rates were constant.  So, population growth would continue annually at a rate equal to the difference between the fixed birth and death rates.  Thus, exponential growth.
His food availability reasoning was that only a constant rate of arable land could be added each year to production of crops and livestock.  This linear growth limit is implausible on its face, with population growing exponentially.  However, his exponential assumption about population growth, which seemed obvious to him and his peers, also errs, as history has proven.
The Environmental Handbook was the bible for the first Earth Day.  Its most remarkable prediction of disaster came from biologist Paul Ehrlich, who basically adopted and updated Malthus’ errors.  In the Handbook and elsewhere, he claimed devastating famines would kill tens of millions of people in the 1970s and even 100-million to 200-million in the 1980s.
Like other environmental doomsday prophesies, his was wildly wrong.  Thank goodness.
Many other Earth Day predictions were almost as spurious.  The catastrophists essentially adopted some version of Malthus’ very limited supply forecast for minerals, metals, fuels and other resources.  They also forecast people would be overwhelmed by various kinds of pollution, even as we exhausted resources, the use of which produces pollution.
They were spectacularly wrong on both counts, as the last half-century has shown.  But even as early as 1972, John Maddox showed directly and in extensive detail many of their errors in his book The Doomsday Syndrome.
At the same time, economist and demographer Julian Simon explained their key error: The only meaningfully limited resource is human creativity.  It extends theoretically finite resources via technological change and productivity growth to practically infinite levels, at least until substitutes are developed for those resources.  Human creativity also finds more recoverable resources in the earth than the minds of catastrophists can imagine.  And it hugely mitigates pollution.
Simon also showed that higher population concentrations produce higher per-person levels of creativity and thus more usable resources and less pollution.
A key element undermining the Malthusian fallacy is that government planning, command and control stifles this creativity and thus exacerbates resource and pollution constraints.  People operating under individual liberty, private property rights and free markets, not the heavy hand of government, do remarkable things to solve these problems and promote aggregate human well-being and fairness.
They do things catastrophists cannot foresee due to their static, not dynamic approach to analysis and forecasting.
Besides the things people do to expand the supply side and mitigate pollution, on the demand side – that is, growth in population – they also make adjustments on their own.  In the last half century, birth rates have fallen around the world.  In fact, in half the countries, including the US and half the world’s people, fertility rates are now below replacement levels.  So, the real population problem we now face is decline, not Ehrlich’s population bomb.
Another error environmentalists make is their forecasts and policy proposals are driven by ideological agendas, not by an unbiased quest for knowledge and service to the broad and true public interest.  Essentially, environmentalism has become an apocalyptic religion or left-wing political ideology that’s predatory upon the public interest.
In next week’s column, on Earth Day, I’ll explain that and other errors.
Ron Knecht, MSc, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net
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Clean Water Act: Reforming Environmental Excess

4/7/2020

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​The environmental movement flowered when I was in college.  I got active in it, as did many people, for the best of reasons.
Our basic motivation was that public policy in those days didn’t require public actions, industry, commerce and even some personal decisions to recognize and sometimes mitigate certain costs and problems they caused.  We needed to give those costs and problems appropriate weight in public and private decisions and mitigate them as appropriate.  We had to find the right balance points.
That lack of balance and appropriate mitigation has almost completely been remedied by laws, regulations and practices adopted in the last half century.  But we got so carried away with regulation, mitigation and even prohibition that years ago the pendulum swung well past the balance points in many areas.
Over-reach in applying the 1972 federal Clean Water Act (CWA) is a prime example.  The CWA was intended to protect waters from pollution and degradation for maximum benefit to all.  There were major problems in both the processes by which the act and its regulations were administered and the results.
One cause of those problems is that many people attracted to environmental activism and government regulation are not really interested in balance and the public interest.  They are special interest ideologues and zealots with agendas.
Also, when folks become government officials or employees, their natural instinct to expand their scope and means of control comes to the fore.  Then they stretch their constraints and the definitions and standards applicable to their real mission for more room to pursue their agendas.  They even make up powers and rules expedient to the goals of the insular cultures their agencies develop.
The other cause is that the CWA, like so much law and regulation in the 20th Century, centralized most decisions and rulemaking in Washington DC, too far away from where it would be applied to recognize the specific local problems and needs for different solutions.
Coupled with the self-selection of people into the insular culture and special-interest agency agendas, this insulation allowed their imaginations to run amok.  And to view people with competing interests, including balance, as ill-intentioned enemies they must stop and subjugate.  In a career as a professional and manager in regulation, public policy and administrative law and in the private sector dealing with all that, I saw these problems firsthand and continuously.
With the CWA, one main issue is the definition of water types and bodies to which federal regulation applies.  Surely it applies to our great lakes and rivers, but just as surely not to the rain that soaks into a farmer’s field or our lawns.
In presidential administrations since 1972, federal agencies, goaded by environmental activists, expanded the CWA’s reach to include isolated ponds, abandoned gravel pits, ephemeral waters and seasonal wetlands distant from and not directly feeding into navigable waterways.  In two major cases, the Supreme Court struck down some of these exotic attempts, but did not define the limits of federal CWA authority.  That, of course, was the duty of Congress.
As part of the Obama Administration’s transformative special-interest progressive agendas, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2015 lopped off “navigable” from the term “navigable waters of the United States”.  Thus, they sought to give federal bureaucrats virtually unlimited authority in water matters.  Again the Supreme Court blocked this risible over-reach.
Recently, the Trump EPA sensibly adopted the Navigable Waters Protection Rule to rein in those excesses and sensibly clarify waters subject to federal control.  They include: territorial seas and traditional navigable waters; perennial and intermittent tributaries connecting to them; certain, lakes, ponds and impoundments (generally developed or managed by the Army Corps of Engineers); and wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters.
Waters not subject to federal control are: features containing water only directly from rain or snowfall; groundwater and ephemeral and seasonal wetlands not directly connected to navigable waters; many ditches, including most farm and roadside ditches; converted cropland; farm and stock watering ponds and waste treatment systems.
Real and necessary reform leaving local matters appropriately to states.
In a future column, I’ll address the other main CWA problem: endless, costly and risky litigation by the environmental zealots to stop reasonable projects.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net
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