Book Review: The End of Doom

Science journalist Ronald Bailey, who is also a trained economist, continues his career of debunking predictions of impending doom, which he began in his 1993 Book "Ecoscam", which demonstrated that predictions in the 1972 publication "The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome, turned out to be spectacularly wrong.  In "The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century", he examines further spectacularly wrong predictions still being pushed by the pessimism-industrial complex, such as worries about an exploding population, when in fact population is not actually exploding; projections showing us running out of resources and farmland; projections about worsening pollution in a world where pollution is actually diminishing; and about climate change, which everyone understands is a problem that must be dealt with, but which is not an impending catastrophe which requires immediate and massive directed collective action.  He predicted in 2015 electricity produced by clean energy would soon be cheaper than energy produced with fossil fuels without any need for regulatory intervention, and eleven years later this prediction too has been fulfilled.  Critical responses to his work have been feeble and unconvincing, and he opines that advocates of deus ex machina intervention are driven not by genuine concerns but by a hangover of medievalist intelligent design thinking and the desire to be the deus.  It's high time to shift the Overton Window decisively in the direction of greater optimism, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the current "mainstream" of thought is in truth a stagnant intellectual backwater.

Transcript

Book Review:  The End of Doom

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya has submitted a review of a book which is definitely outside the mainstream when it comes to environmental issues.  The book is Ronald Bailey’s “The End of Doom:  Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2015.

 Slainte writes:

 In the modern environmental movement the mainstream consists of works which uniformly prophesy increasing doom; why should we pay any attention at all to a writer from far outside the mainstream who disagrees with most all of the experts, and who champions an optimistic view of humanity’s future?

 Shouldn’t we be on guard against those who would perhaps lull us into complacency at a time when we honestly ought to be alarmed?

 The writer is Ronald Bailey, and the book is titled “The End of Doom:  Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century”.  

 We can view this book as a follow-on to Bailey’s 1993 book “Ecoscam”, where he demonstrated that the highly influential and still popular work “The Limits to Growth”, a 1972 publication sponsored by the Club of Rome, made a series of predictions that turned out not to be just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.  

 The book predicted for example that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.

 It’s beginning to look like we ought to stop thinking of the tradition of thought that produced these absurd predictions not as mainstream, but more as a stagnant intellectual backwater, supported not by the scientific investigation of nature, but instead motivated by the agenda of these medievalist intelligent design thinkers to maintain their grip on authority.  They are simply trying to make us just plain folk believe our future will be one disaster after another without their wise guidance.

 In this review I propose to summarize Mr. Bailey’s arguments, and then to summarize critical responses to his arguments, along with my own comments.

 Bottom line:  after having considered the arguments on both sides, I am firmly convinced by the power of Bailey’s arguments and by the feebleness of the critics’ responses, that it’s time to shift the Overton Window decisively in the direction of greater optimism, and away from the notion that the pessimistic view can be used to support proposals for political intervention.

 The first argument Bailey presents to support his thesis that environmental fears are overblown is that previous predictions of impending doom, even unavoidable doom, have time after time been proven wrong in the passage of time.  

 We were, for example, supposed to have had widespread famine in the 1970’s due to overpopulation; resource shortages, also due to overpopulation, especially of petroleum; worsening pollution; and a 20-foot increase in sea level by 2026.

 He argues that the consistency of the failures in the predictions of doom points to underlying flaws in the world-views of the pessimists, consisting of an abundance in both ignorance and ecnarongi (i.e., ignorance in reverse, or “knowing” things that are not so). 

 Bailey goes on to point out that even if there is some genuine cause for concern about the possible effects of overpopulation, the population of our planet is now growing at less than 1% per year; many countries already have birth rates under the replacement rate; and the total population of world is trending towards negative growth rates later on this century, with a population peak projected within decades.  

 So if the population is not in fact exploding, we do not need to concern ourselves with the effects of an exploding population.

 Bailey’s next discussion is about resources, and he uses data and reasoning to persuasively argue that the idea of peak resources, based on the argument that resources are indisputably finite on our planet, is a straw man rather than serious argument.  We are never literally going to run out of some resource or other due to its finiteness.

 The important reality has been and continues to be that resource availability is a function of technological ingenuity and inventiveness, which humans possess in abundance, and a function of a social environment that allows free enterprise with a minimum of well-intended but misguided authoritarian intervention.

 Bailey addresses the widely touted precautionary principle and rejects it as being overly timid.  He claims that application of this principle means we are limiting our focus to the downside risks without any balancing which recognizes the possibility of upside benefits.  He claims that adoption of the precautionary principle to the extent that its adherents advocate would have the effect of stifling the sorts of innovation which could create a net positive effect.

 He presents data to show that in spite of fears and alarms that are cynically being spread by a pessimism-industrial complex, air and water pollution have actually declined in wealthy countries; many cancer rates are stable or falling in spite of the fact that more and more people are living long enough to develop cancer; and that the trend in life expectancy continues to have upward momentum.  

 Bailey then moves on to a discussion of the alarmist message that we are running out of potential farmland as modern agricultural methods spread.

 He demonstrates that although it is true that more and more food is being produced, it is true at the same time that efficiency continues to increase.  Efficiency, you will recall, is defined as the ratio of output to input.  This means that we have been using less and less land to produce this greater output, getting more bang for the buck, to the point where much of what was formerly farmland has been abandoned, and is reverting to its natural state as forests, grasslands and wildlife reassert themselves.  

 Good news for biodiversity, and bad news for the pessimism-industrial complex as we once again witness reality upending the pessimistic predictions.

 The next topic Bailey addresses is climate change.  He agrees, as anyone must who is paying attention, that climate change is a real thing that is really happening.  

 He takes issue, however, with the notion that climate change is a fast-approaching catastrophe that can only be averted by massive collective action, enabled by compelling the citizenry to surrender their treasure and their freedom, and to submit to the commands of those who have proclaimed their good intentions while parading their personal virtue and by denigrating all of those who object to their schemes as being not just wrong, but evil.

 Bailey asserts that climate change is a problem rather than a catastrophe, and just one of many problems facing humanity.  And that human ingenuity, scientific discovery and technological innovation, enabled in a social system where the regulatory touch is light at the very least, are likely to be a match for this particular problem, or indeed for any other large and complex problem.   

 It seems clear that we are witnessing once again the widespread failure in our time to understand the realities of emergent order and self-regulating systems.  In an ideal world, people would generally recognize that there need be no authoritarian intervention at all; that indeed authoritarian regulation is generally more harmful than beneficial as regulators throw monkey wrenches into the works of a system they do not understand in an attempt to force outcomes into being.

 Bailey predicted at the time of the book’s writing in 2015 that clean energy would soon be produced more cheaply than energy from fossil fuels, a development which would work automatically to reduce pollution created by the use of fossil fuels; that technology was coming up with cleaner ways to use fossil fuels themselves; that the use of nuclear energy was an increasingly safe and cheap way to generate electricity; and that we ought not to heed calls from the pessimism-industrial complex to employ authoritarian means to limit economic growth in general and fossil-fuel use in particular.  It’s a solution looking for a problem.

 He also pointed out that some sort of pricing arrangement that led to decentralized adaptive decision making, such as a carbon tax, would be by far the most effective way of making a dent in the pollution created by the use of fossil fuels.

 We now have the benefit of eleven years of hindsight to evaluate Bailey’s prediction of the cost of clean energy, and the evidence shows that he was right to an extent that probably surprised even him.  

 The cost of producing electricity from solar energy has fallen by 85%, and is already the cheapest source of new electricity. 

 The cost of producing electricity from wind energy has fallen by well over half.

 And battery storage costs, an indispensable link in the chain for effectively harnessing intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind, have fallen dramatically.

 He goes on to observe that many of those in the current mainstream of the environmental movement are basing their opposition to industrial development on an untenable distinction between nature and human beings, with human beings as something separate and apart from nature, in an attempt to support their transparent desire to exert coercive control.  You hear arguments that nature is “good” and human activity is “bad”, as if humans are not themselves as much a part of nature as anything else.

 We ought to recognize that the true basis of these proposals to exert coercive control, stripped of the window dressing, is the desire to be the ones doing to coercing, and the desire to use their power to bring low those fellow humans whose proud achievements they are unable to match.

 So what do the critics of Mr. Bailey’s arguments have to say?  Do they make any good points?  Let’s turn our attention to the critique.

 One critique is that, even though Bailey has consistently been right so far about the exaggerated nature of earlier alarms, this fact is not a guarantee that current alarms about impending disasters are also exaggerated.

 “Not a guarantee” is best viewed as a straw man argument, however.  Nothing in human existence is ever guaranteed, because nature is fundamentally unpredictable, so to dismiss an argument because it is not a guarantee is to dismiss any and all arguments whatever, and thus to miss out on the chance of making real improvements in human well-being at minimal risk.  This critique is as feeble as feeble can be.

 Critics also argue that there are possible scenarios where climate change could well be even more extreme than current pessimistic scenarios.  For example, Greenland and Antarctica could experience massive losses in ice sheets, which would lead to rapid sea-level rise.  Ocean currents could be altered, all with disastrous consequences.

 And won’t somebody please, oh please, think of the world’s poor countries, who will have a more difficult time adapting than the rich countries to whatever the climate future holds?  Surely this is justification, they claim, for deus ex machina style intervention.

 The plight of the poorer countries is certainly a legitimate concern, but the historical record of interventions based on this sort of white-man’s-burden thinking quickly leads to the conclusion that the poor will be much better off without the sort of “help” being offered.

 This is the vein of thought that led to 19th century European imperialism, and to efforts by early American progressives to offer “help” in the form of Indian schools, alcohol prohibition and eugenics, and to efforts by later American progressives to offer help in the form of the war of poverty and a welfare bureaucracy that enriched only the bureaucrats and their cronies, while keeping the poor poor, incentivizing single motherhood and undermining the functioning of poor families.

 Critics argue that Bailey has too much confidence in technology, and way too much confidence in markets; and that there is no effective substitute for authoritarian regulation and directed collective action.

 It's at this point where Bailey’s critics uniformly reveal that they lack even rudimentary understanding of how a market economy functions, and that most of what they think they know about economics is wrong.  

 They argue for example that markets do not automatically handle externalities.  

 Of course they do not, but this statement simply reveals a failure to understand that externalities can be, and routinely are, internalized by a delineation of property rights when they get to the point where the cost of internalization becomes less than the cost of doing nothing.  

 Thanks to the brilliant UCLA economist Harold Demsetz for this insight about the evolution of property rights.  

 And the pooh-poohing about trust in markets really just reveals a failure of the poohers to understand how a price system of resource allocation acts as a coordinating mechanism for complex economic activity with infinitely greater efficacy than authoritarian regulation can ever be expected to accomplish.

 The inhabitants of the intellectual backwater seem uniformly to be willing to put other people’s money where their mouths are, money that is to be coercively extracted and which will pass through the hands of – surprise, surprise – members of the pessimism-industrial complex, a thriving vanguard of the quasi-religious movement of Marxianity.

 But let us not be too cynical.  Many concerns expressed by Bailey’s critics are in fact valid, as Bailey himself would agree.  Everyone understands that there are many concerns which must be addressed.  And many of those who are saying that regulation and collective action are the only ways the challenges can possibly be met are sincere in their belief.

 But I think we can say with justification that such beliefs are based on a failure to understand how human activity is actually organized, i.e., by energy flows generated by productive activity, channeled by observance of property rights and conducted under the rule of law.  Such critics are prisoners of medievalist intelligent-design thinking - evolutionary thinking has not yet arrived in their universe.

 Ronald Bailey’s work is an invaluable contribution to the discussion and deserves all the attention it can get.

 Thanks to Slainte for this book review.

 We Vulcans hope that more and more Earthlings will continue along the path towards more sophisticated thinking about policy issues, i.e., a way of thinking based on a deep understanding of evolutionary processes, and away from the path of the deus ex machina model.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

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