Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit

National Review, March 16, 1992 by Ronald Bailey

SENATOR Albert Gore's new book artfully fuses New Age psychobabble with radical environmentalism into the quintessence of political correctness. Humanity, he warns, is treating swamps, jungles, and seas as though they were the "weakest and most vulnerable members of [a] dysfunctional family." Our "dysfunctional civilization" is "addicted to the consumption of the earth itself" and is "in denial" over the harm its "addiction" is causing. Businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians are "enablers" who abet our "addictive behavior." Like recovering addicts who turn to Naranon, Gore apparently thinks humanity ought to seek its own collective 12-step recovery program. We could call it "Terranon."

While Gore's angle is new, the idea is not. H. L. Mencken observed that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Here, Gore peddles every doomsday prediction made by apocalyptic environmentalism--overpopulation, topsoil erosion, scarcity of fresh water, deforestation, thinning ozone, and, of course, global warming.

Set aside global warming for the moment and look at the other hobgoblins. Overpopulation and famine? The billions of deaths from famine predicted for the 1970s and 1980s by Gore's heroes, Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown, never happened. Food production easily outpaced population growth since the 1950s. Soil scientist Pierre Crosson from Resources for the Future calculates that even without technological improvements, U.S. crop yields would drop at most 2 per cent over the next century because of soil erosion. Of course, improvements will be made, and used by farmers worldwide. Fresh water? The chief problem is misallocation because of enormous government subsidies and a lack of clear property rights. Forests? U.S. forests expanded from 600 million acres in 1920 to 728 million acres today.

Worries about the ozone layer, which screens out harmful ultraviolet radiation (UV) are also overdone. The Antarctic "ozone hole" occurs where no one lives, has not significantly harmed the Antarctic ecosystem, and will not engulf the planet. In the 1960s the ozone layer "thickened" by 5 per cent over the United States. The "thinning" in the 1980s just about brings ozone down to earlier levels. How dangerous is a thinner layer? We put ourselves at greater risk of developing non-melanoma skin cancer simply by moving from New York to Washington, D.C., sine UV increases as one travels south. Finally, the chemicals thought to be eroding the ozone layer have been banned and will no longer be produced after 1995.

Senator Gore flatly declares that global warming "is the most serious threat we have ever faced." Computer models predict the globe's average temperature will increase by 2[degrees] to 9[degrees] F. because of higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide liberated by burning fossil fuels. Earth's surface is warmed by the "greenhouse effect," in which carbon dioxide traps heat before it is reflected back into space.

But what is the evidence? Climate records, though spotty, do indicate that Earth has warmed by less than 1[degrees] F. over the last century. In his book, Gore implies that 98 per cent of atmospheric scientists agree that catastrophic greenhouse warming has begun. However, a recent Gallup poll conducted for the Institute for Science, Technology, and Media found that of those scientists actively involved in global climate research, 53 per cent do not believe human0induced global warming has occurred and 30 per cent don't know, leaving only 17 per cent who think human-induced global warming occurred--far short of 98 per cent.

How does the senator answer skeptics? In Time's "Planet of the Year" issue, he complained that "those who, for the purpose of maintaining balance in the debate [over global warming], adopt the contrarian view that there is significant uncertainty about whether it's real are hurting our ability to respond." Extending the chicken Little logic, Gore now takes the press to task for its coverage of greenhouse skeptics because it "undermines the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." Simply put: shut up and get with the program.

And what a program: He advocates creating a UN "Stewardship Council," modeled on the Security Council. He calls for a "global Marshall Plan" to halt the impending holocaust, redistributing wealth and technology from the industrialized world to the developing world. For example, Gore would slow economic and population growth and reduce [CO.sub.2] emissions by levying a worldwide "carbon tax" on fossil fuels. Now, it would take a 60 per cent cut in [CO.sub.2] emissions to stabilize greenhouse gases at 1990 levels. Yale University economist William Nordhaus calculates that lowering [CO.sub.2] emissions by 50 per cent would cost $200 billion annually.

Gore's extremism, culminating in a demand that we "change the very foundation of our civilization," brings to mind what Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style." Gore too "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. . . . Time is forever just running out."