GREENIE FALSE PROPHETS

Paul Ehrlich has never been right. Why does anyone still listen to him?

"Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." They didn't. Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Far from it. Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. In other words, we abound in "key minerals." Naturally, Mr. Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award-- and a Heinz Award for the environment. (Yes, that Heinz: Teresa Heinz Kerry is chairman of the award's sponsoring philanthropy.)....

Of course, there are environmental problems, although not the global warming the authors fear. (Satellite data now suggest that such warming will be mild over the next century--about a degree Celsius.) But the depletion of fisheries and tropical forests is real enough. Alas, the Ehrlichs and most of their ecological confreres miss the central reason for it: the tragedy of the commons, where nobody owns a resource--forest, fish, water--and thus no one has a reason to protect it. By contrast, enclosing the commons, by assigning owners, internalizes costs and benefits, and allows markets to determine the value of any given resource. With characteristic wrongheadedness, they advocate instead eroding property rights, thus enlarging the commons and tending to make environmental problems worse".

More here

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

*****************************************