GASOLINE AND GLOBAL WARMING

"With gas prices running around $2 per gallon, our economy is performing a wonderful natural experiment on global warming policy. Proponents of the infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming argue that this is about the price that is required in order to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide to 7 percent below where they were in 1990, as mandated by the treaty. This price, they argue, will change behavior. Mainly, people will buy more economical cars.

It's impossible to meet Kyoto's mandates, which start in 2008. There's simply not enough time to ratchet down emissions so quickly. In response, Sens. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, have authored slightly less stringent legislation, dubbed "Kyoto Lite," which sets the emissions targets and timetables back a few years. Well, thanks to the wonders of a tight gas supply (the last oil refinery was built in the United States decades ago) and increasing demand (developing China, for example), in the last year we have seen the price rise advocated by the supporters of Kyoto and Kyoto Lite in order to substantially reduce gasoline use. They were wrong. People are increasing their purchases of gas-hogs and buying relatively fewer of the new gas-electric hybrids.

Trucks use more gas than cars. In September, U.S. truck sales were over 828,147, up 13 percent from last year. 608,424 cars were sold, down 2 percent. (That's right: we buy more trucks than cars, in part because that minivan is a "truck," but that's another story.)

Then there's the green suburban myth about a tremendous demand for hybrid gas-electric vehicles. According to The Washington Post on August 24, "The [hybrid Toyota] Prius has been the fastest-selling car in the country for 10 straight months." The Post cited the prestigious J.D. Power corporation for this data, and this story has been repeated everywhere. I heard it a while back on Clark Howard's popular financial radio show. It isn't true. It's not even close to true. I have no idea where it came from. Toyota sells about 10 times more Camrys a month (35,000) than it does Priuses. Toyota sells over 21,000 pickup trucks a month. They're great vehicles, but their V6 and V8 engines, which are in the majority, will only get you miles per gallon (mpg) in the high teens if driven gingerly. For comparison, September Prius sales were 4,309. Car and Driver got 52 mpg driving theirs around town. The company expects to sell 45,000 in the entire year....

So much for the notion that $2 a gallon will dramatically reduce our consumption of gasoline. When offered hybrid cars and expensive gas, people are buying V8 pickups instead.... Think back to the 1970s. On an inflation-adjusted basis, gas was about $4 a gallon in today's dollar. When the first high-quality Japanese econos hit the U.S., they were snapped up immediately. Now with the advent of high quality hybrids, there's no similar response. Obviously the price of gas is simply not high enough. Years ago, Time Magazine claimed that a majority of Americans were willing to pay 50 cents more (in today's dollars) for a gallon of gas if it would fight global warming. Well, we now know that this is just another environmental myth. Because when the price of gas goes up by that same amount, truck sales go up, car sales down, and hybrid sales are a drop in the gas can.

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MALTHUS: THE FIRST "GREENIE"

Theory first: Facts second

The principle that there is a perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is usually attributed to Malthus. But he was really just the popularizer of a belief that was (and is) fairly widespread.... The Malthusian population principle is always incorrect, but its proximity to the truth varies.... As Stove put it:

It is . . . a curious irony that the general biological principle which he put forward comes steadily closer to being true, the further one departs from the human case, and is a grotesque falsity only in the one case which really interested Malthus: man.

Human populations, once they reach a certain size and complexity, always develop specialized orders, of priests, doctors, soldiers. To the members of these orders sexual abstinence, either permanent or periodic, or in "business hours" (so to speak), is typically prescribed. Here, then, is [a] fact about our species which is contrary to what one would expect on the principle that population always increases when, and as fast as, the amount of food available permits.

The Malthusian law is the basis of the environmental movement. Its application is often masked by the term "carrying capacity," which is the number of individuals that a unit of area can hold. And, more recently, "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how many units of area an individual uses-literally an inversion of carrying capacity....

Subjective individualism is ignored; uncertainty of the future is ignored; impossibility of quantification of human action is ignored; and government intervention is always put forward as the solution. It is nothing more than the flip side of the free-rider problem: we can exclude others, therefore we should not increase the rate or take more than our fair-i.e., equal-share in which we exclude others; otherwise there will be nothing left for others....

Any numbskull can find statistics to show that if the resource base stays the same and population increases then all hell will break loose. This is the Malthusian mirage. Based on this sophisticated doctrine, believers go around telling people that we should desist from further folly, for the impending threat of doom is ever looming. And government, of course, is our only hope. Another silly use of this method is finding out that the population of Italy is decreasing, hence, they project that after a while there will be no Italians left.

Suicidal environmentalists believe that the human race is a burden on the environment. They claim that for the sake of dolphins, koalas and cockroaches, we should cease to exist. They believe that by existing, humans take up space that other life forms could have used. We also eat other organisms, which would not be eaten-by us-if we did not exist.

We can see how ridiculous this view is when we apply it to any other living thing. To some extent, all life takes up space or other resources that other organisms could have used. Why do environmentalists think that humans are not entitled to do things at the level of other organisms? So much for these environmentalists professed avoidance of treating humans differently than other organisms, of considering humans as part of the environment. This is the misanthropic muddle. Typically, Rothbard gets to the bottom of this absurdity:

It is true that if the American continent had never been populated many millions of miles of square forest would remain intact. But so what? Which are more important, people or trees? For if a flourishing conservation lobby in 1600 had insisted that the existing wilderness would remain intact, the American continent would not have had room for more than a handful of fur trappers. If man had not been allowed to use these forests, then these resources would have been truly wasted, because they could not be used. What good are resources if man is barred from using them to achieve his ends?

Then there is the common argument that at any time a natural resource is used, any time a tree is chopped down, we are depriving future generations of its use. And yet this argument proves far too much. For if we are to be prohibited from felling a tree because some future generation is deprived of doing so, then this future generation, when it becomes "present," also cannot use the tree for fear of itsfuture generations, and so on to prove that the resource can never be used by man at all-surely a profoundly "anti-human" thesis, since man in general is kept in subservience to a resource which he can never use.

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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, truth regardless.

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