Trying not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg

Over in Reason, Ronald Bailey takes a first, partial step towards redeeming his awful recent record with respect to the global climate change issue. Bailey has long represented a voice of, well, reason, in the area of humanity's responses to scientific issues. In the last 6 months or so, he has done a dramatic turn-around on this one issue, throwing aside years of hard-won understandings and instead drinking the cool-aid of government intervention.

In this article, though, he returns to his rational roots. The article addresses a special issue of The New Scientist detailing "The Folly of Growth," whose general theme is "Economic growth is folly because "our economy is killing the planet."" Bailey outlines the insane extrapolations made by the authors in this issue and the extent to which they are willing to use those doomsday predictions to begin the lobbying now for stronger big-brother states, with some clearly laying the groundwork for a truly frightening big-brother *world* government.

But Bailey throws off his recent big-government costume and lays out the same fundamental arguments that are so devastating to his own foray into government control over carbon emittance: that we've seen these kind of doomsday scenarios before and careful monitoring and non-panicked action proved to be the best course of action; that the extrapolations made by these apocalyptic prognosticators ignore the demonstrated history of technological advance; that it is generally *non-privately* owned commons that have (predictably: there's a reason it's called the "tragedy" of the commons) suffered the worst degradations; and, most importantly, that rather than being a *cause* of environmental neglect, economic growth is the great *reducer* of environmental neglect.

On the issue of "shrinking forests", for example, Bailey says

It is true that tropical forests are shrinking in poor countries in which such forests "belong" to the government. However, a 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change."

That is, that economically advanced countries are *saving* forests, not shrinking them. In fact,

the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research points out that the "main threat to tropical forests" comes from slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families.

On the issue of technological advancement and previous "scares", Bailey does not explicitly mention the world starvation scare of the 1970s led by Paul Ehrlich, but he does refer to it obliquely:

Between 1980 and 2005, the world's farmers nearly doubled crop production while increasing cropland only 7 percent. If farmers around the world produced crops as efficiently as American farmers, global cropland could be cut in half.

For those with short memories, it is imperative to point out that the starvation scare of the 70s was just as prominent and highly touted as the current global climate change scare, and drastic measures involving the use of force to control behavior of the multitudes were advocated as the only way to stave off a pandemic that was predicted to kill as many as one *billion* people (the global climate change literature is actually pretty bereft of actual predictions of the damage that is supposedly to come as a result of their dire predictions, but nothing I've seen gets anywhere *close* to predicting a billion dead. It is something I'd like to understand better: what is the current state of analysis of the *consequences* of the global climat change scenarios, assuming that the change actually occurs? Mostly I've seen vague mentions of rising sea levels; while that clearly has some negative consequences to those living in low-lying areas, it's clear that these would be gradual changes, and so presumably would kill *no one* in any sort of eminent disaster way, right? If it takes 50 years for an area to flood, isn't that sufficient time to save those lives? Clearly at an expensive cost, but I still count lives as the most important resource). That we didn't panic and kill many people in the pursuit of saving more has turned out to be a *very* good decision. Technology improves rapidly and there's every reason to be careful about over-reacting before we've had a chance to let technology, and it's bigger brother economic growth, play themselves out. (I know for example that there are researchers working on ways to "sequester" excess carbon at the bottom of the sea through clever application of microbes to the problem. I have no idea if that is a promising approach, but the fact is, there *are* many lines of inquiry that can be made into these issues).

Kudos to Bailey for returning to his roots: reason, thought, and working together via civil society over panic and the urge to forcibly control.