Just a heads up: I will be speaking at the Voice & Exit Festival of the Future in Austin this coming November. My talk is: The End of Doom: Humanity's conquered the worst ... what's next?

So what is Voice & Exit? As the organizers explain the goal of the festival is explore ways to maximize human flourishing:

November 11-13, 2016. Voice & Exit is this generation's conference and festival of the future. We bring together thought leaders, community builders and innovators from diverse backgrounds who share a common goal: to maximize human flourishing.

We live in a world limited by outdated institutions and social models. But as Buckminster Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Join a global group of Exiters who aren't f*cking around when it comes to transforming our world. Learn, collaborate, experiment and connect with like-minded people who are ready to criticize by creating.

The conference is limited to 500 participants. Go here to register. Hope to see you there.

A CNN poll earlier this year found that a majority of Americans are pessimistic about the future of the country. That's consistent with prior polling, which discovered that a majority thinks the next generation will be worse off than their own. Are the worries that underpin this trend legitimate?

Reason TV went to the Venice Beach boardwalk to gage how people are feelings about the future, with the goal of cheering up the doomsayers. Maybe it was just the pleasant beachside atmosphere, but, at first, most people told us they feel a sense of optimism about the future.

With a little digging into the issues, however, we uncovered the seeds of pessimism. Many referenced one particular (orange) presidential candidate. So we responded with some statistics and success stories that should give even the most hardened pessimist hope for a better future.

General trends over the past few decades in numerous categories are good cause for hope and—dare we say—optimism for the future. From the massive declines in war and street violence to the reforestation of the planet, from rising living standards and huge reductions in global poverty to the democratization of the world's political regimes, things are looking up for humanity and our neighboring species in a plethora of ways.

The World's Forests Are Not Being Obliterated

Take the seemingly perpetual and intractable problem of deforestation, which dominates media reports every year around Earth Day. In fact, scientists call the present turnaround in the world's forests the "Great Reversal," and a study from Rockefeller University and the University of Helsinki found that the forests in a majority of countries have been thickening for the past few decades.

Part of this reversal is thanks to a more remarkable trend: Contrary to 1970s-era Malthusian warnings of mass famine and starvation, advances in biotech and agriculture have led to a tripling of the amount of food grown on just 10 percent more land. If crop yields had been stuck at 1960s levels, we would have needed to farm an area almost twice the size of South America to feed the doubling population. The global adoption of genetically modified crops has also reduced chemical pesticide use by 37 percent and increased farmer profits by 68 percent.

What's more, the efficiencies in farming and other factors have increasingly encouraged urbanization. Rural populations will be nearly cut in half by 2050 according to U.N. projections, potentially returning huge plots of land to nature. And researchers at Rockefeller University say we might be on the verge of peak farmland, meaning an area twice the size of France could become available for other uses come 2060.

The Decline in Violence

Another trend that contradicts pessimistic prognostications is the overall decline in violence. Not only has the FBI documented just about every metric of violence on a downward trend since the mid 1990s, gun violence in particular was cut in half in that period despite a doubling of gun sales. But fear of violence persists thanks to breathless media coverage of terrorism and mass shootings that fails to put the magnitude of the problem in proper context.

Atrocities committed by groups like ISIS and dictators like Syria's Bashar Al-Assad are real and horrifying, but those tragic death tolls are still dwarfed by the mass murder and genocide that was commonplace in the era of Communism and Fascism. And while the threat of terrorism looms large in America, a civilian on U.S. soil is about four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack.

Living Standards Are Improving

Unemployment is back around 5%, but that's partly because many Americans have dropped out of the labor force altogether. But there's still good reason for optimism about the economy if historical trends hold.

If you break down the income of Americans into quintiles and think of them as rungs on the economic ladder, 95 percent of families on the lowest rung move up at least one rung in their lifetime, with a majority moving up to the top two rungs to join the top 40 percent of American earners. And 82 percent of kids whose parents were on the bottom rung move up at least one rung.

We're also getting more bang for our buck. The number of work hours Americans have to log to afford household appliances and luxury goods has steadily declined since the 1950s, and GDP keeps rising even though people are working fewer and fewer hours. In the 1930s, Americans spent more than a quarter of their disposable income on food; now, it's less than 10 percent.

The dramatic gains have accrued to the planet's poorest people. More than a billion people have climbed out of extreme poverty since 1990, cutting the global poverty rate in half.

President Trump?

How about the orange elephant in the room? Regardless of your feelings about Donald Trump or any other potential political leader, there's good reason to be optimistic about human freedom and the decline of authoritarianism across the globe. Countries have been dumping their autocratic dictators in favor of democratically elected representatives; in fact, most countries are now democracies.

Many of the people we spoke with were optimistic about the freedom that technology provides, our increasingly tolerant society, and the ever-expanding consumer choice that's improving all of our lives.

So, have we cheered you up?

About 8 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. Hosted by Weissmueller. Camera by Monticello and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Joshua Swain.

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"Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever" was the title of an urgent report written by the legendary asset manager Jeremy Grantham in 2011. Grantham proclaimed the advent of a resource scarcity "paradigm shift" that was "perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution." As evidence, he noted that "the prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70%." Since then, he continued, "this entire decline was erased" by the price surge, which he took as a signal that the world was using up its natural resources at an alarming rate. The result, he declared, would be a permanent shift where the prices of raw materials rise and shortages become common.

Grantham also pointed to a slowdown in crop productivity, suggesting that it would be impossible to feed the world's burgeoning population. "How we deal with this unsustainable surge in demand and not just 'peak oil,' but 'peak everything,' is going to be the greatest challenge facing our species," he wrote.

This week, Grantham took almost all of that back. Grantham, like a whole raft of professional doomsters, was declaring Peak Everything just as the latest economic super-cycle was cresting; many commodities' prices peaked the very year of his report and have been drifting downward ever since.

Economic forecasting often seems little better than reading tea leaves or parsing the convolutions of a sheep's liver. Nevertheless, some economists argue that stepping back from the crises and volatilities of the moment and taking a longer view can shed light on how the economic future will likely evolve. Specifically, they have identified what they call economic super-cycles, which trace the steady downward trend of commodity prices as they have gone through a series of decades-long peaks and valleys. A 2012 study by economists associated with the Australian National University analyzed price trends from 1650 to 2010 and concluded that "relative commodity prices present a significant and downward global trend over almost the entire capitalist age." 

In their 2012 study "Super-Cycles of Commodity Prices Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century," economists Bilge Erten and José Antonio Ocampo—from Northeastern University and Columbia University, respectively—confirm that the commodity price increases in the first decade of this century were the result of a super-cycle upswing. Parsing real price data for nonfuel commodities such as food and metals from 1865 to 2009, they find evidence of four past super-cycles ranging in length from 30 to 40 years. The cycles they identify ran from 1894 to 1932, peaking in 1917; from 1932 to 1971, peaking in 1951; from 1971 to 1999, peaking in 1973; and the post-1999 episode, which is ongoing. The increases in commodity prices during these cycles are driven largely by increases in demand arising from strong periods of industrialization and urbanization, such as those experienced by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States in the 19th century, by Japan in the 20th century, and by China and other emerging economies at the beginning of the 21st century.

Erten and Ocampo find that "for non-oil commodities, the mean of each super-cycle has a tendency to be lower than that of the previous cycle." In other words, the valleys after each super-cycle peak is lower than the preceding ones—commodities become cheaper over time. In their 2012 study, they noted that metal prices were still high, but observed that "the contraction phase of this cycle has not even begun yet, which can lower the mean of the whole cycle in the upcoming years." Four years later, metal prices are nearly back to their pre-boom values. If previous commodity trends they identify are right, then metal prices will continue to fall and eventually will reach a new nadir lower than their previous trough.

The Dallas Federal Reserve economist Martin Stuermer tries to account for trends in commodities by looking at how prices have evolved for four minerals—copper, lead, tin, and zinc— since 1840. In a 2014 working paper, "150 Years of Boom and Bust: What Drives Mineral Commodity Prices?," he finds that commodity price increases are driven by demand shocks rather than by supply shocks. These "persistent price increases caused by commodity demand shifts trigger technological advances and new discoveries," which then lower commodity prices. A demand shock's increasing prices typically continue for 15 years or so, and the resulting supply shocks that lower prices last between five and 10 years. "Price surges caused by rapid industrialization are a recurrent phenomenon throughout history," concludes Stuermer. "Mineral commodity prices return to their declining or stable trends in the long run."

Back to Grantham. Practically ever since he issued his dire forecasts in 2011, the trend in commodity prices has been steadily downward. The Bloomberg Commodity Index (see below) has dropped 50 percent since 2011, back essentially to where it was in 1998, when it was first formulated. The index tracks commodities, including petroleum, natural gas, corn, soybeans, copper, aluminum, coffee, and live cattle. Writing this week in GMO Quarterly Letter, Grantham presented "an admission of a past mistake on resources."

First, he admits to buying into the notion of "peak oil" as petroleum prices began their steep ascendant 10 years ago. He then explains, "If we were running out of low-cost oil, I asked myself in 2011, why should we not run out of other finite resources? That everything finite runs out is known by everyone except madmen and economists (Kenneth Boulding)."

Grantham was far from alone in prophesying peak oil. For example, the Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. As it happens, global oil production averaged 85 million barrels per day in 2005; the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that it was nearly 96 million barrels per day in 2015.

Astute readers will have noticed that all of the super-cycle researchers cited above make an exception for crude. For example, Erten and Ocampo find that while oil prices do indeed trace a similar boom and bust price cycle like other commodities, the average has been drifting upward since 1962. On the other hand, researchers at the Colorado School of Mines do detect super-cycles for oil after World War II: one running through 1966 to 1996, and the current one, which has just peaked. They note that the timing of the two recent crude oil super-cycles correlates with the super-cycles in metals and matches the timing of the industrialization and urbanization phases of economic development in the U.S., then Europe, and finally Asia.

The month Grantham issued his 2011 Peak Everything report saw oil prices reach $112 per barrel for refiners, just down a bit from their pre–financial crisis peak of $129 per barrel in July 2008. According to the most recent EIA figures, oil averaged $33 per barrel in March, up to $46 per barrel this week.

Interestingly, Grantham predicts in his new Quarterly Letter that oil prices will rise toward $100 per barrel by the end of this decade. But all bets are off after that, since demand for crude could falter as new technologies enable such things as transport systems based on shared electrified self-driving vehicles.

What about Grantham's food fears? Here he was worried that agricultural productivity would not be able to keep up with the world's growing population. He was particularly alarmed about allegedly impending shortages of two fertilizers, phosphorous and potash. "These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It's a scary set of statements," he warned in a 2012 column for Nature. "What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can't get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried."

Grantham could not have looked very hard for satisfactory answers to worries about peak phosphorus and potash. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that current reserves of phosphate rock will last 300 years at current rates of production. The estimated total resources of phosphate rock would last over 1,300 years. Similarly, known supplies of potash would last 95 years at current rates of usage. Total world estimates of potash resources would last 7,000 years. 

Grantham notes with alarm that agricultural productivity gains have slowed. Partially this is because crop breeders, agricultural scientists, and farmers rapidly ramped up yields in response to the steep food price increases of the 1970s; once food production caught up to market demand, it slowed down. In any case, agricultural productivity increases at about 1.7 percent per year; world population is increasing at 1.2 percent annually, and that rate is expected to fall. Taking into account higher future demand for meat and milk as the world grows richer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects a "75-percent increase in total production and consumption of major field crops between 2005 and 2050. This increase is larger than the 43-percent increase in global population projected for the same period." In the meantime, the Food and Agriculture Organization's annual deflated food price index peaked in 2011 and has dropped back to where it was in 1997.

Grantham concludes, "I do not believe that the current distress in commodities is caused by the workings of some super cycle, some decadal cosmic force, as some observers are tempted to say." Perhaps he's right. But so far, long-term bets against human ingenuity have proved to be pretty bad investment advice.

The highly respected Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has just issued The State of the World's Plants 2016 in which its researchers estimate that perhaps one-fifth of the world's 391,000 vascular plant species may be at risk of extinction. The chief reason plant species are threatened is human activity, specifically land use changes such as farming, raising livestock, logging, and land development. The Kew findings rely heavily on research published last year, "Green Plants in the Red," in PLoS One by a team of mostly British researchers associated with the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens. According to the journal metrics that article received no media coverage, which may be why the results are being updated and republished in the splashy report.

To try to estimate how many plants are threatened with extinction, the researchers took a random sample consisting of some 7,000 plant species and then checked to see how they are faring using data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN constructs and maintains various databases called Red Lists aiming to monitor the conservation status of species populations.

The PLoS One study reported, "More than 20% of plant species assessed are threatened with extinction, and the habitat with the most threatened species is overwhelmingly tropical rain forest, where the greatest threat to plants is anthropogenic habitat conversion, for arable and livestock agriculture, and harvesting of natural resources." The study also calculated that "arable farming affects 60% of threatened species, while livestock farming affects 47%, logging affects 38%, targeted harvesting affects 25% and fires (natural or man-made) also affect 25% of threatened species."

In addition, the PLoS One study estimated that with 79% of threatened plant species are found in forests, followed by 19% of threatened species in shrubland, 13% in rocky outcrops, 10% in savanna and also 10% in grassland  percentages do not sum to 100% as some species occur in more than one habitat). The fewest threatened species were found in deserts and wetlands, largely because those areas are least suited for agriculture.

So that's the bad news. But the good news is peak farmland and plantation forestry. As I report in my chapter on extinction in my book The End of Doom:

Considering that agriculture is the most expansive and intensive way in which people transform natural landscapes, the really good news is that the amount of land globally devoted to food production may be falling as population growth slows and agricultural productivity increases. “We believe that projecting conservative values for population, affluence, consumers, and technology shows humanity peaking in the use of farmland,” conclude Jesse Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, and his colleagues in their 2013 article “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing.” They add, “Global arable land and permanent crops spanned 1,371 million hectares in 1961 and 1,533 million hectares in 2009, and we project a return to 1,385 million hectares in 2060.” As a result of these trends, humanity will likely restore at least 146 million hectares, an area two and a half times that of France or the size of ten Iowas, and possibly much more land. “Another 50 years from now, the Green Revolution may be recalled not only for the global diffusion of high-yield cultivation practices for many crops, but as the herald of peak farmland and the restoration of vast acreages of Nature,” write the researchers. “Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature.”

Also in The End of Doom I note:

Resources for the Future analyst Roger Sedjo estimates that most of the world’s wood products could be derived from tree plantations occupying about 7 percent of the world’s currently forested area. Improving the productivity of tree plantations by means of biotechnology would shrink that area even further. Cultivating trees on plantations spares land for natural forests to grow, and the more productive the trees, the more the land that can be spared for nature.

A couple of months after my book came out, the Food and Agriculture Organization published its new Forest Resources Assessment and reported that that rate of deforestation had already fallen by half between 1990 and 2010. And what is more, the rate of deforestation was likely to continue decelerating.

And finally, most people are moving off of hard scrabble farms and into cities. From The End of Doom:

Demographers expect that 80 percent of people will live in urban areas by 2050 or so. Setting aside the demographic fact that people who live in cities have fewer children, what this trend means is that a lot fewer people will be living on the landscape in the future. Today, about half of the world’s population of 7.2 billion people lives in rural areas. Assuming that world population grows to 9 billion by 2050 and that 80 percent do live in cities, that would mean that only 1.8 billion would be on the landscape, as compared to 3.6 billion today. If world population tops out at 8 billion, then only 1.6 billion people would live in the countryside—2 billion fewer people than live there now.

The new data on the vulnerability of plants to extinction from the Kew researchers is sobering, but there are lots of positive trends that suggest that the 21st century will be a century of environmental renewal, rather than one of ecological ruin.

My article, Earth Day, Then and Now, looked back 30 years at numerous predictions made on or around the first Earth Day in 1970 prophesying imminent and widespread environmental apocalyse. I am pleased that several places around the web - Mark Perry over at AEIdeas and Andrew Follett at the Daily Caller, are citing it for the lists of massively failed predictions that they are publishing today. To both, my humble thanks.

Perry mined my article for 18 spectacularly wrong predictions of doom: 

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”*

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

And Follett used my article to focus of 7 just dead wrong predictions and provided some fascinating extra data on just how badly wrong the doomsters got it:

From predicting the end of civilization to classic worries about peak oil, here are seven environmentalist predictions that were just flat out wrong.

1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”

Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy.

Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.

2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”

Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably grown despite increases in population.

Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.

3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”

Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase.

Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”

4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”

Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India.

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.

5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”

Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”

Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.

6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”

David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement.

Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control.

Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.

7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”

On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market.

American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking.

Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.

Again, thanks guys. And may we all have a Happy and Prosperous Earth Day!

*CORRECTION: In 1975, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next thirty years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

As will be clear in the book, I am highly critical of long-time environmental doomster Paul Ehrlich, but the above prediction was actually made by Ehrlich’s sometime collaborator biologist Peter Raven in 1994 in his article "Defining Biodiversity" published in Nature Conservancy. For those who may still be interested in Ehrlich’s prognostications, in June, 2015 he confidently asserted that “without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event.”

I regret the error.

For folks who live near Charlottesville, VA or may want to come for a visit in order to enjoy the literary festivities, I will be participating in panel discussion during which I will talk about my new book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. My fellow panelists are UVA's own Jonathan Cannon and Duke University's Jedediah Purdy. Details of the panel are below. Please drop by - the discussion should be quite lively.

Environmental Thought: Resources, Law, and Politics

Friday, March 18, 2016, 2:00 PM

UVa Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections

UVa Central Grounds, 160 McCormick Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22904

Book Sales by: UVA Bookstore 

Authors Ronald Bailey (The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century), Jonathan Cannon (Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court), and Jedediah Purdy (After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene) discuss their recent books.

Featuring: Ronald Bailey, Jonathan Cannon, Jedediah Purdy

Ronald Bailey

rbailey@reason.com

Ronald Bailey, author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, is the award-winning science correspondent for the public policy magazine Reason. A former PBS TV producer and staff writer at Forbes, he has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Jonathan Cannon

jzc8j@virginia.edu

Jonathan Cannon, author of Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court, is Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law and director of the environmental law program at the University of Virginia School of Law. He served previously as EPA General Counsel.

Jedediah Purdy

Purdy@law.duke.edu

Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene is Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. 

Moderator: Willis Jenkins

willis.jenkins@virginia.edu

Willis Jenkins is the author of The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity and Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology on the intersection of religion and environment. He is associate professor of Religious Studies at UVa.

For more information about the Virginia Festival of the Book (March 16 through 20) click here.

Microsoft founder and big time philanthrophist Bill Gates predicts in his annual foundation letter: "Within the next 15 years—and especially if young people get involved—I expect the world will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our world."

Gates accepts the mainstream scientific projections that rising global temperatures resulting from unabated emissions of greenhouse gases would likely cause significant problems for humanity later in this century. In order to avoid these problems, he argues humanity needs to shift away from fossil fuels to carbon-neutral forms of energy. Current versions of carbon-neutral energy, chiefly solar and wind power, are not adequate because the sun doesn't always shine and wind doesn't always blow. While the capital costs for both are falling steeply, they are still far too expensive for the 1.3 billion poor people around the world who still lack access to modern energy supplies. A breakthrough in battery storage would help a lot, but progress remains slow.

The "miracle" Gates thinks will happen is that a new suite of zero-carbon technologies will drive the cost of energy production below that of fossil fuels. As he explains over at the Tech Insider, "When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons."

Gates is the organizer of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition which is a "public-private partnership between governments, research institutions, and investors. Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone." Gates is a believer in the role of government in subsidizing energy innovation and argues that such R&D spending needs to be tripled in the U.S. from $5 billion to $15 billion per year.

As examples of the type of research that might produce energy miracles, Gates cites work in which carbon dioxide is transformed into liquid fuels. The great thing about such liquid fuels, if they can be manufactured at scale, is that they are more or less compatible with our existing energy infrastructure, e.g., pipelines, internal combustion engines, etc.

So what energy bets is Gates making? One is Terrapower which aims to produce electricity by burning nuclear waste in traveling wave reactors. However, as Gates told Andrew Revkin over at Dot Earth, "The best case is that we have our pilot plant built by 2023, and that by 2030, this fourth-generation inherently safe design with all sorts of nice characteristics, including cost, becomes the standard for all nuclear builds from that point forward. That’s the best case for this amazing, brilliant Terrapower design." Last September, Terrapower signed a memorandum of understanding with China National Nuclear Corporation to build the prototype of its reactor.

Of course, as I reported recently, there are is a lot of effort and excitement in the nuclear power arena nowadays and it's possible - with the right regulatory system - that nuclear power will cost less than burning fossil fuels.

In my newish book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, I outlined what I called the emerging energy climate consensus. I noted:

The fourth and most provocative plank of the new energy technology consensus is that government research and development spending on zero-carbon forms of energy supply must be dramatically ramped up. ...

The better course would be to establish a level playing field by eliminating all energy subsidies and incentives and letting the cheapest technologies developed by innovators win in the marketplace. Proponents of markets must continue to push policy in this direction, but given the history of pervasive government intervention in energy markets, it is unlikely that governments will suddenly step back and allow markets to decide how to innovate and produce energy in the future. Energy production, especially for electricity, approximates a government-sanctioned monopoly that has the unfortunate side eect of stifling private innovation in energy production technology. Given that situation, the new consensus in favor of government-subsidized energy production research and development that aims to make zero- carbon energy supplies cheaper than fossil fuels looks like the least bad likely policy option for addressing concerns about climate change.

I concluded:

Man-made climate change is a problem, but it does not portend the end of the world. The solution to future climate change is the same as the remedy for other environmental problems—the application of human ingenuity and technology.

Like Bill Gates, I expect that an "energy miracle" will resolve the climate-energy-poverty conundrum well before the middle of this century.

The price for West Texas Intermediate crude oil continues to sink toward $30 per barrel. Now the analysts at the financial services firm Morgan Stanley are saying that it could go as low as $20 per barrel later this year. Not just because rising global supply is colliding with weakening demand, but also because the U.S. dollar is likely to rise in value. As OilPrice.com notes, a Morgan Stanley research report ...

...attributes the sharp slump in crude prices to the strength of America’s currency. Morgan Stanley says that if the U.S. dollar appreciates a mere 5 percent, it could force crude oil prices down by another 10 to 25 percent...

Not only that, but a steeper drop could be just around the corner, again because of the strengthening greenback. “Given the continued U.S. dollar appreciation, $20-$25 oil price scenarios are possible simply due to currency,” wrote Morgan Stanley’s analysts in their latest report. “The U.S. dollar and non-fundamental factors continue to drive oil prices.”

Last fall, Goldman Sachs even suggested that the current oil price slump mirrors what happened when oil prices collapsed in the 1980s and remained low throughout the 1990s. In other words, humanity may enjoy low oil prices for perhaps another 15 years.

In my book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, I reported various depletionist predictions:

“The world is at, nearing, or past the points of peak production of a number of critical nonrenewable resources—including oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as many economically important minerals ranging from antimony to zinc,” warned prominent environmentalist Richard Heinberg in his 2010 article “Beyond the Limits to Growth.” Heinberg had earlier made plain his collapsist beliefs in his 2007 book Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines. In 2012, Michael Klare, Hampshire College political scientist and defense correspondent for The Nation, piled on in his book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. “Government and corporate officials recognize that existing reserves are being depleted at a terrifying pace and will be largely exhausted in the not-too-distant future,” declared Klare.

Wrong again.

As recently as July, I was part of a Cato Unbound debate with economist Dambisa Moyo who was still unaccountably arguing that brilliant Chinese central planners were locking up all the world's fast-depleting resources for their country.

In fact, it is very likely that the world is now experiencing the downward sloping side of latest commodity super-cycle. Generally speaking, as each succeeding super-cycle unfolds resource prices eventually reach levels even lower than the nadir of the previous cycle. In any case, depletionist innovation-deniers need to be publicly shamed.

First, Happy New Year to you all! I am finally getting around to posting my C-SPAN Book TV interview about The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century below. The book has been described as "one of the year's best science books" and as the anti-doomsaying book of this decade.

From The End of Doom:

THE END OF THE WORLD IS NOT NIGH. Far from it. Humanity does face big environmental challenges over the course of the coming century, but the bulk of the scientific and economic evidence shows that most of the trends are positive or can be turned in a positive direction by further enhancing human ingenuity....

New technologies and wealth produced by human creativity will spark a vast environmental renewal in this century. Most global trends suggest that by the end of this century, the world will be populated with fewer and much wealthier people living mostly in cities fueled by cheap no-carbon energy sources. As the amount of land and sea needed to supply human needs decreases, both cities and wild nature will expand, with nature occupying or reoccupying the bulk of the land and sea freed up by human ingenuity. Nature will become chiefly an arena for human pleasure and instruction, not a source of raw materials. I don’t fear for future generations; instead, I rejoice for them.

Click here to see the interview.

Did I mention that I have a new book for sale? Click here to start 2016 off right with a realistic and upbeat assessment of the humanity's future.

*Mitch Daniels in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal earlier this month asked various friends to name their favorite books for 2015. Former Indiana Governor and current Purdue University President Mitch Daniels very kindly selected my book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century as one of his 2015 favorites. Daniels wrote:

No, we’re not all going to starve, and, no, we’re not going to run out of anything essential and irreplaceable. Unless boneheaded government precludes it, human ingenuity will continue to surprise and to produce answers to all such challenges. But in an era when people receive “genius” awards for careers of colossally fallacious doomsaying, an occasional corrective is valuable, and Ronald Bailey’s “The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century” is one for this decade.

Regarding "genius" awards for colossaly fallacious doomsaying, I suspect that Daniels is referencing, among others, my comprehensive debunking of genius population doomster Paul Ehrlich, and genius famine prognosticator Lester Brown, and genius Limits to Growth depletionist Donella Meadows.

Although I have not yet gotten a genius award, The End of Doom might be one of your favorite books too. Amazon says that if you order now you could get as many copies as you'd like delivered before Christmas.

Slate has published a joint review of my book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century and Leigh Phillips' book, Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts. Phillips is one of those rarest of creatures; a Leftist who still believes in progress and human ingenuity. The review is by Alex Trembath from the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think-tank based in California.

From the review:

Two remarkable books that came out this year—Austerity Ecology & the Collapse Porn Addicts by Leigh Phillips and The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey—each makes the case that growth, technology, and accelerated modernization can solve the twin global problems of poverty and environmental devastation. The twist is that Phillips and Bailey argue from diametrically opposed left and right positions. ...

Bailey, a scholar and columnist at the libertarian Reason magazine, makes a similar case. An update to his 1993 book Eco-Scam, End of Doom counters 50 years of apocalyptic environmentalist rhetoric on pesticides, GMOs, fossil fuels, and other hallmarks of modernity. Along the way, he regularly chides environmentalists and big-government bureaucrats for slowing the advance of promising technologies.

Bailey writes that not only are the risks of advanced technologies massively overhyped by nominal lefty spokespeople like Vandana Shiva and Bill McKibben, but said technologies in fact have the consistent and demonstrable effect of lifting people out of poverty and saving more room for nature. ...

On GMOs, nuclear power, energy consumption, and industrial activity, Phillips the socialist and Bailey the libertarian agree. But for their positions on the role of government, they have written nearly the same book. How can this be?

The two authors do not fit neatly into political categories. Phillips excoriates his fellow leftists for abandoning their historical faith in progress, technology, and institutions. According to Austerity Ecology, the anti-technology “small-is-beautiful” ideology of the modern left feeds right into the anti-government right of the latter 20^th century. This is an evolution of the progressive movement that Phillips harshly rejects. Bailey, likewise, contrasts sharply with past conservative ideas of Malthus, Thomas Jefferson, and other anti-modernists. ...

Left and right have been around for centuries. But they’ve never actually been the most relevant ideological divide. Rather, humanity has always been tugged between the proponents and skeptics of progress. In his recent work, University of Warwick’s Steve Fuller has borrowed a 40-year-old distinction between “up-wingers” and “down-wingers” to advocate a proactionary principle, a deliberate contrast to environmentalism’s hallowed precautionary principle.

Go here to read the full review.

Did I mention that The End of Doom makes an excellent holiday gift? You can't have too many copies! 

As I made my way toward the Paris climate change conference, Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, very kindly invited to me last week to make a presentation about my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century. Lord Bernard Donoughue generously arranged for the discussion to be held in a committee room at the House of Lords.

Before the session, Peiser interviewed me for GWPF TV about my book and closely questioned me about my analysis of the science related to man-made global warming. We also discussed what sort of agreement might be reached at the Paris conference. I think it's fair to say that I think man-made global warming is more likely to cause significant problems for humanity as this century unfolds than do the folks at the GWPF. As I explain in my video interview, I think that the balance of the evidence supports my view, but the evidence is not beyond a reasonable doubt. I will be very happy to be proven wrong. Additionally, one must always keep in mind that what government is planning to do about global warming is likely to be worse than global warming.

In any case in include the video of my interview below.

Disclosure: I am very grateful to the GWPF for putting me up in a hotel room and buying me a delicious Chinese dinner.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Best Books for Science Lovers

Matt Ridley recommends new books from 2015.

Nov. 20, 2015

One of the year’s best science books is Ronald Bailey’s “The End of Doom” ( Thomas Dunne, 345 pages, $27.99), which exposes the extraordinary failure rate of gloomy ecological prophets. With the world’s population growth rate falling fast, species loss lower than predicted, oil and gas abundant, and land being returned to nature because of booming farm yields, the 21st century is proving much better than most forecasters said it would be. Mr. Bailey is especially acute in nailing the harm done by the “precautionary principle,” which measures only risks and not benefits of new technologies, and, as Mr. Bailey says, in effect urges: “never do anything for the first time.”

Confessing to mutual admiration, I also highly recommend Ridley's new book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.

I wouldn't be much of a capitalist if I didn't take this opportunity to point out that a copy of The End of Doom would be a wonderful Christmas present for nearly anyone on your gift list.

I will also mention that today is my birthday. Just saying.

As some Reason readers may have heard, I have a new book out, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century. It's been reviewed in various places, including the Wall Street Journal. I just came across the recent review of it over at the Sierra Club. Like most environmental activist groups, the Sierra Club has a rather downbeat view of the future of our planet. So I was surprised at the rather wistful and somewhat contradictory tone of the review of my book over at the organization's website. From the review:

It is refreshing to read about positive trends that bode well for the future of humanity, such as the mass migration to cities (“the most environmentally benign human settlement”), or the potential for self-driving cars to significantly reduce the amount of vehicles globally. Nevertheless, we get the sense that Bailey is ignoring a whole lot of bad in order to highlight the good.

The book is overly packed with studies and statistics. Bailey’s research was clearly exhaustive, but his writing sometimes feels like a composite of other people’s arguments.

Overly packed, yet clearly exhaustive? Those are criticisms? Also as a reporter, I don't just make stuff up. So I do confess to writing analyses that incorporate insights from other people's arguments, especially those derived from researchers who publish "peer-reviewed science done in good faith."

The review concludes:

Bailey doesn’t go so far as to say that rising temperatures aren't a worry, but his message is that “the solution to future climate change is the same as for other environmental problems—the application of human ingenuity and technology” fostered by free market capitalism. While the book doesn’t entirely convince us of that, we can only hope, to some degree, he is right.

May I suggest that you all buy and read the book to see if you think that I am right?

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a good op-ed today, "The Most Important Thing, And It's Almost a Secret" in which he documents the "secret" that global poverty rates have been falling steeply in recent decades. Kristof cites a poll that found that the majority of Americans believed that global poverty rate has doubled in the past 20 years. Most of the remaining respondents more optimistically believed that global poverty has remained steady.

So Kristof argues that the "most important thing" that journalists never seem to report is the fact that the lot of poor folks in many developing countries has been steadily improving. I will not forbear to point out that these Americans would not have been so mistaken about the trajectory of global poverty if they had read my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century.* More on that in bit, but let's first savor the good news Kristof reports:

• The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.

• In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half.

• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do. ...

The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection point when extreme poverty is retreating.

Kristof cites data showing that poverty reduction leads to women choosing to have fewer children, thus abating "overpopulation" fears still peddled by some doomsters. He then references the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as supposedly showing the way forward and concludes by urging: 

So let’s get down to work and, on our watch, defeat extreme poverty worldwide. We know that the challenges are surmountable — because we’ve already turned the tide of history.

Indeed, but not because of U.N. has set out some elaborate economic development goals. Kristof and most other commentators miss the crucial fact we have reached the "inflection point" where poverty has been receding at the same time that economic freedom has been rising around the globe. As the Fraser Institute's 2015 Economic Freedom of the World Report notes the...

...economic freedom rating for the 102 countries with continuous ratings since 1980 has increased from 5.31 in 1980 to 5.77 in 1990 before jumping to 6.74 in 2000 and finally to 6.86 in 2013. The global average increased slightly this past year.

It is no coincidence that poverty falls when human ingenuity is unleashed in voluntary markets. With regard to global population trends I report in The End of Doom:

In 2002, Seth Norton, an economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study, “Population Growth, Economic Freedom, and the Rule of Law,” on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared the fertility rates of over a hundred countries with their index rankings for economic free- dom and another index for the rule of law. “Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law,” wrote Norton. “The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures.”

Norton found that the fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children per woman, while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility rate of 1.82 children per woman. His results for the rule of law were similar: fertility rates in countries with low respect for the rule of law averaged 4.16, whereas countries with high respect for the rule of law had fertility rates averaging 1.55.

Economic freedom and the rule of law occur in politically and eco- nomically stable countries and produce prosperity, which dramatically increases average life expectancy and lowers child mortality; this in turn reduces the incentive to bear more children. As data from the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom shows, average life expectancy for free countries is over eighty years, whereas it’s just about sixty-three years in repressed countries.

With regard to the efficacy of U.N. goal-setting, I note: 

There is only one proven way to improve the lot of hundreds of millions of poor people, and that is democratic capitalism. It is in rich democratic capitalist countries that the air and water are becoming cleaner, forests are expanding, food is abundant, education is universal, and women’s rights respected. Whatever slows down economic growth also slows down environmental improvement. By vastly increasing knowledge and pursuing technological progress, past generations met their needs and vastly increased the ability of our generation to meet our needs. We should do no less for future generations. ...

What well-meaning activists and UN bureaucrats are trying to do is centrally plan the world’s ecology. History suggests that that would work out about as well for humanity and the natural world as centrally planned economies did.

*Did I mention that I have a new book for sale?

Invitation from the Reason Foundation:

In his new book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century, Reason magazine Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey takes a close look at the many failed prophecies of the environmental movement, using facts and data to demonstrate that-despite the doomsayers-the future actually looks better than ever.

On September 15th, you are cordially invited to join Ron, Reason Foundation President David Nott, and other friends of Reason at a reception at Reason's Westside headquarters in celebration of the book's release. 

The End of Doom: Enviromental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century

Tuesday, September 15

6:00 p.m. drinks and food, 7:00 presentation

Reason HQ, 5737 Mesmer Avenue; Los Angeles

map: http://bit.ly/1JmwEp1

Please RSVP to Mary Toledo no later than Friday, September 11 at mary.toledo@reason.org or 310-391-2245. 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Every five years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issues its Forest Resources Assessment. The latest report finds that even has world population has increased and global economy has expanded, the overall rate of deforestation has slowed significantly since 1990. From the report: 

Over the past 25 years forest area has changed from 4.1 billion ha to just under 4 billion ha, a decrease of 3.1 percent. the rate of global forest area change has slowed by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2015 (table1). This change results from a combination of reduced forest conversion rates in some countries and ncreased forest area expansion in others. It appears that net forest area change has stabilized over the past decade. This is an important development given the fact that wood removals in 2011 are about 200 million cubic meters higher per year than in 1990 and human populations have grown during this period by about 37 percent.

Annual forest change from 2010 to 2015 demonstrates positive change: a reduction in forest loss rates. ...

The decrease in net forest loss rates in the tropics and subtropics, combined with stable or moderate increases in the temperate and boreal zones, suggests that the rate of forest loss will probably continue to decrease in coming years.

Below are charts listing the ten countries in which forests are expanding most and the ten that are losing the most.

So how many trees are there on the earth anyway? As the Washington Post reported last week, a new study in the journal Nature answers this question:

In a blockbuster study released Wednesday in Nature, a team of 38 scientists finds that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, blowing away the previously estimate of 400 billion. That means, the researchers say, that there are 422 trees for every person on Earth.

However, in no way do the researchers consider this good news. The study also finds that there are 46 percent fewer trees on Earth than there were before humans started the lengthy, but recently accelerating, process of deforestation....

The study shows that trees are most prevalent in the tropics and subtropics – home to 1.39 trillion trees – but that boreal or northern forests contain another .74 trillion, and temperate forests contain .61 trillion. It also suggests, rather surprisingly, that boreal and tundra forests often have a greater tree density than tropical ones.

The Post article seems to imply that fewer trees is necessarily a "bad thing," but where would we humans put our farms and cities if all of the forest primeval remained?

Interestingly, the FAO forest assessment finds that the global rate of deforestation is decelerating, not accelerating.

The researchers in Nature believe that on net humans are cutting down 10 billion trees per year. At that rate it would take over 300 years to cut all of the world's forests down. For those worried about deforestation, the good news reported in my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, is that humanity has likely reached peak farmland. As a consequence, forests around the world will be expanding by hundreds of millions of hectares over the next several decades.

Details from the Zadek website:

Reading recent headlines, one might start to think the world is unraveling at its seams. But dig beneath the surface of attention-grabbing press, and a different picture emerges. Consider a few surprising truths the media rarely reports: The cancer "epidemic" only appears as such because of longer lifespans. As countries get wealthier, they are able to afford a cleaner environment. GMOs have saved billions of lives. All three of these facts run counter to the doomsday narratives, so loved by sensationalist media and environmental-activists-in-scientists'-clothing alike. Award-winning Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey has made it his mission to look honestly at the ecological impact of civilization, and correct the dire predictions of environmentalists which consistently fail to materialize. Bailey joins Bob for the full hour to discuss his new book, "The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century." Tune in for some good news, amid so much bad.

Enjoy the weekend folks!

As a convenience to Reason readers I am posting various reviews of my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century. Below is the review from the New York Post:

Ignore the dire warnings about our lives because it’s just hysteria

By Kyle Smith

August 15, 2015 | 4:05pm

Remember the great penis scare of the 1990s?

Due to environmental toxins, sperm counts were in free fall, and the world was doomed.

Scandinavian researchers discovered that a nearly 50% decline in sperm counts had taken place over the last 50 years, probably because of “endocrine disruptors” that are everywhere in our poisonous, chemical-infested modern world, and Greenpeace used the study for fundraising under the slogan, “You’re not half the man your father was.”

Moreover, the penis was suddenly at increased risk of deformity: It was reported that there had been an explosion in instances of hypospadias, a common birth defect in which the urethral opening is in the wrong place on the penis.

Since we have to be terrified of something at all times, new fears have sprung up to replace the old ones.

Except none of the above was happening. Scary sperm-count studies have gone limp. A meta-review of 35 sperm-quality studies conducted in 2013 found that eight studies encompassing a total of 18,109 men found a decline in sperm quality, whereas 21 studies involving 112,386 men showed either no change or an increase in sperm quality.

Newspaper editors and TV producers quietly let the issue fade away without apology. Oh, and a 2009 report on the hypospadias data concluded, “the bulk of evidence refutes claims for an increase in hypospadias rates.”

So much for the great dong doom dirge.

The penis scare took its place alongside the DDT scare (banned in 1972, it was later found to be as carcinogenic as coffee by the International Agency for Research on Cancer), the overpopulation scare (in fact, the population is leveling out and will actually start to decline in about 50 years), the famine scare (despite a doubling of the world population since 1968, world food production has tripled, and today both Pakistan and India have so much grain that they export some).

But since we have to be terrified of something at all times, new fears have sprung up to replace the old ones: Now we’re worried about global warming, genetically modified food, vaccines and that old standby, cancer. (Cancer rates have fallen precipitously, while survival rates are way up.)

Meanwhile, as science journalist Ronald Bailey writes in “The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century” (Thomas Dunne Books), massive improvements in virtually all areas of human endeavor have simply gone ignored.

If there were a musical theme to what’s actually been happening to the world in the last 50 years, it wouldn’t be “A hard rain’s a gonna fall” but “Getting so much better all the time.”

Bailey has been trying to talk humanity off the ledge for more than two decades, and people won’t forgive him for it. When, in 1992, he brought to his editor an idea for a sober, evidence-based book about how humanity copes with environmental challenges, the editor replied regretfully, “Ron, we’ll publish your book and we’ll both make some money. But I want to tell you that if you had brought me a book predicting the end of the world, I could have made you a rich man.”

Environmentalist groups are, of course, in the same business as the folks who brought you the “Saw” movies. Their fundraising depends on it, and the media rarely go back to fact-check past predictions, instead blustering ahead with the next dire warning.

Bailey doesn’t claim that global challenges simply resolve themselves — although, as we have seen, some scares were fictitious, based on junk science to begin with.

The doomsayers simply never account for the role of human cooperation and ingenuity in confronting challenges. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants apparently floated up to the atmosphere and were eroding the protective ozone layer over Antarctica.

Some scares were fictitious, based on junk science to begin with.

Bailey believes apocalyptic forecasts were off-base, but after an international treaty phased out the CFCs, French researchers reported in 2013 that the ozone layer is recovering.

So will global warming, a much more complicated issue than CFCs, be resolved by cooperation or ingenuity? Ask yourself which science has seen more breakthroughs in the last few decades — political science or technology.

Politicians issue fatuous warnings about the dangers of global warming, which they vow to combat with even more absurd fantasies about immediately de-carbonizing the economy.

Back in 2008, Al Gore urged America to “commit to producing 100% of our electricity” from renewables within 10 years. It’s seven years later, and solar, geothermal and wind energy are providing 5% of our power.

Renewables will start to take over when their costs fall below the price of fossil-fuel based energy. It’s as simple as that. Solar energy, on current trends, could be as cheap as $24 per megawatt hour in a decade. That is far cheaper than the forecasts for fossil fuel costs.

Stanford tech guru and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa said last year that “there is little doubt that we are heading into an era of unlimited and almost free clean energy” thanks largely to the coming breakthroughs in solar.

For climate-change hysteria, that would be catastrophically good news. Bailey doesn’t wholly share Wadhwa’s optimism. But he adds, “Wagering against human ingenuity has always been a bad bet.”

A majority of people—54 percent—surveyed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom believe there's a risk of 50 percent or more that our way of life will end within the next 100 years. Even worse, some 25 percent of respondents in the same poll believe it that likely that we'll go extinct in the next century. Americans were the most pessimistic, giving those gloomy answers 57 percent and 30 percent of the time, respectively. And younger respondents tend to be more pessimistic about the future than older ones.

These results were recently reported by the Australian futurists Melanie Randle and Richard Eckersley in the journal Futures. They also document that cultural pessimism is increasing. Polls taken in 2005 and 1995 asked young Australians to choose between two statements: "By continuing on its current path of economic and technological development, humanity will overcome the obstacles it faces and enter a new age of peace and prosperity" versus "More people, environmental destruction, new diseases and ethnic and regional conflicts mean the world is heading for a bad time of crisis and trouble." In 2005, only 16 percent of respondents thought it was likely to be "a new age of peace and prosperity," down from 41 percent in 1995. Sixty-five percent opted for "a bad time of crisis and trouble," up from 55 percent in 1995.

Earlier polls have similarly found large segments of the world's population believe that the end is nigh. In a 2012 Reuters poll covering more than 20 countries, 15 percent of the respondents said the world will end during their lives. This year in February YouGov poll of Americans asked, "How likely do you think it is that an apocalyptic disaster will strike in your lifetime?" Nearly a third answered that it was very to somewhat likely.

The Australian researchers themselves apparently think the world as we know it is at significant risk of coming to an end. "Scientific evidence and concern are mounting that humanity faces a defining moment in history," they assert, "a time when we must address growing adversities, or suffer grave consequences." What growing adversities? They uncritically recite the conventional litany of global doom: "climate change and its many, potentially catastrophic, impacts; other threats include depletion and degradation of natural resources and ecosystems; continuing world population growth; disease pandemics; global economic collapse; nuclear and biological war and terrorism; and runaway technological change."

In his 1974 book Disaster and the Millennium, the Syracuse political scientist Michael Barkun wrote: "The apocalyptic myths of the last several decades have been cast on a global scale: world depression, world war, nuclear holocaust, overpopulation, ecological disaster...the imagination of disaster has become fixated on world-wide catastrophe." Forty years later, the same myths of impending global disaster are still being widely preached. In a 2013 article for the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich asked, "Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?" Their short answer: no.

This pervasive pessimism about the human prospect flies in the face of a plain set of facts: Over the past century, the prospects and circumstances of most of humanity have spectacularly improved. Depending on how you calculate it, world per capita GDP has increased between 5-fold and 10-fold since 1900. Average life expectancy has more than doubled in the same period, and we live in the most peaceful time in history.

As the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in 1830, "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason." Macaulay then asked, "On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?"

Maybe because it's exciting to think that your generation is the last. Your generation just happens to be living at the hinge point of history. "There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one's actions, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance," wrote the University of Vermont lecturer Eric Zencey in 1988. "Apocalypticism fulfills a desire to escape the flow of real and ordinary time, to fix the flow of history into a single moment of overwhelming importance."

Millenarianism—the belief in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed—has always been attractive to some portion of humanity. But earlier millenarian ideologies were more likely to predict that good would triumph over evil and the future be transformed in a positive way: that Christ would return to establish his peaceful kingdom or the proletariat would overthrow the oppressive capitalists and abolish the state.

In this new Futures study, the Australian researchers find that among those who believe humanity is likely to go extinct soon, a majority endorses both nihilism and activism. Sixty percent agree that "the world's future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love"; 77 percent endorse the idea that "we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world." Interestingly, the Ehrlichs' Royal Society B article expresses a similar combination of nihilism and activism, telling us that "the odds of avoiding collapse seem small" but we should "try to accelerate change towards sustainability."

In 1982, the brilliant futurist Herman Kahn published The Coming Boom, in which he pleaded for the reestablishment of "an ideology of progress." Kahn warned:

Two out of three Americans polled in recent years believe that their grandchildren will not live as well as they do, i.e., they tend to believe the vision of the future that is taught in our school system. Almost every child is told that we are running out of resources; that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources in silly, frivolous and wasteful ways; that we are callously polluting the environment beyond control; that we are recklessly destroying the ecology beyond repair; that we are knowingly distributing foods which give people cancer and other ailments but continue to do so in order to make a profit.

It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong. What the school system describes, and what so many Americans believe, is a prescription for low morale, higher prices and greater (and unnecessary) regulations.

Three decades later, large swaths of the Western intellectual classes still preach an apocalyptic anti-progress ideology. As the Futures survey shows, corrosive pessimism has clearly trickled down and is demoralizing many citizens. Such cultural gloom is a significant drag on scientific, technological and policy innovation. Overcoming that pervasive pessimism and restoring the belief in human progress is one of the most important philosophical and political projects for the 21st century.

I am cross-posting various reviews from over at RealClearBooks of my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (St. Martin's Press) as a convenience for Reason readers (and a mild effort at self-promotion). This next one is a bit more critical of the book. I respond to the criticisms below.

Malthusians v. Cornucopians

By Roger Pielke Jr.

Reading Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom, I was reminded that the debate between prophets of a looming apocalypse and self-styled cornucopians has a long history, the modern version of which can be traced to the writings of Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century warning that humanity’s ability to reproduce would outstrip its ability to feed itself. The twentieth century saw no shortage of neo-Malthusians, countered by those—such as Julian Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, Gregg Easterbrook, and Bailey himself—with a far more optimistic vision for humanity’s future. By now the combatants know their roles and lines too well. The debate has gotten pretty stale.

It’s not that Bailey’s argument is totally off-base. In fact, I’m skeptical, too, about warnings of apocalypse around the corner and sympathetic to visions of a bright future for people and the planet in the twenty-first century. But securing that future is by no means simple or guaranteed.

In The End of Doom, Bailey takes on a series of issues that he believes have been vastly misunderstood by the neo-Malthusians and their fellow travelers: population, peak oil (and peak commodities more generally), the precautionary principle, worries about a cancer epidemic, genetic modification in agriculture, climate change, and species loss. For each, the argument is much the same. Concern is overhyped. Technology driven by “free markets” has always provided solutions and will do so in the future as well. But Bailey’s analysis never really gets beyond the cornucopian arguments that have been advanced many times before.

To take one example, Bailey accurately finds that the predictions about a “population bomb” advanced in the 1960s and 1970s were wildly wrong. Advocates like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren—currently President Obama’s science advisor—warned of a global crisis that might require draconian action such as forced sterilization. History has proved these arguments ridiculous and even unethical. Yet, as Bailey shows, latter-day Malthusians are saying the same things.

But Bailey stands on shakier ground when he argues that the “population bomb” was diffused because of the so-called Green Revolution, which brought high-yielding wheat and other crops to India and elsewhere.  Bailey asserts that Norman Borlaug, popularly known as the father of the Green Revolution, “is the man who saved more lives than anyone else in history” through “a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India.” In Bailey’s view, the “massive campaign” arrived just in time to prevent the famine predicted by Ehrlich.

It’s a great story, but it’s wrong.

A more accurate history shows that the specter of a looming famine in India was an invention engineered by President Lyndon Johnson to help sustain the U.S. Food for Peace program, which faced a politically skeptical Congress. Technological advances had led to a glut of crops in the U.S., low prices for commodities, and unhappy farmers. Agricultural aid was also seen as a useful strategy in the Cold War. So Johnson wanted the shipments made. Thus, as historian Nick Cullather writes in The Hungry World, “through the fall of 1965 [LBJ] developed the theme of a world food crisis brought on by runaway population growth.”

In fact, official State Department notes reveal that when Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited Washington in spring 1966, one of her agenda items was to get the story straight about a crisis that didn’t exist. The Indian delegation noted that, “The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed.” Scientists and the media jumped on the bandwagon, and a mythology of famine was born.

Bailey’s restatement of the Green Revolution mythology in fact gives neo-Malthusians far too much credit, suggesting that they were correct in their forecast of global famine, only to be proven wrong by the wonders of technological and market innovation. In fact, the neo-Malthusians were never right to begin with. Bailey is promoting a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.

In 2003, the International Food Policy Research Institute asked what would have happened if the Green Revolution in the developing world never happened. They concluded that developed countries would have produced more and trade patterns would have evolved differently, but the situation “probably would not be considered a ‘World Food Crisis.’”

Perhaps ironically, it seems that the cornucopians need the neo-Malthusians to be correct in their diagnosis of potential apocalypse so that they can argue that their preferred solutions provide answers. But what if both sides are wrong in significant respects? Is there room in our debates for a third perspective?

It’s easy to see the end of the world in every technological innovation. It is just as easy to look at the generally improving state of the world and conclude that things will always continue to improve, and that when problems do arise, they will be easily solved.

Our public debates over economics, technology, and political power deserve better than a tired rehashing of Neo-Malthusianism v. cornucopianism.  And yet, these polarities remain appealing to many. Bailey recounts a conversation he had with his editor back in 1992, when he brought an earlier version of these arguments to him. His editor said that he’d publish the book, but “if you’d brought me a book predicting the end of the world, I could have made you a rich man.”

The “end of doom”? Hardly. The end of Panglossian optimism? Nope, not that either. The dance of the two will no doubt go on.

Roger Pielke Jr., is a professor at the Center for Science & Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

Bailey Responds:

Author Ronald Bailey Responds

By Ronald Bailey

First, I want to thank all three reviewers for taking the time and spending the intellectual energy to engage seriously with my new book.  In general, I think that both Darwall and Easterbrook fairly characterize and explain its contents and goals. Pielke has some reservations. 

For the most part, Pielke agrees with me, admitting that he is “quite sympathetic to critiques of apocalypse around the corner.” He is impatient with my chronicling of environmentalist doomsaying over the past several decades, but he should remember that the more than 200 million of his fellow citizens who are younger than he is (46) do not know the sorry ideological history of Neo-Malthusianism. As philosopher George Santayana reminded us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” By reminding readers of the past, I hope to spare future generations from being duped by doom dogmas. I suspect that even Pielke would agree that that is a worthy aim.

Pielke further objects that I give Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution too much credit for forestalling the world-spanning famines widely predicted to occur in the 1970s. It bears noting that in 1970, the chairman of the Nobel committee explained why it had chosen Mr. Borlaug for its Peace Prize in this way: "More than any other single person of this age, [he] has helped to provide bread for a hungry world.” With regard to Nick Cullather’s historical revisionism: Revisionists must revise. That’s what they do. By the way, India’s wheat harvest jumped 45 percent in 1968.

I certainly agree with Pielke that securing a “bright future for people and the planet” is “by no means simple or guaranteed.” I do explain in some detail how the technological progress and wealth generated by democratic free-market capitalism makes environmental renewal in this century possible. While Pielke strikes a world-weary pose of intellectual ennui over a supposedly “stale” debate, he oddly fails to mention that there is between me and the Neo-Malthusians one big difference: My predictions have consistently proven right and theirs wrong.   

Ronald Bailey is the author of "The End of Doom"

As a service (self serving?) for Reason readers I am cross-posting this review of my book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (St. Martin's Press) here from RealClearBooks.

Against the Dogmatists

By Rupert Darwall

Environmentalist doom-saying, according to author Ronald Bailey, is not about scientific prediction but about ideology: one that says nature is good and humanity is evil. In The End of Doom, Bailey challenges modern environmentalism on its own ground. Cut loose from its scientific moorings, environmentalism attacks the human aspiration for a better life. Doing so, at the very least, it holds back the positive economic and social developments that, over the course of this century, will see nature become chiefly an arena for human pleasure and less a source of raw materials.

Environmentalists have long targeted globalization, which they see as destructive of local cultures and local habitats. As Bailey shows, they have it completely wrong. The emancipation of women, along with increased life expectancy, leads women to have fewer children, especially in wealthier societies. Bailey has a gift for letting the anecdotal illustrate the trend. A Johannesburg taxi driver remonstrates with Bailey for not having children and tells him that whereas his father had 12 children, he has six—but his children have none. Eureka. This is the demographic transition which, Bailey suggests, will see the world’s population peak at 9.6 billion in 50 years’ time and gently decline to 9 billion by the end of the century.

Capitalism and the rule of law are the key drivers of this development, and those countries most open to trade have seen the fastest decline in fertility rates. By contrast, the lawlessness, violence, and economic chaos of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa result in stubbornly high fertility rates. This state of affairs turns conventional environmentalist nostrums on their head. For example, in one of the most cited papers on ecology, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” biologist Garrett Hardin asserted in 1968 that human over-population would necessitate replacing Adam Smith’s invisible hand with government coercion.  But Hardin was theorizing without facts. “Hardin’s fears of a population tragedy of the commons are actually realized when the invisible hand of economic freedom is shackled,” Bailey writes.

One after another, Bailey neatly picks off each “peak everything” fear. Even though commodity prices are now coming off the top of a super-cycle, since 1871, the Economist industrial commodity price index has sunk to around half its value. Thanks to improved energy productivity, in 2007, the U.S. consumed half the energy it would have if energy productivity had remained at its 1970 level. Technology will continue to make more efficient use of resources. 3D printing could reduce materials needs and cost by up to 90 percent.

Bailey makes the crucial distinction between scarcity and shortage. Scarcity exists because human wants are boundless while the resources to satisfy them are limited. Shortages arise when something is not available at any price and when governments intervene to stop markets working properly. According to a survey on water access in major cities in the developing world, poor people pay a multiple of what those connected to the water mains do. How to improve water access for the world’s poor? Privatization. Only 3 percent of the poor in developing countries get their water from private-sector water suppliers, yet even this miniscule percentage has provoked an outcry against a “global water grab” by giant corporations. Bailey notes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is silent on the role of markets and prices in managing water scarcity.

The End of Doom marshals findings from a prodigious survey of scientific papers and other scholarly papers – about 220, by my count, or four for every five pages. But more often than not, Bailey himself provides the most thought-provoking ideas. “Resources are defined by human knowledge and technology,” he writes, which helps explain the fall in commodity prices. “Never do anything for the first time” says all you need to know about the precautionary principle. “History provides us with no models of sustainable development other than democratic capitalism” deftly skewers the 1987 UN Brundtland report and Pope Francis’s recent musings.

Bailey brands Rachel Carson’s cancer chapter in Silent Spring a “stroke of public relations genius,” and he condemns the Nixon administration’s “political” ban on DDT for taking away the most effective way to control malarial mosquitoes. Carson’s unwillingness to fairly balance costs and benefits became the hallmark of the modern environmental movement, which today is busy attacking genetically engineered Golden Rice—even as Vitamin A deficiency causes 1.9 to 2.8 million preventable deaths each year and half a million cases of childhood blindness. As Bailey notes, “environmentalist organizations raise money to support themselves by scaring people.”

Once a climate skeptic, Bailey now sees the balance of evidence pointing to the likelihood that rising temperatures would become a problem by the end of the century. It would be hard to find a more evenly balanced account of the scientific uncertainties of global warming. The prolonged pause or plateau in global temperature is “something of an embarrassment,” Bailey writes, and he quotes a climate scientist cautioning against extrapolating long-term trends from it; but the scientist also concedes that “the inconsistencies we found among the models are a reality check showing we may not know as much as we thought we did.”

The best is saved for last, when Bailey provides a cool antidote to the emotional journey Elizabeth Kolbert took in The Sixth Extinction. With certain exceptions, the IPCC finds “very low” extinction rates during the last several hundred thousand years of climate change. It is a matter of faith, not science, that pristine ecosystems are superior to human-influenced eco-systems. Science, long a tool of environmentalist dogmatists, now shows the ecological notion of the “balance of nature” to be unscientific. In an often high-decibel debate, Bailey’s prose is soft-toned and reasonable.  His is a voice that compels attention—and The End of Doom a book that provokes fresh thinking.

Rupert Darwall is the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History (Quartet, 2013).

I will post additional reviews and some responses later.

First, the good news: The Library Journal reviewed my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century. Now the bad news: The reviewer, Ms. Venessa Hughes of Buffalo, N.Y. hated it. Seeking to understand why Ms. Hughes was so disappointed by my book, let us parse her review (see entire review below) of The End of Doom line by line.

Ms. Hughes writes: Bailey, (science Reason magazine; Ecoscam) in what is sure to be a controversial book, disputes claims that the world has reached peak population, peak oil, and peak land usage. She is surely right that the book is likely to be “controversial” among people who sincerely (but mistakenly) accept the more apocalyptic versions of environmentalism. Although I sadly failed in this regard with Ms. Hughes, I hope that the book will persuade hundreds of thousands of other concerned readers that most global environmental trends are positive with regard to the human future. Let us now turn to the review.

No doubt striving for brevity and a bit of euphonious alliteration, Ms. Hughes writes that the book disputes claims that the world has reached peak population, peak oil, and peak land usage. I am not sure what she means by “disputing” peak population; but what I do show is that world population has not yet peaked but is very likely to do so later in this century. Why? Chiefly because total fertility rates (the number of children a woman bears over the course of her lifetime) have been dropping from 5 per woman in 1970 to around 2.4 today. Factors that lower fertility include female life expectancy greater than 70 years, women becoming more educated, greater access to contraception, falling infant mortality, lessening warfare, economic growth, and urbanization. As I show, all of these factors are moving in positive directions, by which I mean, these are factors that enable people to decide how many children that they really wish to have.

What about peak oil? I explain how economic super-cycles affect the rise and fall of commodities like metals, grains, and yes, crude oil. As the price of oil ascended in the last decade, claims of an impending petroleum famine became strident. For example, in 2006 Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes claimed that peak oil had been reached on Thanksgiving Day 2005 and was warning that falling global oil production would result in “war, famine, pestilence and death.” Using data from, yes, the bogey-companies, BP and ExxonMobil and U.S. government entities like the Energy Information Administration, I show that claims that the world is running out of oil are, well, exaggerated. I am a bit curious just what other sources Ms. Hughes would evidently prefer that I use for data on oil production? In any case oil production did not peak in 2005. That year global daily oil production was 85 million barrels per day, and by last year it had increased to 93 million barrels per day.

In her pursuit of pithy alliteration, Ms. Hughes could have more accurately cited the actual claim I made with regard to global land use trends, that is, humanity is approaching peak farmland. That analysis is based on the research done by Rockefeller University Human Environment Program director Jesse Ausubel and his colleagues that suggest that agricultural productivity is increasing at such a rate, that farmers will abandon fields returning as a low end estimate 146 million hectares by 2060, an area two and a half times that of France or the size of ten Iowas, and possibly much more land.

Let’s examine some more of Ms. Hughes’ sly criticisms of The End of Doom. She writes: Bailey picks apart well-known ideas from leading environmentalists such as Bill McKibben, Lester Brown, and organizations such as, to use the author’s term, the alarmist Worldwatch Institute. Well, yes, I do pick apart the claims made by many leading environmentalists. After all, my book is about global environmental trends. Interestingly, I do agree with McKibben and others that the balance of the scientific evidence suggests that unchecked man-made global warming could become a significant problem. However, I do disagree with McKibben that the way to deal with climate change is become “a nation of careful, small-scale farmers who can adapt to the crazed new world with care and grace, and who don’t do much more damage in the process.” I point out that instead of resorting to subsistence farming, human ingenuity is already well on the way to creating no-carbon energy technologies that will be cheaper than fossil fuels in the next couple of decades.

I do recount Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown’s long history of failed predictions of imminent global famine. Brown, for example, asserted way back in 1963 that “the food problem … may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades.” As recently as 2013 he declared that “the world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity.” An alarmist is defined as “a person who tends to raise alarms, especially without sufficient reason, as by exaggerating dangers or prophesying calamities.” I don’t think that it’s unfair to characterize the views of Brown and the organization he founded as being “alarmist,” but Ms. Hughes evidently disagrees.

Let us turn now to my supposed “vendetta” against Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring. “Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,” declared then Vice-President Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. Since Carson is one of the founders of modern environmentalism, it is surely mandatory that I examine carefully her scientific and intellectual legacy. One of the main themes in Silent Spring is Carson’s worry that using synthetic chemicals, most especially the pesticide DDT, would spark a massive cancer epidemic. She ominously warned, “The full maturing of whatever seeds of malignancy have been sown by these chemicals is yet to come.”

Hughes observes that I scrutinize Carson’s claims in my “chapter challenging the idea that doctors and scientists are battling a cancer epidemic.” Yes, I do. However, in that chapter I cite and celebrate the fact that doctors and scientists are succeeding in their battle against cancer. The five-year survival rates of cancer patients have risen from 50 percent in the 1970s to 68 percent today. What Hughes oddly fails to mention is that I report the really good news that age-adjusted cancer incidence rates have been falling for nearly two decades in the United States. In other words, Carson was dead wrong; exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals has not resulted in a growing cancer epidemic.

With regard to overall cancer risks posed by synthetic chemicals, the American Cancer Society in its 2014 Cancer Facts and Figures report on cancer trends concludes: “Exposure to carcinogenic agents in occupational, community, and other settings is thought to account for a relatively small percentage of cancer deaths—about 4 percent from occupational exposures and 2 percent from environmental pollutants (man-made and naturally occurring).”

Hughes correctly notes, “Bailey claims that the only path to sustainable growth lies in free-market capitalism and that developing countries can cope with climate change better if they increase their means.” It is widely recognized that the development of inclusive political and economic institutions over the past two centuries have significantly alleviated humanity’s natural state of abject poverty for billions of people by generating a virtuous circle of sustained economic growth. If Hughes wants to use “free-market capitalism” as shorthand for such institutions as democratic politics, strong private property rights, the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, freedom of movement, and a free press, so be it.

Poverty equals vulnerability. “Global disaster risk is highly concentrated in poorer countries with weaker governance,” notes the United Nations’ 2009 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. The report further observes, “Wealthier countries have lower risk levels than poorer countries.” The wealth created by economic growth buffers people against the dangers of extreme weather events. So yes, economic growth will help developing countries better cope with whatever perils future climate change may generate.

Next Hughes wounds me deeply when she asserts that the book is “written for a wealthy, Western audience concerned with economic improvement….” Actually, The End of Doom makes a wonderful present for anyone no matter his or her nationality or socioeconomic status. The book is an especially thoughtful gift to celebrate bar and bas mitzvahs, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, Festivus, Christmas, Eid-ul-Fitr, Father’s Day, and Mother’s Day.

Hughes twists her knife further when she observes, “Bailey’s anecdotes, such as a woman choosing between taking an Aspen ski vacation or remodeling her kitchen, may not resonate with some.” Damn. Why didn’t I illustrate the nature of trade-offs using my Prius versus the organic garden example?! In any case, I grateful that Ms. Hughes did not mention that I have orphans polish my monocle daily.*

Finally, Hughes really puzzles me when she recommends the book “for politically right-leaning readers interested in examining environmental issues from all possible angles.” I would think that open-minded left-leaning readers be even more interested in examining environmental issues from all possible angles. 

Verdict: Hughes hated The End of Doom, but you might not. Click here to buy a copy and find out.

Errata: Since I have your attention, this is a good place to correct two errors that have come to light after the book was printed. The first appears in my chapter, “Is the Ark Sinking?” where I write: In 1975, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next thirty years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

As will be clear in the book, I am highly critical of long-time environmental doomster Paul Ehrlich, but the above prediction was actually made by Ehrlich’s sometime collaborator biologist Peter Raven in 1994 in his article "Defining Biodiversity" published in Nature Conservancy. For those who may still be interested in Ehrlich’s prognostications, in June, 2015 he confidently asserted that “without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event.”

In any case, how has Raven’s prediction concerning tropical deforestation fared over the past 20 years? In 1990, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that the rainforest area in the Americas, Africa, and Asia shrank by about 9 percent between 1990 and 2010. Even if the annual high rate of deforestation identified by satellite surveillance earlier this year held steady, it would take about 180 years for 90 percent of the remaining rainforests to disappear.

The second error is more in the nature of a typo. This sentence in my chapter "Can We Cope with the Heat?" currently reads: Between 1901 and 2010, sea level rose at a rate of 1.7 millimeters (0.7 inch) per year, increasing average sea level by 0.19 meters (about 8 inches) over that period. 1.7 millimeters equals 0.067 inch. If the rate had actually been 0.7 inch per year since 1901, sea level would now be more than 6 feet higher than it was 110 years ago. On the other hand, a much-hyped non-peer reviewed study released this week claims that man-made global warming could boost sea level by 10 feet in as little as 50 years.

I regret the errors and they will be corrected in subsequent editions.  

If you happen to be in the Washington, DC area on Thursday, July 23, come to the Cato Institute book event at noon to hear me discuss The End of Doom. Register at the Cato link provided.

*Not really. I don’t wear a monocle.

On July 23, the folks at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC are hosting a luncheon talk by me about my new book, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (St. Martin's Press, July 21). Come listen to what I have to say about the scientific and economic data that strongly point toward an amazing and abundant future, and for your pains Cato will serve you a free lunch. Of course, books will be available for purchase. The talk begins in the Hayek auditorium at 12:00 noon.

From the Cato invitation:

Featuring the author Ronald Bailey, Science Correspondent, Reason magazine; with comments by Indur M. Goklany, Author, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (Cato Institute, 2007); moderated by Marian L. Tupy Senior Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute.

Throughout the past five decades there have been many forecasts of impending environmental doom. These projections have universally been proven wrong. Those who have bet on human resourcefulness, however„ have almost always been correct. In his book, Bailey provides a detailed examination of the theories, studies, and assumptions currently spurring forecasts of calamity and shaping environmental policy. Breaking down the numbers, he finds that — thanks to human ingenuity and economic progress — many current ecological trends are in fact positive. Cancer rates are falling in America, world population will soon be declining, more and more land is being restored to nature, increasing wealth is leading to decreasing pollution, and the cost of clean energy will soon fall below that of fossil fuels. As Bailey demonstrates, the way to cement these trends is not to retreat into a maze of paralyzing regulation but to craft our own future through continuing economic and technological development.

You need to register for the talk and luncheon, so head on over to the Cato event site here, and click the button at the bottom of the page. I look forward to seeing you all.