Posted on 08/27/2002 9:56:24 PM PDT by joyce11111
townhall.com
Jonah Goldberg
August 28, 2002
'Sustainable growth' is not sustainable solution
President Bush's absence at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg has a large fraction of the international environmentalist community mad enough to kick a panda. But, while it may make the rest of the world angry, Bush is doing the right thing. In fact, the world leaders who choose to attend the summit are in all likelihood doing the wrong thing.
Few groups, aside from the Flat-Earthers and fans of Carrot Top, have been more consistently wrong in their basic assumptions and predictions than the sustainable-development crowd.
The philosophical assumption undergirding sustainable growth -economic growth without depletion of natural resources -has a very old pedigree, dating back most famously to the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus, who claimed the world would starve because food production could never keep up with human population growth.
Perhaps the most famous modern Malthusian is Paul Ehrlich, an academic scare-monger who's still cited by the establishment press as a reliable expert. He predicted in 1968 that the "population bomb" would result in the mass starvation of billions of people, including some 65 million Americans by the 1980s.
Of course, Ehrlich, like all Malthusians before and since, was proven laughably wrong. But the idea endures that we must live within our means or die.
Malthusian thinking fails to grasp that human beings are "the ultimate resource," in the words of the late hero Julian Simon, who wrote a book by the same name. Human beings solve problems through creativity and ingenuity.
Take food. Today, humans are producing more food than ever before in history, easily enough to feed the whole world. Indeed, thanks to improved crops and farming techniques, the developed countries of the world actually produce way too much food at prices that are too low.
In America, the political reward for politicians to subsidize unneeded agriculture -i.e. the farm vote -far outweighs the economic or material benefits from propping up superfluous farmers.
Meanwhile, America has abandoned millions of acres of inefficient farmland over the last decade, much of it reverting to the wild, including much of the Great Plains, which is today supporting the largest buffalo population since at least the 1870s. Indeed, the plains states have become so depopulated that the Census Bureau is reclassifying much of the land as "frontier" or simply "vacant." Meanwhile, the East Coast is covered with more forests than it has been in more than a century, largely because we stopped using wood for fuel and construction.
Such trends should make the sustainable-development people happy, not just because we can feed more people, but because technological advances mean fewer precious habitats, like rainforests and grasslands, have to be destroyed to feed hungry mouths around the globe.
But the Johannesburg crowd prefers such things as "organic" crops, which are grown without the aid of biotechnology, modern pesticides and fertilizers. That's fine, except science can find no special benefits to organic food, while there are many obvious drawbacks to inefficiently growing less food on more fertile soil -namely global deforestation and hunger.
But such blinkered thinking is typical of the sustainable-growth people. They say we must live within our means, but they want to determine the means by which we live.
Fossil fuels, they claim, are destroying the Earth's atmosphere, but they reject the use of nuclear energy, which generates no greenhouse gasses. They rightly decry the state of world fisheries, but they don't like modern fish-farming techniques that would alleviate the pressure of overfishing in our oceans, just as domesticating livestock solved the problem of overhunting thousands of years ago.
They bemoan wastefulness, even as they champion recycling, which in the words of John Tierney, writing in The New York Times Magazine a few years ago, "may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."
The true-believers in the Johannesburg crowd have an almost religious faith that Western-oriented capitalism is destructive to the environment, while "indigenous peoples" live in harmony with the natural world.
Alas, this is a dangerous myth. Sure, plenty of environmental horrors have occurred under capitalism, but they have occurred under socialism, monarchies and, yes, even the gentle indigenous peoples of the world. There's a growing consensus among anthropologists and biologists, for example, that Native Americans radically transformed the natural landscape long before Europeans arrived, including helping to drive the woolly mammoth to extinction.
What makes capitalism special is not the problems it creates but its ability to fix them. That's why the United States has cleaner air and water than it has had for generations. President Bush is right not to attend the Johannesburg boondoggle, because if he went he would have to compromise with those who are part of the problem, not the solution.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a TownHall.com member group.
THE SOCIAL AND/OR LEGAL INFRASTRUCTURE NECESSARY FOR THE CREATION AND PROTECTION OF WEALTH!
That's it. That is the only difference between the wealthy nations and the poor nations. If you have a society that says "Rich people are evil, we should kill them and take what they have and give it to the poor people" then you end up with a Zimbabwe or a USSR. If you have a society that says "Police have to pay for their jobs, and then they extort their salaries from the people they encounter during the day" and where the courts are openly and wholeheartedly corrupt then you end up with a nation like Mexico.
It's all really very simple. It's why a seed won't grow if it's left out on a bare rock. Wealth is something that grows from a free society that is governed by just laws. The closer a nation comes to that ideal the wealthier it is.
If you have no respect or regard for private property then you lose the right to cry when nobody has any. 2 - by Billy_bob_bob
THE INTRODUCTION of electricity has caused the "destruction" of cultures in the third world, according the editor of an environmental website. He says "there's a lot of quality to be had in poverty."
"I don't think a lot of electricity is a good thing. It is the fuel that powers a lot of multi-national imagery," said Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute's online journal the Edge...
"...what personal conveniences and self-indulgences are you willing to give up in order to stop destroying the planet?"
...like most U.S. environmentalists, he firmly believes that "the level at which Americans consume is unsustainable." He quotes a recently released World Wildlife Fund statistic: "If the rest of the world consumed at the same rate as the United States we would need three extra planets to exploit."
Smith goes on to declare that poverty is "relative." He explains that "you can't really have poverty unless you have wealthy people on the scene."
...Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, left the group in the 1980s after becoming disillusioned with its radicalism and "eco-imperialist politics." He says of the delegates at the Earth Summit: "They are mainly political activists with not very much actual science background who are using the rhetoric of environmentalism to push agendas that are more political than ecological."
Outside the southern African state's parliament, there was no sign of a planned protest march by pro-democracy activists after police warnings that the demonstration would be crushed. Mugabe said Zimbabwe, in the grips of its worst economic and political crisis since independence from Britain in 1980, was facing "considerable challenges" from what he called "British machinations" and a regional drought.
The economy is in its fourth year of recession with record high inflation and unemployment and a severe food shortage. "Our sovereignty is constantly under attack from the bullying states ... which seek to use their political and economic prowess to achieve global hegemony," Mugabe said. At 78, Mugabe is a left-winger who counts Cuba's Fidel Castro and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi among his foreign allies. Monday, the European Union extended a blacklist of Zimbabwean officials subjected to a visa ban and asset freeze. The move is aimed at piling more pressure on the country whose human rights record it says has deteriorated since Mugabe's re-election in March. ***
Communists rising in Pretoria? Said to be manipulating ruling ANC from behind scenes*** Since 1994, South Africa has moved away from the West and embraced Libya, Cuba, China, Iraq, the PLO and other anti-Western regimes. ………"To the face of the international community, they fly the flag of so-called 'democracy' to attract foreign investment, tourism, NEPAD dollars and politically-correct sympathy," Snow said. "But when Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan come to South Africa and meet with the Marxists here, do you think they are only having a cup of tea? They are formulating their international strategy."
Last week, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande said that there is a possibility that the SACP will take over the ANC "from within," and that the "working class must dominate ANC policy." "The African nationalism of the ANC has always been revolutionary, but it doesn't mean you don't find backwards elements," Nzimande said. He also believes that a coming crisis in the capitalist West will provide an opportunity to further the communist cause.
"A new type of global robber baron is emerging - look at what has been happening with all these companies in the United States," Nzimande told the South African media. "For us [the SACP] this is not a deviation - it's inherent in the system," he said. "The relevance of communist parties worldwide is that they represent an alternative society, an alternative to capitalism. When the Soviet Union collapsed there was a neo-liberal triumphalism that said: it's the end of history, there is one route for countries to develop. But poverty is widening. At our congress we are going to reflect on how we link up with this mass creative expression of anti-capitalist sentiment."***
Lorianne, saw this topic in your "links" page.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/13G53TPHMYK7H/sunkencivilizati
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