More Gloom ... for Apocaholics

The Malthusians of the world are always right until they’re wrong. They’ll warn of impending resource depletion until they’re blue in the face, but time and again human ingenuity (and natural providence) has made fools of them. We’ve seen two welcome new examples of Gaia’s riches this week—what’ll we find next?

So concludes an article at The American Interest. (h/t Instapundit)  It mentions:

 As one of the researchers put it, “[t]here’s a lot more fresh groundwater in California than people know.” The breakthrough here involved searching for water deeper underground than aquifers designated for human consumption typically lie.

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Halfway across the world a different group of scientists employing a novel new detection technique found an enormous new supply of helium gas—an increasingly scarce element that’s critically important for advanced scientific research and medical technologies—in Tanzania. The University of Oxford reports:

[A] research group from Oxford and Durham universities, working with Norway-headquartered helium exploration company Helium One, has developed a brand new exploration approach. The first use of this method has resulted in the discovery of a world-class helium gas field in Tanzania. […]

...
 

Helium prices have quintupled since 2000 as supplies have started to dwindle. You can understand, then, why this discovery is being described as a “game changer,” and not just for the fact of this specific supply alone, either: this was the first place these scientists employed their new surveying technique. They’re batting 1.000, and could now apply this technique in areas with similar geology in different parts of the world.

The Apocaholics, control freaks and statists of varying stripes just never learn...

Apocaholic

Recently I was reading this post at Rich Karlgaards' blog and it linked to this absolute gem. If you have even a little bit of curiosity about the world you'll find the linked to item very revealing. When trying to make sense of things you can study theory, relevant data and history. This can be done in different fields with different perspectives all trained upon the matter of interest. Some people narrow their focus and get trapped by the dark side before they can acquire a broader perspective. People who do this again and again are Apocaholics.

Hi, I’m Gary and I’m a recovering Apocaholic. I am currently Apocalypse free for nearly 18 years. I left the church of the Religious Apocalypse in 1976, over 30 years ago, and I resigned from the secular church of the Financial Apocalypse in 1989. Yes, I still feel the urge to proclaim the end of all things, from time to time, but I white-knuckle my way to a history book for a little perspective, and then I breathe easier. If you wish to join AA, the only requirement is that you give up the adrenaline rush of media-fed fantasies.

Here is a sampling:

We’ve now gone over 61 years without using nuclear bombs against humans – thank God. Back in the late 1960s, Herman Kahn wrote “On Thermonuclear War” and “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in which he demonstrated that we can survive a nuclear holocaust, but that didn’t seem likely in 1962:

I wrote other articles supporting the ban in DDT, which I am ashamed to say, has caused the deaths of millions of Asians and Africans since then. Many insect-borne diseases were on the verge of extinction in 1970, when the U.S. tied foreign aid to poor nations to their “voluntary” banning of DDT, to our great shame.

Then came Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), in which he opened famously by saying, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The famine/population fear is older than Malthus. Confucius thought the earth was full, 2500 years ago. Romans thought they had “worn out the earth.” St. Jerome said “the world is already full, and the population too large for the soil.” Tertullian wailed about “teeming populations of Carthage” with “numbers burdensome to the world.” He saw death from famine, war and disease as “the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.” In truth, Rome was rich when it was crowded, and a wasteland when it was empty.

In the early 1970s, Garner Ted Armstrong pulled me aside and gave me a challenging new project, which might take years to finish. He said that all the globe’s trends are getting worse, and that if we could only “feed all these trends into a computer,” we could predict the precise time of the end.
They fed all the same kind of data into Harvard’s massive mainframe and came out with their magnum opus, “Limits to Growth,” modeling the future consequences of growing world population and finite resources.

Shortages beget higher prices and more exploration, not depletion of resources. In the extreme cases, shortages create new technologies. A wood shortage in England in the early 17^th Century led to the use of coal and the birth of the industrial revolution. A shortage of whales led to the use and discovery of petroleum, and electrical lighting. The stench of horse manure in urban streets led to the invention of the horseless carriage.

One example was Newsweek, for the week of April 28, 1975. It said that leading climate scientists were “almost unanimous” (sound familiar?) in their predictions of global cooling. Time Magazine had “The Coming Ice Age” on its cover, and the November 1976 issue of National Geographic had a lead article on the problem of global cooling.

In the 1970s alone, all of this was “Coming…”

* The Coming Dollar Devaluation (1970) by Harry Browne
* The Coming Dark Age (1971) by Roberto Vacca
* The Coming Credit Collapse (1974), by Alexander Paris
* The Coming Bad Years (1978), but Howard Ruff
* The Coming Real Estate Crash (1979) by English and Cardiff

The #1 Best-seller in 1987 was Dr. Ravi Batra’s “The Great Depression of 1990.” Dr. Batra turned out to be right on his timing, but wrong on his geography. Japan suffered a decade-long Great Depression in the 1990s, but according to Batra and others, Japan was the last place this could happen. Many other best-sellers of 1987 were proclaiming the superiority of the Japanese management system, Japan’s work ethic, its currency, its wealth and ability to “buy up American assets” from Hawaiian hotels to Hollywood studios. (As it turned out, Japan only knew how to pay way too much for those assets.)

I remember this last book well and was under its' sway for awhile. When I woke up and got over being so foolish my efforts to better understand the world shifted into high gear. My depth and breadth of knowledge and critical thinking skills thereby improved dramatically.

Having gained a new perspective from all of the past misperceptions, Mr. Alexander makes this prediction:

For my grandchildren’s generation, I look for another 75-fold gain in the next 60 years, despite threats from Global Warming, the Housing Crisis, the Triple Deficits in America, and anything else Doomsday prophets dream up in the future. I have been inoculated against such fears. Please join me in abandoning the siren song of the Prophets of Doom.

There will always be challenges and difficulties to overcome. I would be especially concerned about self-inflicted wounds from people trying to fix problems which aren't really problems. There is no sainted savior here on earth who can know what will happen. Do not be seduced by their promise to save us if we only follow their prescription. People living in freedom with a culture and institutions which support innovation and adaptation can always find a way!

There you go again

Historically, natural resources have been subject to long periods of chronic scarcity or abundance with prices rising and then falling back towards their cost of production for extended periods of time. The bullish phases have typically lasted 15 to 25 years until supply finally overtakes demand again. This adjustment usually entails some combination of greater production, more efficient usage and/or creation of a substitute. Countries which are large net exporters of natural resources will seem to have an economic wind at their backs during the bullish phase (think Russia, Brazil and Australia) and more of an economic headwind during the bearish phase. Note also that the magnitude of the price swings and the difficulty of adjustment can be exacerbated by bad economic policy.

This Malthusian redux appeared recently, although in fairness, the authors are not quite full-blown apocaholics.

Now and then across the centuries, powerful voices have warned that human activity would overwhelm the earth's resources. The Cassandras always proved wrong. Each time, there were new resources to discover, new technologies to propel grow.

Today the old fears are back.

Although a Malthusian catastrophe is not at hand, the resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank's famous book, "The Limits of Growth." Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities -- some of which have set record highs this month -- are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.

As the world grows more populous -- the United Nations projects eight billion people by 2025, up from 6.6 billion today -- it also is growing more prosperous. The average person is consuming more food, water, metal and power. Growing numbers of China's 1.3 billion people and India's 1.1 billion are stepping up to the middle class, adopting the high-protein diets, gasoline-fueled transport and electric gadgets that developed nations enjoy.

The result is that demand for resources has soared. If supplies don't keep pace, prices are likely to climb further, economic growth in rich and poor nations alike could suffer, and some fear violent conflicts could ensue.

In the past, economic forces spurred solutions. Scarcity of resource led to higher prices, and higher prices eventually led to conservation and innovation. Whale oil was a popular source of lighting in the 19th century. Prices soared in the middle of the century, and people sought other ways to fuel lamps. In 1846, Abraham Gesner began developing kerosene, a cleaner-burning alternative. By the end of the century, whale oil cost less than it did in 1831.

A similar pattern could unfold again. But economic forces alone may not be able to fix the problems this time around. Societies as different as the U.S. and China face stiff political resistance to boosting water prices to encourage efficient use, particularly from farmers. When resources such as water are shared across borders, establishing a pricing framework can be thorny. And in many developing nations, food-subsidy programs make it less likely that rising prices will spur change.

Indeed, the true lesson of Thomas Malthus, an English economist who died in 1834, isn't that the world is doomed, but that preservation of human life requires analysis and then tough action. Given the history of England, with its plagues and famines, Malthus had good cause to wonder if society was "condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery." That he was able to analyze that "perpetual oscillation" set him and his time apart from England's past. And that capacity to understand and respond meant that the world was less Malthusian thereafter.

Political responses can alter rules and institutional arrangements so as to facilitate the adjustment by consumers and producers or they can make things worse, particularly by trying to choose the solutions. (Think ethanol from corn...)

I suspect that many people haven't met The Doomslayer.

This is the litany : Our resources are running out. The air is bad, the water worse. The planet's species are dying off - more exactly, we're killing them -at the staggering rate of 100,000 per year, a figure that works out to almost 2,000 species per week, 300 per day, 10 per hour, another dead species every six minutes.We're trashing the planet, washing away the topsoil, paving over our farmlands, systematically deforesting our wildernesses, decimating the biota, and ultimately killing ourselves.

The world is getting progressively poorer, and it's all because of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There's a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our small and fragile tiny planet, and we're fast approaching its ultimate carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we're living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable. Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty, famine, starvation, and death.

Time is short, and we have to act now.

That's the standard and canonical litany. It's been drilled into our heads so far and so forcefully that to hear it yet once more is ... well, it's almost reassuring. It's comforting, oddly consoling - at least we're face to face with the enemies: consumption, population, mindless growth. And we know the solution: cut back, contract, make do with less. "Live simply so that others may simply live."

There's just one problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is false. Incorrect. At variance with the truth.

"Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way," he says. "Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.

Julian Simon: The facts are fundamental.

Garrett Hardin: The facts are not fundamental. The theory is fundamental. - from a 1982 debate with the UC Santa Barbara biologist The doomslayer-doomsayer debate, Simon thinks, is an opposition between fact and bad theory, a case of empirical reality versus abstract principles that purport to define the way things work but don't.

"It's the difference," he says, "between a speculative analysis of what must happen versus my empirical analysis of what has happened over the long sweep of history."

The paradox is that those abstract principles and speculative analyses seem so very logical and believable, whereas the facts themselves, the story of what has happened, appear wholly illogical and impossible to explain. After all, people are fruitful and they multiply but the stores of raw materials in the earth's crust certainly don't, so how can it be possible that, as the world's population doubles, the price of raw materials is cut in half?

It makes no sense. Yet it has happened. So there must be an explanation.

And there is: resources, for the most part, don't grow on trees. People produce them, they create them, whether it be food, factories, machines, new technologies, or stockpiles of mined, refined, and purified raw materials.

"Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," says Simon. "Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."

The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. "These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people - the imaginative and creative."

As for the future, "This is my long-run forecast in brief," says Simon. "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards.

"I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse."

Eventually the current bullish phase for natural resources will end, although not without more predictions of doom, and those familiar with the ideas of the doomslayer will smile.

See also videos of Julian Simon.

Vastly Underappreciated

As I emphasized in this post, innovation and adaptation are keys to good long term economic performance. Reuven Brenner described this as the commercialization of novelty.

To conclude, the broadest historical evidence suggests that prosperity would be
hindered less if governments just created the institutions that make it possible for entrepreneurship and financial markets to flourish. We can be confident that the idea that governments can frequently do more than that is a consequence of government-subsidized myth creation.

One of the great contributors to his fellow man, much to the chagrin of apocaholics, is Norman Borlaug. See here and here:

The reversal of the Mexican crop disaster was an early tiding of the Green Revolution. Over the next 30 years, Dr. Borlaug devoted himself to the undeveloped world, undoing crop failure in India and Pakistan, and rescuing rice in the Philippines, Indonesia and China. He has arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.

Dr. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, yet his name remains largely unknown. Today, at age 93, he receives the Congressional Gold Medal. Perhaps it will secure the fame he merits but never pursued. Then again, perhaps not. While Dr. Borlaug was expanding human possibility, his critics -- who held humanity to be profligate and the Earth's resources finite -- were receiving all the attention. They still are.

As anti-development environmentalists preach the gospel of limits and state coercion, here is a question worth asking: How many millions of people might have perished had Norman Borlaug heeded their teachings?

As a reader at Instapundit points out:

Gregg Easterbrook has it half right about why Norman Borlaug is ignored by the press. It's not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It's that Mr. Borlaug didn't serve the poor by giving away other people's money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

You won't see any accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.

Not standing in the way is very helpful. Appreciating the great benefits to the masses rather than bemoaning such innovation is even better.