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Bad News About Energy Is Not Based On Facts

Ross Kaminsky - 5/13/2005

Bad news sells. It's obvious from watching television news or reading newspapers, including the Daily Camera giving two separate articles to one pessimistic book, James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency", continues the trend. Modern history has been full of doom-and-gloomers who are proven wrong time and time again.

In his 1798 treatise "An Essay on the Principle of Population", Thomas Malthus predicted that because human have insatiable desires for sex and food, exponential population growth combined with slower food production growth would lead to societal misery. The only certain ways population will be kept in check are through war and disease. Less certain but just as desirable for Malthus was somehow to find a way to keep poor people from having so many children.

Quoting Malthus: "This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature."

Malthus explicitly ignores the possibility of much greater efficiency in food production and of changes in birth rates, particularly as societies become wealthier.

Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich has become the modern equivalent of Malthus with the unfortunate difference that at least Malthus spent much of his career examining whether he might be wrong rather than simply making more and more outlandish claims.

Some of Ehrlich's well-known predictions include:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (1968)
"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)

Typical of radical environmentalists, Ehrlich's true anti-capitalist motivations showed through in such statements as "We've had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." Pronouncements like this, and like Kunstler's apparent wish that we revert to a non-industrial micro-agriculture economy would make Mao or the Khmer Rouge proud.

James Howard Kunstler appears to be following Malthus and Erlich as role models despite the fact that they are best known for their errors. If history judges writings based on originality as well as accuracy Kunstler's book will end up as a minor footnote alongside more spectacular failures of his predecessors.

Environmental and energy scare-mongers talk a lot about the lack of new oil discoveries. What they don't tell you is that despite our increasing oil use and production, proven reserves continue to rise because we get better at extracting oil from previously discovered sites.

What they also don't tell you is that our economy continually increases its energy efficiency. In a 1991 study, the National Center for Policy Analysis concludes that "in the United States, the amount of energy needed to produce a dollar of GNP (in real terms) has been declining steadily at a rate of 1 percent per year since 1929." In their informative book "It's Getting Better All The Time", Stephen Moore and Julian Simon note that "Energy efficiency continued to surge so much in the 1990s that today almost twice as much output is produced per unit of energy as was produced in the first half of the century."

Kunstler's suggestion that alternative fuel sources will not be developed because of the cost in oil to do so assumes what all his mistaken predecessors assume, namely that nothing changes in technology. Arguing that our costs of oil production will not decline or that we will not produce windmills or solar panels because they are dependent on oil ignores decades of history as well as common sense.

Since Kunstler is probably not stupid, one must conclude that his motivation is anti-development and anti-capitalist and that he has written a book to try to justify this position. In other words, he finds arguments to fit his pre-determined conclusion rather than developing a conclusion by examining facts.

Moore and Simon's book uses hard data to lay out the case that not only do we live in the most prosperous, healthiest, freest, and cleanest time in human history, but that from our economy to our environment, improvement trends continue…though only in free societies. Unfortunately, the book is not frightening enough to sell as well as Erlich's fact-free tomes which, like Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" should be filed in the fiction section of the bookstore.