An Alternative View of ESI
I know I'm wasting my time but hey it's my time. As is typical of some this report is posted as if it were some sort of gospel. It doesn't even given any information as to how the index is calculated which is bad form but typical. Here's an article that basically states that the ESI is bunk. An excerpt:
But the premises of IPAT are demonstrably false. Economists have found that for almost all pollutants, environmental quality will worsen with economic growth until per capita income reaches $3,000-$9,000 (depending on the pollutant), at which point environmental quality will improve with further growth. Technology can cut either for or against the environment, but environmental improvements in the 20th century suggest that "for" is much likelier. Population has proven no constraint on environmental quality.
Greens, however, will hold on to the IPAT formula like grim death. A typical result is the "Environmental Sustainability Index," devised by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Yale and Columbia universities. This index ranks each nation's "sustainability" according to 68 metrics -- fewer than half of which have any bearing on environmental quality or resource availability. Typical questions include: How many cars are in circulation? How many agricultural chemicals are employed? How much seafood do people eat? How many organized environmental groups are there, and how large are their memberships? How willing are domestic companies to join international environmental coalitions? How much land does the government own? How many international treaties has it signed?
The results are bizarre. If we posit that a more sustainable country is preferable to a less sustainable country, then Americans (living in a country with an "environmental sustainability index" of 53.2) ought to be clamoring to move to Botswana (61.8), Slovenia (58.8), Albania (57.9), Paraguay (57.8), Namibia (57.4), Laos (56.2), Gabon (54.9), Armenia (54.8), Moldova (54.5), Congo (54.3), Mongolia (54.2), or even the Central African Republic (54.1).
This study that is purported to be the end all regarding whose damaging the environment seems like another BS UN study.
Greeniacs in Jo-burg: The U.N.'s latest 'earth summit'
Greeniacs in Jo-burg: The U.N.'s latest 'earth summit'.
National Review, Sept 16, 2002, by Jerry Taylor
'A great tragedy is fast unfolding," intones Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and one of the most respected figures in American environmentalism. "More than 20 years ago the alarm was sounded regarding threats to the global environment, but the environmental deterioration that stirred the international community then continues essentially unabated today." Population growth, affluence, and technology, Speth warns, are pushing us toward "a swift and appalling deterioration of the natural world. Only a response that in historical terms would be seen as revolutionary is likely to avert these changes."
As we prepare for the latest U.N. environmental carnival -- the "World Summit on Sustainable Development," to be held in Johannesburg over our Labor Day weekend -- despair is indeed warranted. No, not despair over the state of the planet. Despair over the state of the world's intellectual elite.
"Sustainable development" is widely defined as "that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It's essentially a call to maximize human welfare over time, although people seldom think of it this way. That's what economics is all about: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations could fairly be called the world's first blueprint for sustainable development. Sustainable development, that is to say, is in the eye of the beholder.
There are some, of course, who would urge us to avoid any deterioration of the natural resource base. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Is the world really a poorer place because past generations drew down stocks of oil, iron, and various other minerals and metals to make advanced satellites, modern industry, and -- through the wealth created thereby -- advanced medicines and hundreds of other life-enhancing technologies?
Other environmentalists allow that we must use some resources, but call for us to leave them above a minimum critical level and to pass down the wealth generated by resource use to future generations, who would otherwise be "robbed" of their rightful inheritance.
But consider: If the only way we could have preserved the American bison beyond a "minimum critical level" was by leaving the Great Plains largely untouched by agriculture, would the sacrifice of what was to become the world's most productive cropland been in either the economic or the social interest of future generations? Issued without due consideration of both costs and benefits, the admonition is anti-human.
Moreover, the claim that the proceeds of resource use must be preserved for future generations is redundant at best. Since all wealth is eventually inherited, there is simply no need for a special, state- supervised "account" to be established for the benefit of those to come.
Indeed, the radical improvements in standard of living, life expectancy, and resource availability attained by each succeeding generation since the Industrial Revolution show that we don't need the Greens to watch over our children. You can look it up: Agricultural production continues to outpace population growth. Global forests are on net expanding, not contracting. Resources of almost all kinds -- petroleum, natural gas, minerals, and foodstuffs -- are becoming more abundant no matter how one chooses to measure them. Air and water quality in the most advanced industrial nations is improving at a truly jaw-dropping pace, while improvements in even the poorest of the world's nations are demonstrably tied to levels of per capita income. The future, moreover, is even sunnier than the present. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculates that, given trends in agricultural productivity, an area the size of the Amazon basin will likely be returned to nature by 2070. Innovations in timber harvesting suggest that 10 percent of the world's forests will produce all our commercial needs by 2050. Advances in fisheries management promise a boom in marine productivity and a corresponding recovery of commercially valuable fish stocks. Growth in per capita income will improve the quality of both our air and our water. Man's "footprint" on the planet is becoming both softer and smaller.
Yet the Green mentality seems impervious to such facts, no matter how high the data are piled. My late colleague Julian Simon demonstrated this quite nicely at a forum some years ago. He began by asking, "How many of you think that pollution is in general getting worse and that resources are on the brink of exhaustion?" Nearly every hand in the audience went up. Then he asked, "What sort of evidence would you need to change your opinion?" No hands. "Is there anything that could change your mind -- anything at all?" Again, nothing. "Well," he said, "let me apologize then. I'm not dressed for church."
If the data are so clearly pointing in the right direction, what are we to make of the various stylized sustainability indices, regularly trotted out by the media, suggesting that doom is around the corner? In a word, they're cooked.
Consider the "IPAT Identity." Introduced by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, it postulates that Environmental Impact (I) = Population (P) x Affluence (A) x Technology (T).
But the premises of IPAT are demonstrably false. Economists have found that for almost all pollutants, environmental quality will worsen with economic growth until per capita income reaches $3,000-$9,000 (depending on the pollutant), at which point environmental quality will improve with further growth. Technology can cut either for or against the environment, but environmental improvements in the 20th century suggest that "for" is much likelier. Population has proven no constraint on environmental quality.
Greens, however, will hold on to the IPAT formula like grim death. A typical result is the "Environmental Sustainability Index," devised by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Yale and Columbia universities. This index ranks each nation's "sustainability" according to 68 metrics -- fewer than half of which have any bearing on environmental quality or resource availability. Typical questions include: How many cars are in circulation? How many agricultural chemicals are employed? How much seafood do people eat? How many organized environmental groups are there, and how large are their memberships? How willing are domestic companies to join international environmental coalitions? How much land does the government own? How many international treaties has it signed?
The results are bizarre. If we posit that a more sustainable country is preferable to a less sustainable country, then Americans (living in a country with an "environmental sustainability index" of 53.2) ought to be clamoring to move to Botswana (61.8), Slovenia (58.8), Albania (57.9), Paraguay (57.8), Namibia (57.4), Laos (56.2), Gabon (54.9), Armenia (54.8), Moldova (54.5), Congo (54.3), Mongolia (54.2), or even the Central African Republic (54.1).
Other studies purport to measure our "ecological footprint" by assessing mankind's total demand on the planet against the supply of resources the planet has to provide. The World Wildlife Fund recently reported, for instance, that we are harvesting 20 percent more of the planet's resources than can be regenerated in a year and that we'll need to colonize two additional planets by 2050 if this continues. The media, predictably, went wild.
But if resources are indeed becoming scarce, shouldn't prices for those resources be going up? In fact, they're going down.
The study warns in particular that the amount of land we need to produce energy has doubled over 40 years -- hence the dramatic warning that space colonization is necessary unless we cease and desist.
What the authors calculated, however, was not how much land was being used to produce oil, gas, and coal (which is, in fact, trivial), but how much forestland was necessary to absorb the carbon dioxide generated by fossil-fuel consumption. Only by the wildest stretch of the imagination can one discern a human "footprint" on the wild and uninhabited forests that suck up carbon dioxide. If anything, those emissions are contributing to forest health by fertilizing them mightily -- an argument that has been convincingly made by Sylvan Wittwer, former chairman of the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture. Moreover, this human "use" of forests as carbon sinks does not preclude any other ecological or economic use of forestland resources.
Why do otherwise intelligent and well-educated people rush to crowd the pews in Johannesburg? For the same reason that otherwise intelligent and well-educated scientists in the Islamic world publish papers in peer-reviewed journals describing technologies to harness energy from Koranic djinni. Both are gripped by religious fervor, and scientific facts get left by the way.
COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc.
HeeHaw
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