From an article in Slate magazine...not a magazine known for its sympathy to conservative or libertarian viewpoints. Several interesting points 1. Recycling is foolish. Consider recycling, which is often just a feel-good gesture with little environmental benefit and significant cost. Paper, for example, typically comes from sustainable forests, not rainforests. The processing and government subsidies associated with recycling yield lower-quality paper to save a resource that is not threatened. 2. Organic food is not environmentally friendly Indeed, reliance solely on organic farming—a movement inspired by the pesticide fear—would cost more than $100 billion annually in the U.S. At 16 percent lower efficiency, current output would require another 65 million acres of farmland—an area more than half the size of California. Higher prices would reduce consumption of fruits and vegetables, causing myriad adverse health effects (including tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths per year). 3. A discussion of the utter wrongness of the book "The Limits to Growth" that was published in the early 1970s. That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc. 4. Solution to our biggest problem - Economic Growth and an increased trade. The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost 1 billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life. The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 18:33:49 +0000
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