Environmentalist Forecasting Model

But DDT is still a good example of environmentalism gone wrong. While indiscriminant use of DDT has awful effects, mostly because of the long lived nature of the molecule and bioacumulation, that doesn’t mean that an outright worldwide ban on DDT use makes sense.

Because of its long lived nature, spraying the interior of a home with DDT will kill mosquitos for over 6 months. No other current generation insecticied can do the same thing, because they are specially enginnered to break down into less harmful chemicals after a short lenght of time.

DDT is cheap, and it works. It needs to be used in a smart way to make sure that its significant side effects don’t cause more harm than good. But that makes it no different than any other chemical, man made or otherwise.

>>We have yet to see a nuclear cloud over a Population center.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? Nuke-you-lehr power plants are not anywhere near as dangerous as the enviro-weenies would have you believe.

Even Chernobyl took some gross incompetance on the part of the Russians to blow up. And, once again, the death and destruction unleashed by Chernobyl was at the low end of what was predicted by the “experts”.

The west was always orders of magnitude more safety conscious that the Russians were. And these days, companies with nuclear power plants are even more safety and quality conscious.

There is no perfectly safe source of energy. Every form of power has its risks. More people have been killed by natural gas pipeline explosions than nuclear power, for example.

What about changes to the weather? Ok – we haven’t had any major disasters yet, but the weather is changing in frightening ways around the world, I think it helps to be a bit paranoid about weather…

>>all their breathless hyperbole was for nought, stupid scientists.

Maybe, maybe not.

I have trouble with “scientists” making “breathless hyperbole”. There is nothing “breathless” about science. Science is a process of rational analysis, the assembling of facts that can be used to make narrow conclusions.

When so called scientists take narrow conclusions and make broad, societywide policy recomendations, I have a problem, if for no other reason than that they have gone beyond their area of expertise.

For example, an atmospheric scientist has no economic policy experience, and is really unqualified to tell us to ban CFCs outright. He can tell us that his research shows that CFCs are leading to ozone loss, and can have an opinion as to what should be done about it. But his expertise in atmospheric science lends no more weight to his policy opinion than, say, my (crackpot) opinion.

I also think that there is a lot more conflict of interest in science than the scientists themselves would lead you to believe. The way to get more government grants is to scream and yell that a crisis is at hand.

Arnold presents a good issue, environmental forecasts do not take into account the ability of humans to make substitutions. There’s a flip side to this problem, often the cost projections of environmental proposals do not take dynamicism into account either.

Over on Asymetrical Info I got into a long discussion over the costs of reducing CO2 emissions. Basically the cost of cutting CO2, say 10%, was computed by looking at GDP today versus GDP of the year when CO2 emissions were 10% lower and calling the difference the cost.

I argued that this is absurd. If for some reason we felt we had to reduce CO2 emission to the level it was in 1980 then one way to do it would be to roll back the clock to 1980. That would indeed cost the difference in GDP between 1980 and today. But that would be the absolute worst way to do it, which means that other methods (i.e. tradable credits, targetted taxes etc.) would have to cost less.

I suggest the response to Arnold’s post should be:

1. What ‘doomsday’ predictions were never based on hard science to begin with?

2. What ‘doomsday’ predictions were averted by real policy changes?

3. What predictions were averted by market forces that were not included in the models that generated the original predictions?

4. What predictions were averted by unexpected events (aka good luck)?

This gets to the point of how we should plan. I have a plan for tomorrow…it will look a lot like today. My plans for the next year or two look a lot like the past year or two. I understand I will have unexpected events but I make an assumption that my life will follow the pattern it has followed in the recent past even though I know it will probably surprise me.

It would be foolish for me to live my life as if I will win the lottery in June or be in total poverty and ill health by September. How should environmentalists build their models then? Is it reasonable to demand that they insert a ‘Human genius will solve this problem’ variable into their equations?

Wouldn’t this defeat the point of a model? Take the Federal Budget. The CBO makes projections based on current policy and does not make assumptions about policy changes…even if they are likely to happen like reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax. IMO the model should give you a good idea where you are heading so you decide if you want to change course..

“Which pessimistic environmentalist predictions have come the closest to being fulfilled?”

Reductions in available fresh water and living topsoil, airborne pollution on every square inch of terrestrial surface, entry into the human food chain of heavy metals and industrial chemicals untested for long-term or synergetic effects, reduction in size of old-growth forests and other original ecosystems, loss of wild species in the remainder due to fragmentation of habitat disallowing replenishment of population, crashing of fish stocks worldwide, acceleration of weather extremes signalling possible approach of a climate discontinuity, corporate control of politics to jigger cost-benefit and risk analyses, etc. etc… All predicted in the Seventies and Eighties.

It might generate a much shorter list to ask, putting aside the timeframes which environmentalists generally did get wrong (and which Bailey is still harping upon, to less and less avail, except to the chowderheads in Congress), which of their predictions are NOT likely to come true.

I will not go into Bailey’s analysis of species extinction rates, which continues an absolute intellectual scandal now grown tiresome. It is disreputable, and in relying upon him you do yourself damage. Read the last dozen articles on the subject in both Science and Nature to get the real story. The idea that it will not harm the survival of humans is most likely true, scientifically trivial, and an enormous religious tragedy. Never mind that God gave dominion over the beasts to man in Chapter One. In Chapter Three, he threw us out, and put a guard at the Gate.

The reliance upon substitution and technological change reveals the economist’s ignorance of scale effects. Mere allocation and distribution will not always suffice cover the analysis. It is entirely possible for our accelerating numbers to outpace creative response to shortages. Any first-year student in population biology understands this. The unexpected slow growth in the present job market gives us a current tiny taste of what will come.

The idea that creativity is or remains linear to population growth is an unexamined canard promulgated by Julian Simon. If it were true, there would be about eight Leonardos walking around, six Shakespeares, three or four Beethovens, maybe two Einsteins. Not! Creativity appears to have little to do with numbers. You can give more people more chainsaws, but they will only cut down more old-growth forests.

As for the absolute predictability of all of this, cool your jets! No complex adaptive (i.e., living) system in the history of science has been successfully predicted, and certainly not on a repeatable basis. Economists can’t even get their own maco model going strong, and it may never be likely. Even with an easier non-living system, Newton thought the three-body problem deterministically intractable, and so it remains without special assumptions. So, perfect deduction of the environmental disaster now in ignition may be impossible. But we can still use induction–check your John Stuart Mill–and a little common sense, as your mother knew.

Some of the things might be addressed with economic policy. But you should try wrangling with the fishing industry. Other things ought be addressed with simple criminal laws, to save the rest of us a lot of transaction costs, and consonant with the many results in experimental economics that altruism works, as long as everyone is on the same page. The tragedy of the commons demonstrates that much of the commons should be considered as a public good, and take it out of the market system. The literature shows no evidence that assigning property rights will end exploitation of a public good, such as an old growth forest. Indeed both theory and evidence show the opposite. Indeed the Bush Administration is allowing cutting in the Tongass! These people should use their God-given entrepreneurial creativity to find another way to make a buck. Also, trade policies ignore and accelerate the terrible tragedies of oldgrowth clearcutting elsewhere in the world. People lived throughout history without the destruction now going on. Blaming it solely on population pressure is a misconstruction from theory. The evidence is that economic growth solves some environmental problems, and exascerbates others. A large reality is corporate rapacity, hiding behind selective microeconomics.

The question was, which environmentalist predictions have come the closest to being fulfilled. The answer is, almost all of them–if you allow for the fact that the time frames were way off, due to the fact that complex systems are mathematically nearly intractable.

Eric, no doubt you’re right that many environmentalists have taken the cloak of religious certitude, much as the economists did on the topic of rational self-interest.

The problem is I think one of having experience with the theories and realities of complex adaptive systems. There is little meaning to the phrase “statistical likelihood” with most, perhaps all, of these systems. They have so many connections, they are essentially incalculate. So if things are going one way, it is a good guess that it will continue.

This is because complex systems follow path dependence (as we each do in our own lives everyday, without stopping to calculate the probabilities), so the past is something of the prologue.

If you talk to community biologists (i.e. ecologists), they are frightened about what is happening. They actually study how soil, plants, animals, and biogeochemicals interact.

And by the way, they see that most of the species extinctions have occured on land where the property rights had been long ago assigned! The subject and practice of economics, for its many great achievements, has done us a disfavor in this regard. Its answer to incalculate complex systems is to disregard all the connections that aren’t about human wealth-getting.

The problem isn’t rationality, it’s rationality restricted to deductive reasoning only, for policy purposes. But no one actually runs his or her life this way.

The worst depredations upon the environment, give or take a few, have all been inflicted in the last twenty-five years–the duration in which markets have gotten freer in the U.S., and the population explosion globally has been regarded a surmountable triviality. Most people do not know that there are 90% less songbirds everywhere than there were a hundred years ago, nor do they have the memory that half of that decline has taken place in twenty-five years. It is continuing. The blindness is almost breathtaking.

Air and water quality have improved over the last 35 or so years almost entirely due to command and control policies, with penalties. And that’s only point-source air pollution–non-point source is worse. Meanwhile almost all rivers, lakes and streams are still polluted–do not drink from them!

Pollution permit trading has had mixed results so far. It has reduced point-source pollution and increased allocative efficiency, but monitoring and enforcements costs are the same or higher, dirty plants become more concentrated, market power can prevent entry of cleaner plants, and the whole system is controlled by corporations with an incentive to fraud, politically aided and abetted by the government.

For example: Bush has RELAXED the standard on mercury emissions, which bioconcentrate in aquatic life (high levels are now found in almost all fish and seafood, which testing, by the way, is as paltry as mad-cow testing. Be careful what you eat–it probably has NOT been tested!) Meanwhile the EPA and the Journal of Pediatrics both released studies this week showing the present mercury levels put one in six children at immediate risk for irreversible brain damage, to some degree, and lack of control of heart-rate.

Of course mercury in the air is invisible, so people just don’t see the degradation. And they just don’t know that childhood autism rates have been skyrocketing. (Ask any doctor.) And learning disabilities. And allergies to chemicals. And asthma…

Perhaps someone will say, “But mercury just hasn’t been connected to these things, so it must be something else, so we have to wait for the risk analyses (run by corporate scientists sworn to non-disclosure), and anyhow I feel just fine!…” And once again economists will prove their own worth by calculating allocative efficiency by disregarding the unknowns and unknowables.

Or perhaps not. Vernon Smith got the economics Nobel last year by the introduction of “ecological rationality” into the discussion. It’s about 35 years too late, but still… Perhaps the economists will be right after all, once they study ecology!

Eric, you appear to confuse allocative and technological efficiency. But it doesn’t matter–NEITHER of them NECESSARILY leads to less pollution! That was compelled by a society-wide mandate.

Meanwhile the idea that science should distinguish the different compounds of mercury and their effects is of course true. But the idea that science MUST BE RESTRICTED to rational analysis to make “narrow conclusions” is NONSENSE–you should study the science of complex systems! That study is quite large and advanced. (It is the place where part of economics itself must go.) That will lead you to, among other things, the precautionary principle. And you will find out that, among other things, it need not lead to economic or technical inefficiency.

With that said, I was happy to see Bush recently provide funding for more FUSION research. I think nuclear fusion is absolutely the way to go. Fission for me is a nonstarter—unless the federal government removed the ridiculously low cap on liability. Which would probably, by throwing it to the free market, prevent any more fission plants from being built!