Ronald Bailey on the End of Doom
2015-08-27 · Guest: Ronald Bailey (Science correspondent for Reason magazine) · 52:29
Environmental renewal and the end of doom
Bob Zadek interviews Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine, about his book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. They discuss how environmental movements often rely on fear-based predictions of scarcity and catastrophe—such as overpopulation, peak oil, and cancer epidemics—that have consistently failed to materialize due to human ingenuity and market forces.
Topics: Environmentalism, Scarcity, Market Economics, Peak Oil, Cancer Trends, Overpopulation, Climate Change, Fracking, GMOs, Endangered Species Act
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Ronald Bailey: Science Correspondent for Reason magazine and author
- Caller (Linda): Listener from Marin County
- Caller (Mike): Listener from San Francisco
- Caller (Alan): Listener from Berkeley
The Peddling of Fear [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM. We are the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend, proudly the show of ideas, not attitude. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation at any time. This is the only live libertarian radio show on the air until tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening.
Leaders in our world have always trafficked in fear, doom, despair. They understand, whether they are religious leaders, political leaders, or whatever—these leaders understand that if they can instill fear in the population, make the population so afraid they don’t know where to turn, then these leaders present themselves as the alternative, as the protection against whatever fear they are selling. The flocks will come. Doom, fear, damnation, burning in hell have always worked very, very well for those leaders and are a wonderful substitute for rational discussion.
How nice it would be if all of us, all citizens of our planet, could be freed once and for all, once and for all free of doom, despair, and guilt. Well, lucky you tuned in because for the next hour, you will become free of doom thanks to my guest, Ron Bailey. Ron is the science correspondent for my super very favorite magazine, Reason magazine. Reason is published by the Reason Foundation. They are the show of free minds, they are the magazine and the institution of free minds and free markets. Ron is the science correspondent, and Ron has just written a very, very important book, a book which is freeing to all of us, called The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. In this book, Ron undoes most of the, if not all of the, environmental myths that are presented to us as a way to influence our political and economic lives. Ron, thanks so much for joining me this morning.
Ronald Bailey: I’m delighted to be with you. Thank you.
The Origins of Environmental Alarmism [04:02]
Bob Zadek: Now, Ron, the environmental movement and those who seek to influence worldwide economic decisions, they have for quite some time, of course, trafficked in doom. It goes back to Malthus, overpopulation, the cancer scare of Rachel Carson—we’ll get into that—the fear of running out of this, running out of that, running out of whatever. You have finally offered a counterweight to those fear-mongers with your book, The End of Doom. Please tell us the premise of the book and what you have learned in writing it.
Ronald Bailey: Well, years ago—and let me tell a little bit of a story about this—is that when I was in school back in the 1970s, I was taught and read and believed all of the leading books of the time, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome, for example, and also The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. And I actually thought, well, these people have outlined my future, which is going to be terrible and short.
So, 20 years later, I was working as a staff writer at Forbes magazine, and I noticed that we were still here. And in fact, things were better, not worse. And so I decided to reread the books and go and talk to all these folks, if they were still alive. So I interviewed Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, who in 1968 said hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in the 1970s despite any crash programs embarked upon now. That didn’t happen. So I called him up and said, “Paul, what happened?” And my thought was that he would say, “Oh, well, I got—I was wrong.” And instead, what he said was, “I got my timing wrong. The famines are going to—and I tell you, this is what he told me, this is back in 1990—he said, “The famines are going to happen between 2000 and 2010. I got my timing wrong.” Well, they still haven’t happened.
I went and visited the folks at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had done The Limits to Growth, and they have a nice little table in the middle of that book published in 1972 where they basically said we’d be completely out of oil, natural gas, tin, zinc, a whole bunch of other minerals by the year 2000. And I sat down, spent the whole day with them, and finally one of them said, “Look, we perhaps overemphasized the material resources side.”
So what ultimately occurred to me is that environmentalism isn’t really about science. It is about a particular worldview, and that worldview is that humanity is about to run off a cliff, and if you don’t do what we say, the end of the world will occur. And what they say is essentially we need top-down centralized government to save us from ourselves. It turns out that they’re wrong.
Bob Zadek: So this is a political movement dressed up in a faux scientific environmental movement.
Ronald Bailey: I think that’s right.
Scarcity vs. Human Ingenuity [06:52]
Bob Zadek: And now, the environmentalists, they pedal scarcity, whether it’s running out of water, running out of petroleum, running out of food, running out of space. They pedal scarcity, and what they fail to recognize is that water, petroleum, all other stuff of life—the danger is not really running out of it, but as we say in California with the faux drought, it’s not running out of water, it’s running out of free water. Any commodity is available at a price, which means this is all about the functioning of the market, not about physically running out of anything.
Ronald Bailey: Right. Now, with regard to water—and I know California’s having a problem with that—as one of the analysts that I quote in the book points out, he says, “Look, God can make a drought, but only humans can make a shortage.” And that’s the problem. If you have free water, you will run out of it. If you have free anything, you will run out of it. And the point is to make sure that whatever is valuable gets valued and that we can put it into the marketplace and understand its costs and its benefits to people. So you’re absolutely right about that.
And you know, one of the things that I don’t know if your listeners will recall this, I suspect that they will, but in the around 2005 or so forth, we were again going to run out of oil, right? We were at peak oil. And one of my favorite lines is from a geologist who published a very popular book back in 2005 where he said the oil production on planet Earth peaked on Thanksgiving Day 2005.
Bob Zadek: I remember it well.
Ronald Bailey: And the point, of course, is that—and I report this in the book as well—is in 2005, the amount of oil being produced was about 83 million barrels per day. It is now over 96 million barrels per day. It didn’t peak. And it didn’t peak because what happens if the price goes up, people find new supplies, develop new technologies, and basically can supply the market that way. And as we all now know, the price is down to about $40 a barrel again.
Bob Zadek: And there is—and the issue is not to take oil simply as an example—it’s not a question of running out of oil, but as technology develops new methods of reaching oil that was before the technology inaccessible—that is, it would have been too expensive—it now technology makes it less expensive. So it’s not that more oil is created—of course it’s not, it was created but very slowly—but rather that technology makes oil that was uneconomic to take out of the ground, makes it economical. So it’s not the magic that we’re creating more oil, it’s always there, it’s simply a question of technology, which always solves our problems, giving us a way to access it at reasonable prices.
Ronald Bailey: Right. I never—and I try to make this point all the time—never bet against human ingenuity.
Bob Zadek: Although the environmentalists are betting the ranch against human ingenuity, and in fact, they are discouraging it. Look at the opposition to fracking, which is human ingenuity making huge amounts of very cheap, very clean energy available. Technology has done its part, but the environmentalists, since it’s contrary to their political goals, they oppose it almost per se.
Ronald Bailey: Yes. What is fascinating—and again, I’ve done reporting on this—is that in the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, a lot of environmental groups, for example, the Natural Resources Defense Council, were in favor of natural gas and referred to it as the bridge fuel to the no-carbon energy future. But as soon as it became really cheap and started undercutting their preferred energy sources in price—that would be solar and wind, for example—they turned on it. So it’s kind of fascinating that way. Again, as you pointed out in your initial remarks, essentially the way environmental groups make their money is by selling and peddling doom. If there’s no problem, no one will send them any money. And so they always have to come up with a problem.
The Cancer Myth and Rachel Carson [11:58]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Ron Bailey. Ron has written The End of Doom. Yes, folks, doom ends today. The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. 800-345-5639. We are happy to help you shed yourself of fears of damnation and rotting in hell. 800-345-5639.
Now, Ron, a strong principle which I have always followed on this show is I am strongly opposed to cancer. I am unequivocal, I don’t waver in that. Now, cancer has always been—the “big C” as it’s sometimes called—cancer has always been looked upon as the threat that is used by environmentalists to frighten people. Cancer is growing, we have to be afraid of it, chemicals cause cancer, leisure suits cause cancer, everything causes cancer. Tell us about what’s really happening to the disease of cancer on Earth, and even though we have increased use of chemicals in food production and agricultural uses.
Ronald Bailey: Right. One of the things—the cancer scare, the notion that synthetic chemicals, man-made chemicals, were creating a cancer epidemic was first really promoted by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring. And it was okay because she was writing in the 1950s and ’60s and nobody had a really good theory about what causes cancer. But the fact of the matter is, we have now had 50 years since that book, and it turns out that actual incidence of cancer—this is reported by the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute—the incidence of cancer for at any age, Americans for the last 20 years, it’s been going down.
Essentially, it’s been going down at a rate so that if it had stayed at the same rate it was in 1990, 100,000 more people a year would be getting cancer than they are now. And it’s been going down because of a lot of different reasons, but what we can clearly now say is that exposures to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is not a major cause of cancer. In fact, the American Cancer Society has pointed out that exposure to chemicals of all sorts, both natural and synthetic, probably cause 2 to 3% of cancer at all. And most cancers are caused by other things—genetics, for example, smoking, for example, obesity is actually related to cancer as well. And those are causes that people well know. But the fact is is that exposure to synthetic chemicals is not a big cause of cancer.
Bob Zadek: Now, when there’s so much written attempting to link the use of synthetic chemicals in agricultural production, food production, GMOs—which are a separate topic which we’ll talk about in a moment—are the environmentalists not telling the truth? Are they guilty of just being bad at scientific work, or are they manipulating data? Can you help us understand the great disparity in their position versus your position?
Ronald Bailey: That’s actually an extremely good question. The problem is is that once you’ve created a particular kind of scare and a kind of, if you will, the idea out there, it’s very hard to draw it back in. And so this notion that synthetic chemicals cause cancer has been around for a very long time, and it just takes years and years of data and discussion and so forth to talk people out of it.
Again, I read all of these studies, and I report them in the book, where basically it is well known that synthetic chemicals are not a big cause of cancer. And yet you have groups out there that still promote this notion. And I believe that they think themselves to be honest, good brokers of information, but I think that they’re terribly mistaken and they are, I don’t know…
Agricultural Productivity and Peak Farmland [16:46]
Bob Zadek: Now, what I don’t understand is also the core goals: have people live longer, productive, happy lives, raise families. Everybody, I would think, or both sides of the environmental movement, have the same goals. And if we take as an absolute, as we should, that the use of chemicals increases productivity of farmland, increases productivity of agricultural life, feeds more people, reduces hunger, reduces the cost of food, provides all of these public goods—then taking a step back, what makes environmentalists ab initio opposed to chemicals? I mean, chemicals are just—they exist in the physical world. Why are they opposed to chemicals almost per se if they achieve so much of what everybody would agree is a good?
Ronald Bailey: That’s a very good question. I mean, think about agriculture productivity, and I go into this quite a bit, is that what has happened is over the last 50 years or so, the amount of food produced in the world has tripled while world population has just doubled. So food is cheaper and more abundant than it’s ever been in human history. And it’s done so largely because of the modern technologies—chemical agriculture, genetically modified crops, that kind of thing—made it possible to feed more people with less use of land.
One of the things that—think about it this way: if we were still producing food at the same level of productivity we were doing it in the year 1960, and we had this current population of 7.2 billion people, we would have had to plow up an area, an extra area the size of the entirety of North America in order to supply that food. Instead, what we did is we are in fact reaching “peak farmland” where we’re going to produce more and more food off of less and less land over time. That, of course, is a huge benefit for both humanity and the natural world.
Bob Zadek: And it reallocates labor to be more productive because as we need less and less farmland, we need less and less workers in the farms to do the work, and it frees them up to do other more productive activities. So it’s positive, positive, positive, except we still have environmentalists who seem to be per se against it. Mighty strange to me.
The Truth About Overpopulation [19:43]
Bob Zadek: Now, there’s also a fear, there’s this almost permanent, a little bit below the surface fear of overpopulation, where too many people, we’re going to run out of space, everybody will be living in a tenement in the Amazon somewhere, be no free spaces left. What’s the truth about world population growth?
Ronald Bailey: What’s happening is it’s very likely—and this is something I definitely do cover in the book and talk to a lot of demographers and do a lot of reporting on it—is world population is very likely to peak in the middle of this coming century at between 8 to 9 billion people and start declining by the end of the century. And largely it’s going to be because of a number of facts, but one is is that as women become liberated around the world, as they become educated, as they join the market economy, essentially they have fewer and fewer children.
In 1970, the average woman—this is called the total fertility rate—in 1970, the average woman was having five children over the course of her lifetime. It’s now down to 2.45 and continues to drop. There are something like 60 countries, including the United States, that now have below-replacement fertility. That’s defined as 2.1 children per woman over the course of her lifetime. And this is going to expand. And this is great because what this means is that people get to have the number of children that they want to have, they choose to have, as opposed to having to produce children merely because they don’t have the technology or the alternative opportunities in their lives. So what we’re going to find is that world population will stabilize and start declining fairly soon.
Bob Zadek: So, and of course, historically, families had children for economic reasons. Children were wealth producers, they worked on the farm, they were free labor. So there were motivations other than merely personal lifestyle choices; they were a necessity. Plus the fact that there was high infant mortality, so you had to give birth to lots of children in order to have just the normal amount reach adulthood. So that situation, of course, has profoundly changed. Now it’s simply a matter of personal choice, not dictated by outside economics.
Ronald Bailey: Right. And as the world becomes wealthier, these choices will become more available to people across the planet. And the data suggests very strongly that people will have fewer and fewer children as their opportunities increase outside of farming, for example.
Bob Zadek: So if I live long enough, the portions will get bigger in the restaurants and the lines in the movie theaters will be shorter. See that doom—that’s the great tangible proof that we are truly reaching the end of doom: larger portions in the restaurants. Hooray for that.
This is Bob Zadek and I’m talking with Ron Bailey. Ron has written The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. In this book, Ron rebuts many of the popular held myths about all of the bad things that are happening to the planet. In doing so, Ron takes the wind out of the sails of the environmental movement to the extent that the environmental movement is seeking to influence economic and political life in our country and in the world. And that is the core issue, because the environmental movement is, as Ron points out, it is a political movement—indeed, some would say a religious and political movement—dressed up in the motherhood and apple pie gloss of “we are protecting the planet, we are saving the whale and saving the polar bear and saving the indigenous people.” This is a very important book. 800-345-5639. We’ll be back in 60 seconds to continue our conversation with Ron Bailey. Please stay tuned.
Caller Segment: Immigration and Resources [24:53]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Ron Bailey. Ron has written The End of Doom. Yes, folks, doom ends at 9:00 AM this morning. The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation. And we have some joiners of the conversation now, Ron. We have Linda calling from Marin County. Linda, welcome to the show this morning.
Caller (Linda): Hi, thank you. I wanted to take issue with some of the things that your guest is saying. As you’re talking about commoditizing water, it seemed to me from what I was hearing that the elephant in the room, which is massive immigration of high-fertility people to the United States, is not being addressed. We have at least 30 million people that have come in since the laws changed in the ’60s. They’ve had larger families than the average American did. And as a consequence in California, 100% of our population growth right now is attributed to immigration. The water supplies which were being used for farming and agriculture have been diverted to population areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. And I believe this governmental policy of open borders and massive, unprecedented levels of illegal immigration has created a problem with water.
Bob Zadek: Ron, that requires about six hours of response. You take the first three, I’ll take the second three. But go ahead, Ron.
Ronald Bailey: Well, first of all, the book is about basically global environmental trends, and I talk about water markets around the world, not just in California. And the problem is is that among many other things, let’s talk about the immigrants briefly. The fact is is that initially when people immigrate to the United States, they maintain the fertility levels of the countries that they came from, but very soon, in less than a generation, they revert to the same level of having children that Americans who have been here a longer time have. So basically, they don’t really increase population by having higher birth rates. That’s not true. Basically, United States population would not be growing except for the fact that we have more people moving here, not because they’re having more kids, but they’re moving here.
But that’s not particularly the issue I would like to address. With regard to water, if it’s valuable, you should price it. And probably what—and I’ve written about this in a bunch of other places as well—what you probably should be able to do is to provide enough drinking water for people for fairly low prices, and then as you start using it for other things—industrial, agriculture, and so forth—you charge more for it. It’s like any other good. You will have a scarcity of it if it’s free. If you start charging people, they’ll start economizing and using it for better purposes. And that’s true whether or not you have immigrants or anything else. If you have free water, you will have wasted water. If you charge people what the water costs, they will use it the same way that they use everything else they pay for, in a better, more efficient way.
Bob Zadek: And Linda, I’d like to offer one additional observation. You said something like we should be using water for one purpose or another purpose. No, I disagree. It is not the government’s job to decide how we use water. What government does—and question whether we even need government to do this—but at most, government should bring the water in and should sell it at market prices, and the market will decide how it gets used. Top-down planning of water usage is per se wrong, Linda. It should be up to the people who want to or are willing to pay for it get to use it, and not the government’s decision.
Caller (Linda): Yeah, I would like to respond. I’m totally into small government, I’m totally into the constitutional government. However, I would like to point out that the government itself has imposed open borders and a policy of high population growth. And your guest is wrong; when immigrants arrive, their fertility rate actually goes up. And again, I say 100% of our population growth in California, where we have this drought, is now absolutely due to immigration. That’s just not even in question. So the government imposed the policy to create the water shortage. And I think libertarians need to wake up and see that when we commoditize something that is essential to survival, and the government policy has done that to us, then we need to take that back. And I think we need to look at population environment stabilization. And there are a number of groups focused on that, and they are not wacky environmental groups that are trying to seize control. They are trying to say close the borders, stop people that we do not need from coming in and becoming water consumers and gas consumers and other resource consumers, and let’s concentrate on our own issues and using the resources responsibly. And sure, privatize, but I do not believe that taking a governmental policy that’s created booming population unnecessarily and then turning around and saying we don’t want the government to control water is missing the point. And I thank you for your time.
Bob Zadek: Linda, thank you very much. I would just say in closing—Linda has gone off the air—but I would just say in closing that as a libertarian, I respect to the depths of my soul how it is a basic human right to be able to move from place to place. And we should not have an immigration policy based solely upon the people that we “need,” whatever that even means. But again, we appreciate Linda’s call. All callers are welcome.
Caller Segment: Food Prices and Human Resources [31:42]
Bob Zadek: And now, Ron, we have another caller. We have Mike from San Francisco calling this morning. Mike, welcome to the show this morning. How are you?
Caller (Mike): Fine, thanks. I just wanted to know if there’s more to the story than what most environmentalists seem to say. Ron, I wanted to mention I always enjoy your writing in Reason magazine, so thank you very much for that.
Ronald Bailey: Thank you.
Caller (Mike): And I had two brief questions. First is, Ron, you had said food is getting cheaper. Can you explain why it seems to me prices are going up in grocery stores and in restaurants?
Ronald Bailey: Okay. What has happened is—I’m looking again at the long-term trends. What happened—one of the problems that we have, and I discuss this as well, is part of the problem that’s occurred in the United States is we’ve now started producing bio-ethanol. That is, we’re putting alcohol in our gas, right? And so about a third of our corn crop now is turned into fuel. And what you’ve done is link the price of food to the price of fuel. And when the oil crisis, quote-unquote, was going on in the early part of this century, then the price of fuel went up as well, and that affected the price of food. That is now going down again, and I suspect that you’ll find fairly soon that the prices of food and fuel will both be going down for the remainder of this decade.
Caller (Mike): Oh, that’s very good news. And then the other question I had was, as Julian Simon and others have noted, humans are the most important natural resource. So isn’t it bad news rather than good news that population will be stabilizing or declining in the future?
Ronald Bailey: I understand your point, but for me, the point is that people get to choose how many children they want to have. And I think that that’s all to the good when people can make their own choices with regard to having how many children they want to have, how they want them to be educated, and so forth. That is a great human good. I do understand that every human being is also an idea producer and can contribute to human betterment, but it’s more important to me that people have the freedom to choose what they want to do with regard to their reproduction.
Bob Zadek: And Mike, just one other point. You mentioned the cost of food in restaurants. As, of course, we both are aware, restaurants are the end of the line in the marketplace for food. And prices in restaurants are a function of the cost of labor—labor is a reasonably high cost in a restaurant—minimum wage, as we all have read, impacts upon that as well. So the cost of food in a restaurant, plus the fact that restaurants are becoming more and more regulated in what they can do, and regulation itself has a cost. So there are lots of non-food components which make the cost of a restaurant meal high. Just mention that in passing.
Caller (Mike): Oh yeah, makes a lot of sense. Thanks very much.
Bob Zadek: Mike, thank you so much for your call and thanks for listening to the show.
Climate Change: Catastrophe or Challenge? [35:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, Ron, another area that the environmentalists focus on quite a bit is, of course, climate change. Now, climate change is sort of—those are strange words because the climate changes every day. But of course, the words “climate change,” what they really mean as used in the current discussion in America and around the world, what climate change means is, first of all, a long-term change in climate trends, but more importantly, caused by human activity. So tell us what you have learned. And you wrote a piece that changed my mind quite a bit in Reason when you rethought your own position on climate change. So speak to us a bit about the effect of human activity, specifically the use of hydrocarbons, man-made activity, how it affects the climate, and most importantly, is that good news or bad news?
Ronald Bailey: I’ve been covering climate change as a reporter for over 30 years now. I was at the Earth Summit where the UN treaty on climate change was negotiated in 1992, and I’ve been to 10 UN climate change meetings. I’ve been following this for a very long time. And initially, I was very skeptical of man-made climate change as a problem. But as I say, I’ve been following this for a long time, I’ve talked to literally scores and scores of climatologists and scientists, I’ve read huge amounts of the scientific literature, and about 10 years ago, I decided that man-made climate change, global warming, could probably become a significant problem for humanity over the course of the century. And I publicly changed my mind about that, and I’m urging people to take this as a serious problem.
The question then is, does it imply what—do we need a top-down centralized way of solving the problem? I go in great detail in the book about the technologies that are out there, the low-carbon, the no-carbon energy technologies that are coming along now that I think will probably be fairly rapidly adopted over the next few decades and will probably solve the problem of man-made climate change. The world is going to be warmer because of what we’ve done, burning fossil fuels, putting more carbon dioxide in the air, but it’s not going to be a catastrophe.
Bob Zadek: Now, the question is, when you say the world is going to be warmer, what I find myself a bit confused about is: is that per se bad, per se good, or just simply different with, as they like to say, winners and losers?
Ronald Bailey: Probably per se bad is not—it’s not a problem. But what is likely to happen, or could happen if we continue without changing our energy mix—which I think again, and I argue we are going to be changing—it would be very fast relative to the ability of the biosphere and humanity to adapt to it. And it’s the speed, it’s not necessarily the fact the world will be warmer that’s the problem, it’s the speed with which the change occurs and how difficult would that be for the plants and animals and humanity to adapt to it over the next century or so. And so that’s more of the problem. And then there’s also—the most concerning thing is not the heat so much, it’s the fact that sea level will rise as the glaciers melt, and that could be a—that would be a big problem for a lot of people living along the coasts.
Bob Zadek: So your little income statement on the effect is it will be a net minus, but there will be positive attributes, but overall—and of course minus is as subjective as a word can be—but it will be in your view, as somebody who’s studied the issue, a net minus to the planet.
Ronald Bailey: I think it would be, yes. I think, again, it’s the speed with which it might occur, and we need to slow down the warming in order for humanity and the plants and animals on the planet to adapt.
Caller Segment: Fracking Myths [39:56]
Bob Zadek: Ron, we have another caller. We have Alan from Berkeley calling this morning, and Alan, I believe, wishes to discuss fracking. Alan, welcome to the show this morning. How are you?
Caller (Alan): Fine, thanks. I just wanted to know if there’s more to the story than what most environmentalists seem to say about fracking—that it leaves large pools of contaminated water on the surface, it causes earthquakes to be likely, and it contaminates underground aquifers in many ways. So if you can cover these…
Bob Zadek: Thank you for the question, Alan. It’s a great question.
Ronald Bailey: I have looked into it, and I was initially thinking there might be problems with it. But let’s deal with the issues seriatim. One of the concerns that people mentioned was: does fracking contaminate aquifers? Does it contaminate well water? Does it harm people in that way? And there was this famous documentary, quote-unquote documentary, called Gasland where a guy lights his faucet on fire, right? And it turns out that that was completely natural, that it was not caused by fracking. And there are, as far as I can tell—and I combed through the literature on this—there are no examples of where a fracked well caused contamination of aquifers.
Now, what happens is gas wells, regular gas wells, if you don’t seal them properly, if you don’t provide them with a cement and steel coating as they go through an aquifer, that can contaminate well water. But that’s not peculiar to fracking; that’s just peculiar to drilling gas wells or oil wells. It is the case that the produced water, which is the water that they use to pressurize and cause the cracks in the wells, when it comes back up, it does contain some chemicals—some of them are natural, in fact—and if you don’t clean that water, it can contaminate the surface. But fortunately, again, this is something where people in the industry are becoming much better at controlling that. And so that is a problem, but again, it’s a problem that would happen not with fracking but with other kinds of hydrocarbon production as well. It’s not a particular problem.
Species Extinction and the ESA [42:21]
Bob Zadek: You have written in your book about the issue of loss of entire species of animal and plant life, mostly animal life on the planet. And there is a lot of folklore concerning species disappearing because we have been bad stewards of ecosystems. Can you help us understand that?
Ronald Bailey: Extinction is forever, and I would do want to live in a world that still has wild tigers and lions and elephants and so forth. And humanity has been able—well, here’s something that I don’t know that most people know. For example, when human beings started moving out of Africa, for example, and they moved into Australia and North America—in North America, basically the ancestors of the American Indians killed off almost every species that weighed more than a thousand pounds. And they—there are things called glyptodonts, for example, and toxodons that used to roam around in North America, but they were all killed and eaten.
So yes, humanity has caused extinction. But since 1500, I talk about this in the book, since 1500, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has estimated that humanity has caused about 322 species of vertebrates, terrestrial vertebrates, to go extinct. There are over 30,000 species. So essentially, it’s less than 1%. We have to be careful about what’s happening, but again, the trend I’m looking at is, for example, as we reach peak farmland, more land will go back to nature. That will be more land for species that are endangered to thrive upon. Also, people are moving into cities. By the end of this century, the United Nations estimates that 80% of people will be living in cities. And if that is the case, that means that the number of people living on the landscape, in the farms, on the rural areas, will be cut in half, and also leaving more land for nature at that point. It’s a problem, but again, human ingenuity, I think, is well on the way to solving it.
Bob Zadek: And doesn’t require massive reallocations of economic resources and intentionally moving people around in this top-down approach in order to save the species. We have done, without a top-down approach, a reasonably good job of preserving the species, the various species.
Ronald Bailey: Right. And one of the things that we—unfortunately, with the Endangered Species Act, there’s a meme out there that basically says if you have an endangered species on your land and the federal government knows this, then they will start regulating and controlling your land. So I’ve heard this said: the idea is to “shoot, shovel, and shut up.” And that’s not the incentive you want to give people. You want people to want to have an endangered species on their land so that they would protect it and value it.
Bob Zadek: That has been widely reported that when owners of agricultural land and farmland, and maybe even suburban plots—but that’s less likely—when they discover a species that might be or is on the list, they will quickly kill it lest it be found. When the environmentalists find that endangered species on your land, all of a sudden your land will decline in value, the uses you could put to your land will be limited. And just because this little critter was on your land, you will lose the value. Well, it’s just as easy to make sure that critter doesn’t see the light of day again, which further exacerbates the problem rather than preserves the species.
Ronald Bailey: Correct. I mean, the thing is is that if we want land to be used for schools or roads and so forth, we pay for it as part of our tax dollars. In a certain way, if we think that people want to preserve species, we should also pay landowners to preserve them for us, not force them to give up value. Instead, we should honor them by helping them in economic ways to keep the species preserved on their property.
The Madness Over GMOs [47:11]
Bob Zadek: We have saved what I consider one of the most important topics for last. We’re going to run out of time in a few minutes, but Ron, tell us about all of the folklore and all of the insanity surrounding GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms. This is the world gone mad.
Ronald Bailey: I quite agree with you. Every independent scientific organization on the Earth that has ever evaluated the safety of genetically modified crops…
Bob Zadek: Well, first let’s explain what a genetically modified crop or GMO, what it actually is and what it is not, and then we can discuss the effect of it.
Ronald Bailey: Sure. Everything that we eat has been genetically modified. Farmers have been selecting them for years and years. But they’re specifically talking about crops where a gene, one or two genes, have been changed to make it more resistant to pesticides or more resistant to pests or more resistant to herbicide. And it’s just one or two genes that have been added or changed in order to do that. And every group that has ever evaluated them has found them perfectly safe for humans to eat and for the environment. I will make the flat-out statement: no one on Earth has gotten so much as a cough, wheeze, sniffle, stomachache from eating anything made with ingredients from genetically modified crops. And there is a consensus that global warming is a problem, right? The consensus that genetically modified crops are safe is much stronger than the consensus that global warming is a problem. And yet the environmental community continues to attack these perfectly safe technologies. It is, as you said, madness.
Bob Zadek: And what’s really strange is it accomplishes—it being the practice of genetically modifying crops and animal life—it is a practice which produces so much good and does so much to alleviate hunger, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in third-world countries where the farming practices are pretty archaic. This gives them an economic shot in the arm and improves their quality of their diet immensely. And yet the Europeans as a continent-wide belief system, they vehemently oppose GMOs with no scientific basis whatsoever. It is anti-human to do that.
Ronald Bailey: I agree. The most famous case of this—and in fact, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the largest scientific organization in the world, had a statement recently about this—is Greenpeace has been opposing, for example, a crop called Golden Rice. It’s rice that had been modified to create Vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency in very poor countries is a huge problem, and about half a million children a year go blind or they get night blindness, they also have weaker immune systems and die from that. And essentially, the AAAS has pointed out by opposing Golden Rice, Greenpeace is killing literally tens of thousands of children a year who would otherwise be saved by this technology, this completely benign, safe technology. And I think it’s a scandal.
Bob Zadek: Now, here’s a hard question. In about 30 seconds, why do they do that? What’s driving it? They’re not bad people.
Ronald Bailey: I think it’s a long history which I describe in the book, but basically they got stuck with bad information 20 years ago and they simply won’t change their mind in the face of scientific evidence.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’ve been spending a most wonderful and informative hour talking with Ron Bailey. Ron has written The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. It is a very important book. It is the essential counterweight to all of the bad science you have been hearing in the and will continue to hear in the mass media. Ron, how can my audience follow your writings? We have about 30 seconds.
Ronald Bailey: Well, you can always go to Reason.com, and I have a weekly column that appears on Friday, and I also write feature articles, and my colleagues at Reason write wonderful stuff on all sorts of topics, and every one of your listeners should look at it every day.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Ron, and thank you so much for ending doom. It’s going to be a good day today. Thanks a lot, and thanks to everybody for listening. I’ll be back next Sunday. Thanks a lot, Ron.
Ronald Bailey: Thank you.