The Economics of Ecology: Angry Planet or Beautiful World

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The Economics of Ecology: Angry Planet or Beautiful World

Economics Has Provided Real Solutions to Pollution and Environmental Degredation

Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish professor of statistics who was an environmental activist and member of Greenpeace for years. He accepted at face value the Malthusian views, expressed by Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, and groups such as the Worldwatch Institute, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club, that the world was running out of renewable resources, clean water, and forestland, and that the earth was becoming more polluted and that population growth was exploding.

Along came Julian Simon, an American economist from the University of Maryland, who challenged Lomborg’s thinking. Simon had published several books and papers filled with data supporting his view that life was actually getting better, that air in the developed world was becoming less polluted, that fewer people were starving, and that the population growth was slowing.

Simon made two devastating arguments against the pessimists: First, natural resources are virtually unlimited in the long run because higher prices, reflecting scarcity, encourage the discovery of additional reserves and the use of substitutes. In addition, entrepreneurs and inventors are developing new technologies and cost-cutting techniques allowing more resources to be discovered and developed. Second, a large and growing population leads to a higher standard of living because it increases the stock of useful knowledge and trained workers.

Lomborg decided to test Simon’s statistics. In the fall of 1997, he and a group of students examined Simon’s data. Their conclusion: Simon was right! Lomborg reversed course and, in publishing his findings in The Skeptical Environmentalist, has created a furor within the environmentalist community.

Lomborg joins Simon in refuting most of the claims of the perma-bear environmentalists: global forests have increased since World War II; the world’s population growth rate peaked in 1964 and has since declined; only 0.7 percent of species have disappeared in the past 50 years; fewer people in the world are denied access to water; incidence of infectious disease is still on the decline worldwide; the number of extremely poor/starving people is also declining; air pollution is falling in many parts of the world. To read the full article: click here

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