By Stephen Moore
Published April 22, 2015
Wednesday, April 22 is Earth Day. To hear the experts like Usher and Al Gore tell the story, the planet is in a miserable state. We're running out of our natural resources, we're overpopulating the globe and running out of room, the air that we breathe is becoming toxic, the oceans are rising and soon major coastal cities will be underwater, and the Earth is, of course, heating up, except when it is cooling down.
This is perhaps the single greatest misinformation campaign in world history. Virtually none of these claims are even close to the truth -- except for the fact that our climate is always changing as it has for hundreds of thousands of years. Earth Day should be a day of joy and celebration that life on this bountiful planet is better than anytime in human history.
Since the first Earth Day back in the 1970s, the environmentalists -- those who worship not God, but what God has created -- have issued one false prediction of Armageddon after another and yet despite the fact that their batting average is zero, the media and our schools keep parroting their declinism as if they were oracles not shysters.
Here are the factual realities we should be celebrating on Earth Day.
1. Natural resources are more abundant and affordable today than ever before in history. ? The price of every natural resource -- from copper to cotton to coal -- is cheaper today than 50, 100, or 500 years ago. This has happened even as the world's population has nearly tripled. Technology has far outpaced depletion of the earth's resources.
2. Energy -- the master resource -- is super-abundant. Remember when people like Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich warned 30 years ago (and Barack Obama just three years ago) that we were running out of oil and gas? Today, thanks to fracking ushering in a new age of oil and gas, the United States has hundreds of years of petroleum at its disposal and at least 500 years of coal. We're not running out of energy, we are running into it.
3. Our air and water are cleaner. By every standard measure our air and water is much, much, much cleaner today than it was 50 and even 100 years ago. The pollutants in the air have declined by 50 to 60 percent since 1970. The air is so clean now that the EPA worries about carbon dioxide -- which isn't even a pollutant. ? (And, by the way, carbon emissions are falling too, thanks to fracking.). One hundred years ago, about one in four deaths in the U.S. was due to contaminants in drinking water.
4. There is no Malthusain nightmare of overpopulation. Birth rates have fallen by about one-third to one-half around the world over the last 50 years. ? Developed countries are having too few kids, not too many. Even with a population of 6 billion people, average incomes, especially in poor countries, have surged over the last forty years. The number of people in abject poverty fell by almost one billion from 1980 to 2006.
5. Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. In most nations the nutrition problem today is obesity -- too many calories consumed -- not hunger. The number of famines over the last 100 years has fallen in half. The price of food has fallen steadily in the U.S. And most nations steadily for 200 years.
6. The rate of death and physical destruction from natural disasters or severe weather changes has plummeted over the last 50 to 100 years. Loss of life from hurricanes, floods, hurricanes, heat, droughts, and so on is at or near record lows. This is because we have much better advance warning systems, our infrastructure is much more durable, and we have inventions like air conditioning, to adapt to weather changes. ?We are constantly discovering new ways to harness and even tame nature. Earth Day should be a day of joy and celebration that life on this bountiful planet is better than anytime in human history. The state of the planet has never been in such fine shape by almost every objective measure. The Chicken Littles are as wrong today as they were 50 years ago. This is very good news for those who believe that one of our primary missions as human beings is to make life better over time and to leave our planet better off for future generations. Happy Earth Day.
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