GUEST POST: The Finite Planet Fallacy

"The pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet." We hear this constantly, and it's delivered like a law of physics — case closed, only a compromised economist could disagree. Yet it's dead wrong, as Pedro Santa Clara explains in this Guest Post. And the mistake is revealing, because it isn't in the physics. It's in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

In short, we are not running out of matter. We are getting steadily better at making it serve us....

The Finite Planet Fallacy 

by Pedro Santa Clara

A critique I often get, whenever I defend economic growth, runs like this: “The truth is that the pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot sustain exponential growth on a finite planet.” It is delivered with the confidence of a physical law — as if invoking the conservation of mass settles the matter and only an economist too compromised to see it could disagree. It is the founding intuition of degrowth, of much of the environmental movement, and of the Club of Rome before them. It is also wrong, and wrong in an instructive way, because the error is not in the physics. It is in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

The argument commits a category error: it confuses matter with value. The Earth is indeed a closed system of atoms. But economic growth does not count atoms — it counts the value those atoms deliver to human beings, and that value lives in arrangement and knowledge, not in mass. The same kilogram of silicon is worth a few cents as sand on a beach and several thousand euros as the microchips etched from it. Nothing was added to the planet between those two states; not one atom. The entire difference is human ingenuity rearranging what was already there. Growth is the rising value we wring from a fixed stock of matter — and there is no law of physics that caps how cleverly atoms may be arranged. The Mona Lisa and a pile of pigment contain the same chemistry. One is worth incalculably more, and the difference is not material.

This is why the deepest engine of growth is not a resource at all but knowledge — and knowledge has two properties that demolish the finite-pie premise. It is 'non-rival'paul: if I use a recipe, a theorem, a line of code, you can use the very same one at the same instant, and neither of us has less. A barrel of oil burned is gone; an idea shared is doubled. And knowledge compounds, because every new idea is a recombination of existing ones, so the stock of possible combinations explodes rather than depletes as it grows. The pie, in other words, is not made of stuff. It is made of recipes — and the recipes are unbounded. A finite planet sets no ceiling on how much we can know about how to use it.

The closed-system picture fails on the brute facts as well. Earth is not even energetically closed: it is bathed continuously in solar energy that dwarfs all human consumption many times over, and with nuclear power the practical ceiling recedes further still — so the thermodynamic limit the argument gestures at is astronomically distant, not pressing.

Meanwhile the historical record simply refuses to cooperate with the prophecy. Resource after resource declared to be on the verge of exhaustion became, instead, more abundant and cheaper, because scarcity raises prices, and prices trigger substitution, efficiency, and discovery. This is the mechanism that cost Paul Ehrlich his famous wager with Julian Simon over the price of five metals Ehrlich himself selected, certain they would soar as the world ran out; every one of them fell. And the “decoupling” that environmentalists insist is impossible — growing an economy while shrinking its physical footprint — is now measured fact in more than thirty countries that have raised output while cutting absolute emissions and material use. 

We are not running out of matter. We are getting steadily better at making it serve us.

The surest sign that the finite-planet argument is broken is that it proves too much. If exponential growth in value were genuinely impossible on a finite world, then it could not have happened — and yet real income per person has risen something like thirtyfold over two centuries, on the same Earth, with the same inventory of atoms. The theory confidently predicts that the central economic fact of the modern era did not occur. When a model is refuted by the entire history of the thing it claims to govern, the mistake is not hiding in the history. It is in the premise — in the quiet, disastrous assumption that an economy is a warehouse of finite stuff to be divided and used up, rather than what it actually is: a growing body of knowledge about how to make a fixed world yield ever more of what human beings want.

The conservationists are right about one thing only. Atoms are finite. But wealth was never the atoms. It was always what we learned to do with them — and there is no end to that.

* * * * 

Pedro Santa Clara is a professor and entrepreneur -- Professor of Finance at the Nova School of Business and Economics and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and head of Shaken Not Stirred a company that promotes and manages education projects, and the Shaken Academy, which offers corporate development programmes in AI.

Pedro is also a founder and member of the Board of Trustees of Instituto Mais Liberdade, a think tank that promotes the liberal ideals of individual freedom, market economy and democracy, and a founding partner of Atrium Portofolio Managers, an asset management firm created in 1999, and of Data4Deals, a fintech startup created in 2021. 

"Chris Bishop’s primary responsibility is reforming the RMA. ... The bureaucratic class has magnificently undermined his agenda."

"[Chris] Bishop’s primary responsibility, other than completing Steven Joyce’s highway from Warkworth to Whangarei, is reforming the RMA. ... [G]iven how central the reform of the Resource Management Act has been to this government, it defies comprehension that National didn't arrive with a draft ready to go. ...

"The excellent folk at the NZ Initiative have done an analysis of the two proposed [replacement] laws [which eventually emerged]: the Natural Environment and the Planning Bills. Nick Clark, the researcher, concluded, '...in the translation from principles to legislative text, something has gone wrong. Key elements have been weakened, complexity has crept back in, and an extraordinary amount of the systems' substance has been deferred to secondary instruments that do not yet exist.' ...

"The desire to place property rights at the heart of the legislation has been superseded by placing mana whenua into their customary central role in managing the land. ...

"[Also, i]f passed, these bills will not be the final word. That will be left to ‘secondary legislation’, or regulation; binding rules made by the minister of the day that determine how the law is to be applied. The proposal is for parliament to delegate its authority to the executive with minimal oversight. This time next year, Minister Swarbrick could use this secondary legislation to mandate her own vision into reality.

"Did we vote for that? ...

"[T]he bureaucratic class ... has magnificently undermined his agenda. This should have been self-evident thirty months ago ... "

~ Damien Grant from his post 'Chris Bishop has emerged as the main pretender to a shaky crown. How shall we assess his performance?'

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth."

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth. If people understood how generous that engine has been they would have less enthusiasm for protectionism or socialism or environmentalist or economic nationalism in any of their varied forms. Most educated people believe that the gains to income from capitalism’s triumph have been modest, that the poor have been left behind, that the Third World (should we start calling it the Second?) has been immiserised in aid of the First, that population growth must be controlled, that diminishing returns on the whole has been the main force in world economic history since 1800. All these notions are factually erroneous. But you’ll find all of them in the mind of the average professor of political philosophy."

~ Deirdre McCloskey from her review of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn

Super-abundant economic progress

EVER SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION in the nineteenth century and ever-increasing global freedom in this one, human progress has been on a roll -- so says author and rational optimist Marian Tupy. He outlined his arguments and data a few nights ago at an enjoyable NZ Initiative presentation.

Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, the world's most comprehensive database tracking improvements in human wellbeing, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of the acclaimed book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.

He's one of the good guys.

Miserabilist Thomas Malthus famously expressed the idea that while resources would only expand at a linear rate, population will expand exponentially -- a disaster waiting to happen. But Malthus was writing about rabbits, or animals without the brain that humans have; and he was writing before the industrial revolution, when that brain was put to powerful practical use. Malthus was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, as Tupy's data abundantly proves.

Take that Malthus!

In just the last four decades alone, commodities across the board have become more abundant thanks to globalisation and increasing freedom. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, long a source of concern, the average calorie intake is now ticking up to 2,500!

Take that Paul Erlich!

THAT FAMOUS PANGLOSSIAN THOMAS BABINGTON Macaulay talked in the nineteenth century about the inevitability of progress: “In every age," said Macaulay, "everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” It's still possible to remain optimistic even with the many steps backwards anti-freedom forces insist we take.

I was reminded of Peter Boettke's analogy of the horse race between Smith, Schumpeter, and Stupidity -- the progress of Smith's Division of Labour and Schumpeter's progress in technology (well explained by our presenter) has to continually stay ahead of the various degrees of Stupidity inflicted on us all. It's a tribute to human reason and the power of human freedom to wield it that we have to thank for continuing and ongoing progress.

OUR PRESENTER DID GET A LITTLE  pushback from a questioner who interrogated his concept of abundance. Is abundance always good, asked his questioner? A super-abundance of nuclear weapons, for example, or opioids, is hardly a good thing for human progress, he maintained.

It's a fair point, and it resonates with those who argue that to expect infinite growth on a finite planet you must be either insane or an economist. For both points, I think, economist George Reisman makes a profound point in response: the loss of the concept of economic progress.

Tupy still talks of human progress but of economic growth. Reisman (a student of Von Mises) would suggest he'd be better to combine the two to answer both objections: i.e. to talk of economic progress rather than economic growth.

Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity. then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral [the point made by our questioner], equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumours and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively.

In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings. The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation ... with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress.

Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them.

He notes here that it Ludwig Von Mises who had first alerted him to this vital distinction.

The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge.

While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid "growth" as being harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress, let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too quickly -- that things getting better meant they were getting worse. [Capitalism, p.106]

FYI, Professor Reisman has kindly made his book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (in which you can read all his arguments) freely available for reading, saving, and printing. Download the link here.

'Nature-al’ Entrepreneurship: Being Green Without the State | Timothy Terrell

If you want to go green, you should do so without the state’s coercion, says Timothy Terrell at the Mises Institute conference in Oklahoma just last week. In this guest post, based in a lightly edited transcript of the talk, he explains how entrepreneurs and property rights can protect forests, wildlife, and open spaces better than bureaucracies, using real-world examples of “enviropreneurs”....

'Nature-al’ Entrepreneurship: Being Green Without the State

by Timothy Terrell

I subtitled my talk being green without the state, but I'm not trying to put some sort of free-market twist on a lecture about how you need to use an electric lawn mower or recycle or something like that. I'm in fact going to try to avoid pushing my preferences about uses of the environment altogether. That's not really my point here. 

People have different ideas about what is good and about what is useful. And I like the many useful things that we can make with the resources we extract from the environment. 

Many people like me also enjoy wilderness land and views of wildlife. I like forests and rivers. I like knowing that some species of antalope or rhinoceros are still with us, even if I'm not actually going out and looking at it myself. 

What I want to do is show that entrepreneurship is compatible with those goals. 

Entrepreneurship and the environment

An entrepreneur is a person who anticipates a future consumer demand and tries to adjust the factors of production to accomplish that, for the consumer, in search of a profit. For many people, this seems just diametrically opposed to the idea of solving problems related to the use of the environment. I'm going to suggest it's not only not incompatible, that it's essential that we think of things this way. 

We tend to think of entrepreneurship as being separate from the natural world, or at least just making goods that require extracting some substances from the world and then manipulating them into some product. What I'd like to do here is make the case that entrepreneurs can do this with nature as well, creating goods in a sense that have nature in its natural state, or at least something close to it. 

Environmental resources have value that is determined by the goals of the customers. The entrepreneur must satisfy those customers to earn a profit. So we say that environmental value is imputed -- that is to say that the value of the resource in the environment is derived from the value of the product that's made from that resource. 

An environmentalist of the anti-capitalistic type however, which is a very common type, might protest. Um, wouldn't we say that elements of the environment have some sort of value apart from whether they can be turned into a toaster or turned into a fur coat? And uh, you know, they might say, well, do we have to make everything uh into some kind of raw material for a factory? And I would say, well, certainly not. We have to think more broadly about what customers really want. 

Entrepreneurs respond not only to people who want goods that are manufactured out of the environment. They respond to people who value the natural world as more than just a source of calories, minerals, or fibre. 

Many people want goods and services that are the products of factories. We all do that to some extent, but we also value goods and services that are best provided by an environment in its natural state. So, people want the same kinds of things I want when I head out to the wilderness, as I like to do and don't get to do as much as I'd like. 

Maybe some people just want the knowledge that there is a place where land and wildlife exist without human contact. Even if that means we're not necessarily going to go and visit that place. Many of us just like knowing that there is such a place and providing those things is not outside the realm of entrepreneurship. 

Value? Whose value?

But I think we need to clear up something first. Some environmentalists want to separate the idea of value from a valuer. And I think that's a that's a serious problem. 

Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:

• "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
• "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
• “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
• “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
• "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)

Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:

1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.

Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

RELATED:

RMA replacements "look like an improvement (which wouldn't be difficult), but it still relies excessively on trusting politicians"

"[T]he replacement of the RMA, it looks like an improvement (which wouldn't be difficult), but it still relies excessively on trusting politicians to protect property rights.

"There is clearly potential for improvement, but I fear that National Policy Statements, once the other lot get into power, could make it all much worse, by having a nationwide de-growth approach to put development into sclerosis. Chris Bishop and Simon Court talk a lot about private property rights, but it's unclear quite how important they are [here'.

"Certainly on the face of it, this isn't a reform that puts private property rights first. It could have, but the idea that MfE (which didn't exist before 1986) would ever do that or that an expert group dominated by planning lawyers would propose that, is a stretch.

"More simply there does not need to be any kind of 'resource management' law. There should be property law protecting people from infringements of property, and there are commons (that aren't going anywhere soon) that need protection from tort and nuisance from private property."

~ Liberty Scott 

Were Māori environmentalists?

A friend who wrote a thesis several years ago on common law solutions to environmentalism asked me this question a few weeks ago, and I've only recently got around to answering (I've paraphrased the question just a little):

Q: How did Maori activists [he asks] attain the apparent status they now possess in the environmental movement? In other words, why do NZ environmentalists bow to Maori prejudices? When I wrote my thesis this absurdity was not evident as it is now. Please can anybody shed some light on this?

So here's my rather belated answer: Read 'Were Māori environmentalists?' 

Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria: "It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones."

"Relying on human ingenuity to coexist with a changing climate – either warmer or cooler – and tending to long-recognised public health threats are the best ways to ensure the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, according to an Australian physician and expert in climate and public health.

“The ingenuity of Homo sapiens at adapting to climate has permitted people to populate almost the entire globe from the freezing Arctic to the steamy tropics, notes Dr. D. Weston Allen, lead author of a paper supporting a proposed repeal of a federal designation of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. 'If we stick to doing what we do best – adaptation – we will continue to thrive.' ...

"[C]civilisations did well in past eras of relative warmth during Minoan and Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period. And, he says, cool periods often brought suffering, the most recent being the Little Ice Age, which experienced 'frequent widespread crop failures, mass starvation, disease and depopulation.' ...

"Although activists claim that warming will spread tropical diseases into temperate zones, malaria, once widespread in Europe and North America, declined because of public health measures such as draining swamps, spraying insecticides and increasing medical treatment.

"An oft-ignored fact is that cold weather is far deadlier than heat. Globally, cold kills many times more people than heat despite fearmongering about warming. Also, contrary to hyperbolic headlines, data for the last 100 years show that deaths from extreme weather have dropped by 90%.

"When policymakers focus exclusively on carbon dioxide and hypothetical climate harms, populations are denied the tools to manage real threats: infectious disease, hunger, dirty water, unsafe housing.

“ 'It is vital that governments focus on real pollutants, not imagined ones...,' writes Dr. Allen. 'Misguided climate action can be worse than unmitigated climate change.' ”

~ Gregory Wrightstone from his article 'Real Public Health Threats vs. Climate Hysteria'

"The apocalypse was always a decade away. ."

"In 2006, Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth' was peak climate fear-mongering.

"He showed maps of cities underwater, claiming melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica would displace hundreds of millions. He said our maps 'would have to be redrawn.'

[He brought his map porn to New Zealand in 2006,  John Key confessing afterwards "all his buttons had been pushed" having undergone a Damascene conversion at the feet of Al Gore's slides.]

"18 years later, none of it has happened. Not even close. The apocalypse was always a decade away. 

"Meanwhile, the man selling the panic got rich. Very rich. 

"While you were told to feel guilty and lower your standard of living, Al Gore built a $300+ million personal fortune from the climate industrial complex. 

"He became the first 'climate billionaire.' 

"He made his money from: 

• Green investment funds (Generation Investment Management) 
• Board seats & advisory roles 
• Massive speaking fees ($200k+ per speech) 
• Carbon credit trading 

"He didn't save the planet. He monetised your anxiety. 

"The truth is, the predictions were always more profitable than they were accurate."

~ Camus

'Degrowth' says we're running out of land to feed everyone.

 Norman Borlaug says "no."

"Thanks to improved farming techniques, fertiliser, irrigation, genetic modification, and innovators like Norman Borlaug, humanity has massively reduced the amount of land required to feed a person."

More life-giving trends here.

Environmentalism: “Why is it that a point of view that is so false, so impractical, and in my view, so immoral—why has it had such a following?"

"'You’ve just launched a new book...' 

"'I’ll hold it up for you here. It’s called 'A Rebel in Eden,' and its subtitle is 'The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism.' ... 

"'I asked myself the question, “Why is it that a point of view that is so false, so impractical, and in my view, so immoral—why has it had such a following? Why has that following persisted with such intensity for so many decades? What’s that all about?” 

"'The book, in I think a unique way, tries to address that by pursuing two different paths. One is the appeal of environmentalism in some elements of human psychology. And the other is on a parallel track; and that is the popularity of basic premises of environmentalism that go back into Western mythology and Judeo-Christian mythology, way back into antiquity. Many of the core premises of environmentalism are part of the indelible mythological history of the West. And I believe that the roots of environmentalism and the source of its popularity come from both of those sources: from aspects of human psychology, which we can go into a bit; and from this mythological legacy of the West—a mythological legacy that, in many little-understood ways, has transported some of the most radical principles of environmentalism into the 21th century, where they now blossom and flourish.'"

~ Robert Bidinotto from his interview ' The Power of Narrative, with Robert Bidinotto'

"The doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people

"Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth.' ...

"Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. ...

"Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. ... [T]hat anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth'...

"Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people..."

~ Chelsea Follett from her post 'The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth'

"Owners with clearly defined and secure property rights have a strong incentive to care for their land."

"Our dairy farmers are constantly heckled for all manner of environmental ills despite a record unsurpassed anywhere in the world. We focus on minutiae of little consequence instead of extolling the amazing, rich environmental and social value that exists in rural New Zealand. Our total carbon footprint, despite food-miles, is away ahead of the nearest rival.

"Our farmers have set aside and now manage diligently 190,000 hectares of covenanted land under the Queen Elizabeth ll National Trust. That’s an area far bigger than most of our national parks. Riparian planting, steep slope planting, protection of waterways, enhanced wetlands, boosts to diversity increase each year at a surprising rate. Farmers are spending huge numbers of hours working in catchment groups, river care groups, land care groups.

"We need to gather this knowledge, these commitments, this mass of stewardship, this admiration of the family farm, this enhancement of the fabric of our rural communities, and “sell” it to the world’s consumers who have a growing love affair with such noble developments. It is not just empty PR from the Comms team – it's potentially high value marketing that captures hearts and minds as well as wallets.

"We are missing the exciting opportunity to tell the world what a uniquely beautiful and environmentally sound place our food and fibre comes from. We have an amazing story to tell."

~ Owen Jennings from his post 'Keep Those Brands' [emphasis added]

RELATED:

"Private property rights do not just protect us; they provide the strongest possible protection for the environment" - NOT PC

 

The politics of abundance

"Abundance is the opposite of de-growth.

"It reorients politics away from redistributing scarce resources, away from moralising about people’s consumption, to focus instead on production.

"Abundance 'speaks of a cornucopia, all good things for everybody. But the world of abundance has trade-offs, and trade-offs require choices' ... It asks: can we solve our problems with more supply? 

"If there aren’t enough houses, make construction cheaper and build more. The trade-off is that house prices might go down for existing homeowners. If we need more windmills, accept you can’t hold them up with consenting regulation. ...

"The scarcity advocates miss the role of economic growth in solving environmental problems as much as creating them. Rich countries have more re-forested green spaces than poorer countries because they’re not worried about having enough to eat.

"Without exception, countries do better at protecting their ecology as they get richer. If we hadn’t wiped out moa and dodo when we were poor, we would be trying to save them today when we are richer.

"It was scarcity, not abundance that drove them to near extinction.

"Scarcity versus abundance ... [is] the next fault lines of politics."

~ Josie Pagani from her op-ed 'Embracing the opportunities of abundance politics'

"Private property rights do not just protect us; they provide the strongest possible protection for the environment"

Cartoon by Nick Kim 

"The solution is simple: Don't tinker with the procedures for acquiring a Resource Consent. Don't tinker with the Environment Court. Don't 'recraft' the RMA. Don't 'streamline it, don't 'fix' or 'reform' it. 

    "Instead, drive a stake through its heart. [Draw up transitional measures] to reinstate the common law protections of property and environment -- and then get the hell out of the way."

          ~ me, writing 20 years ago in the NZ Herald

"New Zealand has had nearly a decade under the RMA, under planning legislation that abolishes property rights and provides no environmental protection...In doing so we have ignored eight centuries of common law that protects both.

~ me 23 years ago, writing on 'New Zealand's Persecuted Minority: Property Owners' 

"Protection of property rights is amongst the chief reasons for which governments are constituted, yet successive NZ governments over recent years have not only ignored your property rights, but have actively sought to remove them. ...

"New Zealanders who once themselves understood the crucial importance of property rights now seem bemused by their lack, until perhaps they themselves find they can’t build on their own property, can’t cut down their own trees, can’t use their property in ways they always have, or find that control of their property has been passed to someone else … and that someone carries a clip-board and must be called ‘Sir’ … and we must pay that person for the privilege of asking them permission to do what we want to on our own land.
It’s not right.

"Author Ayn Rand once observed that when the productive have to ask permission from the unproductive in order to produce, then you may know that your culture is doomed. Aren’t we there now?

The productive have been asking permission from the unproductive in order to produce … and you haven’t been getting it, have you. Not without a fight. Not without iwi consents. Not without a large legal bill, and several weeks months spent with a consultant.

"There is a litany of projects across the country – projects both large and small --that have never and will never get of the ground – permission having been sought at great time, energy and expense, and permission never having been granted. The number of large infrastructure projects completed in the last ten years can be counted on the fingers of one foot.

"[And there are uncountable small projects, things that you and I would have once attempted], that are just stillborn; never to be tried, as people realise that there’s no point in planning projects and paying for consultants and for permission that will never be granted.

"And there are people who have now realised that their land is no longer their own, since ownership means nothing when you must ask someone else’s permission in order to use that which you own.

"It’s not right.

"We’ve lost our property rights, and we’ve lost the understanding of why property rights are important. What we’re losing is part of our heritage: part of what made the West rich, and part of what protected our freedom, our liberty, and our lives.

...

"The need for a legal framework protecting property has been long ignored or taken for granted by economists and legal theorists of all stripes, but its importance is slowly being re-understood by contemporary thinkers. Tom Bethell’s landmark book 'The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages' traces successes and disasters of history consequent upon the respective recognition or denial of property through the ages: Ireland’s potato famine, the desertification of the Sahara, and the near-disastrous US colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth can all be traced to lack of respect for property.... 

"Bethell identifies four crucial blessings of property that can't easily be recognised in a society lacking the secure, decentralised, private ownership of goods. These are: liberty, justice, peace and prosperity. The argument of [his] book is that private property is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for these highly desirable social outcomes.

"Property rights then give us a firm place to stand deserving of legal protection — a Turangawaewae. Their full legal and constitutional protection is crucial, in order to ensure that their protection is not taken away by arbitrary legislative fiat, as has happened over recent years. ...

"The most glaring recent example of the destruction of property rights by legislative fiat is that of the Resource Management Act (RMA). In all the nearly five-hundred pages of the RMA there is not one reference to property rights — not one! — yet it is people’s property and their use of it with which the RMA deals directly. ...

"Private property rights do not just protect us; they provide the strongest possible protection for the environment, since owners with clearly defined and secure property rights have a strong incentive to care for their own land. Our property rights act like ‘mirrors,’ reflecting back on ourselves the consequences of our own actions.

"[Properly directed, as the common law was once allowed to,] they also give us the power to act as guardians against abuse by others — specific legal power to act against those who would damage the environmental values of our property.

"As property rights are eroded however, people become less willing to invest in good stewardship because they are uncertain as to where the benefits of their labours will finally accrue.

"Most damage to the environment is the result of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ whereby people are encouraged to ‘take the last fish’ or ‘cut down the last tree’ because if they don’t, then someone else will. Property rights solves the ‘tragedy of the commons’ by defining ‘whose tree’ it is, and by giving secure legal protection to those planning longer range by planting trees.

"As Hernando de Soto argues, property rights extend people’s time horizons by allowing them to plan longer-range rather than shorter. In jurisdictions in which property rights are not secure, he writes, it will be observed that people will build their furniture before they build their walls or their roof. The reason for this is that without the protection of property rights, such short-term action is rational: property in such a jurisdiction needs to be kept mobile as property cannot be kept secure. As property rights become more secure time horizons become longer, and planning can become longer range."

~ me, from a 2005 speech on property rights

RELATED:

• 'It's Time to Drive a Stake Through the Heart of the RMA' - Peter Cresswell (2004)
• The problem is not dirty dairying; it's still dirty government (2018)
• How the RMA continues to protect polluters (2015)
• Amy Adams’s meddling dirtier than the dairying (2014)
• The Common Law: How it Protects the Environment – Roger Meiners & Bruce Yandle
• Cue Card Libertarianism -- Common law (2013)
• Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump – Terry Anderson & Pamela Snyder, PERC REPORT
• Without Obstruction, Diversion or Corruption: The Power of Property Rights to Preserve Our Lakes and Rivers – Elizabeth Brubaker, ENVIRONMENT PROBE
• The role of property rights in protecting water quality - Environment Probe
• The state can't protect the environment – markets can – Fred Smith, NOT PC (2017)
• What would Party X do about the environment? Part 2: A Nuisance and a BOR – (2011)
• Environmental Water Markets: Restoring Streams Through Trade – Brandon Scarborough, PERC REPORT

"Blaming climate change for these disasters only deflects attention away from actual causes."

"First, understand Southern California is naturally dry. Its Mediterranean climate means it rarely rains in the summer and has a limited winter rainy season. Three deserts in the region attest to its dry climate. ...
    "While climate alarmists like Michael Mann blame the fires on global warming, December dryness is not unusual. In fact, the January 9th fires were preceded by a 30-day trend of increasing rainfall, but that obviously was not a factor. ... Furthermore, the winter rainy season coincides with the time of the Santa Ana winds ... the winds warm and dry further, typically with a relative humidity below 10% that rapidly dries out the vegetation. ...
    "The region’s last big fire – the December 2017 Thomas Fire – was ignited when Santa Ana winds caused electrical wires to spark.
    "Knowing that natural, lethal fire dangers are always looming for the growing population, the question is whether city and state governments could have been better prepared to minimize ignitions and more efficiently contain a fire’s spread ...
    "Climate alarmists like Michael Mann claim it is the increase of CO2 causing drier conditions that correlates with bigger fires. But the data do not support his fearmongering.
    "An increase in the destruction of property by wildfires better correlates with population growth and the expansion of an electrical grid that is vulnerable to high winds. Increased 1-hour fuels and 10-hour fuels due to land disturbances and poor land management correlate with bigger fires. Increased homeless populations correlates with more ignitions.
    "Blaming climate change for these disasters only deflects attention away from actual causes. Fabrications linking rising CO2 to wildfires should be ignored. Governments must [allow] solutions that will truly protect people and their property from the unstoppable, natural conditions enabling devastating fires."

~ James Steele from his article 'Assigning Responsibility for the Tragic Los Angeles Fires'

"The root cause of today’s wildfires is terrible forest management."

"The solution to dangerous, out-of-control wildfires in California is addressing the root cause: 'excess fuel load' from bad forest management. Focusing on climate change, a minor variable that we 'have no near-term control over, is a craven political ploy. ...
    [T]emperatures have risen 1 degree C in the last 150 years. Is it really possible that that amount of warming makes dangerous wildfires inevitable? No. ... The negative effect of rising global temperatures on California wildfire susceptibility in particular is dubious because past centuries had far more fire-prone climates. The Palmer Drought Index shows only a slight increase in California drought since 1900.
    "Historical evidence shows us that prior to man-made CO2 emissions CA experienced regular 'megadroughts' that could last over a century. The modern era has been very lush by comparison. Even if CA could lower global CO2 levels we could easily suffer a regional drought. ...
    "The root cause of today’s wildfires is terrible forest management. Policymakers have prevented controlled burns, debris clearing, and logging — jacking up the 'fuel load' to incredibly dangerous levels. ... The path forward is simple: focus on the main cause, forest management, which is totally within our control. Stop pretending that lowering CO2 levels would bring about some fire-free paradise–and that it is possible near-term. Stop mandating 'unreliables.' Decriminalise nuclear."

~ Alex Epstein from his post 'Bad Forest Management, and Not Climate Change, is the Root Cause of California Fires'

When the future was something to look forward to

"Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise.... In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.
    "Joan Kron, a journalist and filmmaker born in 1928, recalls sitting on the floor as a little girl, cutting out pictures of ever more streamlined cars from newspaper ads. ‘I was fascinated with car design, these modern cars’, she says. ‘Industrial design was very much on our minds. It wasn’t just to look at. It was bringing us the future.’

"When Disneyland opened in 1955, Tomorrowland embodied the promise of progress. A plaque at the entrance announced ‘a vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements . . . a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come.’
    "Back then, the Year 2000 and the Twenty-first-century were glamorous destinations. Newspaper features and TV documentaries described a future filled with barely imaginable wonders. ...

"As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. Limits replaced expansiveness. Glamour became horror. Progress seemed like a lie.
    "Much has been written about how and why culture and policy repudiated the visions of material progress that animated the first half of the twentieth-century ... Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
    "But the most common explanations for the anti-Promethean backlash fall short. It’s true but incomplete to blame the environmental consciousness that spread in the late sixties. Rising living standards undoubtedly led people to value a pristine environment more highly. But environmental concerns didn’t have to take an anti-Promethean turn. They might have led instead to the expansion of nuclear power or the building of solar energy satellites. Cleaning up smoggy skies and polluted rivers could have been a techno-optimist enterprise. It certainly didn’t require curtailing space exploration. Eco-pessimism itself needs a fuller explanation...."

~ Virginia Postrel from her article 'The world of tomorrow'

 

The Myth of Finite Resources

"Intellectuals, politicians, and journalists treat the idea that capitalism inevitably leads to ecological disaster as an unquestionable truth — ... that free markets cause the destruction of Mother Earth and that we must enact socialist policies to prevent an ecological doomsday scenario. But, what if I told you that economic facts do not buttress this hypothesis at all? And what if I added that an ingenious economist already proved the compatibility of capitalism and environmentalism as early as 1981? ...
    "One of the charges most frequently levelled against capitalism is that this social system must necessarily lead to ecological disaster. After all, the earth’s resources, the eco-socialist argument goes, are finite. Evil capitalists and greedy businessmen will gradually exploit non-renewables until we are doomed because we are out of natural resources. Karl Marx proposed this hypothesis as early as 1867 ...

"Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx believed that the cause for ecological disaster is to be found in the introduction of private property rights. ... Rousseau and Marx’s solution to this alleged problem was the abolition of capitalism and property rights, a solution which has presently been voiced as vociferously as never before by the eco-socialists. ... While reading fairy tales and fables can certainly be an entertaining pastime activity, it is by now about time to return to reality ...

"In a free-market economy, the price of a resource is determined by its scarcity. If a resource becomes more abundant due to an increase in supply and/or a decrease in demand, its price will typically drop. If a given resource, vice versa, becomes more scarce due to a decrease in supply and/or an increase in demand, its price will usually rise. This change in scarcity and price, in turn, affects the behaviour of any rational market participant with an entrepreneurial mindset, producer and consumer alike. In his groundbreaking monograph, 'The Ultimate Resource,' American economist Julian L. Simon observes, 'Heightened scarcity causes prices to rise. The higher prices present opportunity and prompt inventors and entrepreneurs to search for solutions.' In a capitalist society, the depletion of a nonrenewable resource is prevented by three emerging patterns of behaviour, all of them caused by the increase in the resource’s price.
    "[Between them, rising prices and] the profit motive offer an incentive to the rational businessman to obtain and store more units of the nonrenewable resource in question. ... and to start developing substitutes for the nonrenewable resource in question ... [Meanwhile] the desire to economise motivates rational buyers to become less dependent on the nonrenewable resource in question. ...

"Ultimately, there is only one resource which is necessary to replenish all others, namely the human mind. It is for this reason that Julian Simon chose to name his groundbreaking study 'The Ultimate Resource.' 'The main fuel to speed the world’s progress,' he explains, 'is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, hopeful people—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit.' ...

"The eco-socialists are undoubtedly right in pointing out that the earth contains only a certain amount of nonrenewable resources in a fixed quantity. ...  More importantly, though, the eco-socialist errs in concluding that natural resources must be finite because the earth contains them in a limited quantity. Rather, in a free-market economy, as the resource becomes more scarce the price of the natural resource increases. Changes in producer and consumer patterns, in turn, prevent its depletion. In Simon’s words, 'Population growth and increase of income expand demand, forcing up prices of natural resources. The increased prices trigger the search for new supplies [or substitutes, and provides more human capital for the search and investigation.] Eventually new sources and substitutes are found.' ...

"The key economic problem of a socialist economy [however] is that the price of a resource will not rise if it becomes more scarce. Price ceilings effectively prevent an increase in price, thereby demotivating businessmen from increasing their production of non-renewables, and/or developing substitutes for them. The result, as can be witnessed in socialist countries all over the globe, are shortages and famines.
    "Thus, if people are truly concerned with the potential depletion of finite resources, they should start questioning their political convictions. The solution to preventing the exhaustion of the earth’s resources are not government controls but free markets and free minds. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, 'If concern with [the environment] and human suffering were the [eco-socialists]’ motive, they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance'.”

~ Martin Hooss from his post 'The Myth of Nonrenewable Resources'

RELATED POSTS

• Why We Need Private Property to Deal with Scarce Resources - Patrick Barron, NOT PC
• Environmentalism Refuted - George Reisman, MISES DAILY 
• Some propositions on property rights – and IP - NOT PC