It's that time again, and this seems to be a plague year for environmental psychoses. Even the empty headed upper crust socialites have jumped on the tacky green bandwagon, yet again showing their total lack of style or grace.

There are two main points I have been pressing about this disease: one is that the activists have no true concern for the environment - the real environment not the mythical one they agonize about, and the other is that the predictions of pundits and activists are simply laughable, yet we do not hold them accountable when their hysterical predictions are shown by the passage of time to be every bit as insane as wiser commentators noted when those predictions were made.

It's not about the environment, it's merely politics.

For a classic account of the idiocy of this quasi-religious political festival see this old Ron Bailey article from 2000. Earth Day, Then and Now.

How did the doomsters get so many predictions so wrong on the first Earth Day? Their mistake can be handily summed up in Paul Ehrlich and John Holdern's infamous I=PAT equation. Impact (always negative) equals Population x Affluence x Technology, they declared. More people were always worse, by definition. Affluence meant that rich people were consuming more of the earth's resources, a concept that was regularly illustrated by claiming that the birth of each additional baby in America was worse for the environment than 25, 50, or even 60 babies born on the Indian subcontinent. And technology was bad because it meant that humans were pouring more poisons into the biosphere, drawing down more nonrenewable resources and destroying more of the remaining wilderness.

We now know that Ehrlich and his fellow travelers got it backwards. If population were necessarily bad, then Brazil, with less than three-quarters the population density of the U.S., should be the wealthier society. As far as affluence goes, it is clearly the case that the richer the country, the cleaner the water, the clearer the air, and the more protected the forests. Additionally, richer countries also boast less hunger, longer lifespans, lower fertility rates, and more land set aside for nature. Relatively poor people can't afford to care overmuch for the state of the natural world.

With regards to technology, Ehrlich and other activists often claim that economists simply don't understand the simple facts of ecology. But it's the doomsters who need to update their economics--things have changed since the appearance of Thomas Malthus' 200-year-old An Essay on the Principle of Population, the basic text that continues to underwrite much apocalyptic rhetoric. Malthus hypothesized that while population increases geometrically, food and other resources increased arithmetically, leading to a world in which food was always in short supply. Nowadays, we understand that wealth is not created simply by combining land and labor. Rather, technological innovations greatly raise positive outputs in all sorts of ways while minimizing pollution and other negative outputs.

Indeed, if Ehrlich wants to improve his sorry record of predictions and his understanding of how to protect the natural world, he should walk across campus to talk with his Stanford University colleague, economist Paul Romer. "New Growth Theory," devised by Romer and others, shows that wealth springs from new ideas and new recipes. Romer sums it up this way: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply." In other words, new ideas and technological recipes grow exponentially at a rate much faster than population does.

This bit follows a lengthy account of the specific prediction failures of the eco-whackos of the 70s, and the echo-whackos we had then (2000) and still have today. They are stuck on stupid, or at least think that you are so stupid that they can panic you into allowing their inimical political agenda to be enacted.

My fear is that they may be right, that you are so stupid that you will support them. This would be a double tragedy in my view since we would not only be much more poorly governed than the current inadequate level, environmental problems would also be worsened. We have real problems and threats, but the way to deal with them is to face them squarely and overcome them, not to retreat from them. If we turn tail they'll just ride us down and hack us to bits.

OTOH this is exceedingly unlikely. We don't have any institutions so powerful that they can suppress our native good sense enough to bring about such a defeat, and we are too querulous to allow such institutions to form. The worst that can happen is that some unspeakable opportunists will prosper at the margins and progress will be proportionately retarded, as in Europe for example. Developing countries won't stand for it and the US is too diverse and liberated to make more than a token gesture, a little feel good posing to satisfy the intellectually impoverished urban fashion victims.

This too shall pass.