Competitive Enterprise Institute Challenges Radical Environmentalism

By Austin Ruse

     (NEW YORK – C-FAM)  The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) believes the modern environmental movement "cannot afford a single smelly orthodoxy to which all must conform." In its just released "Earth Report 2000," CEI says "the environmental movement is either a serious moral and intellectual inquiry or it is not. If it is serious, it must consider arguments on all sides of a question – it is not enough to jump to preloved and predesired conclusions."

     CEI's report, subtitled "Revisiting the True State of the Planet," makes the case that in a number of areas the conventional environmental wisdom may be wrong. And the report calls for a fairer hearing of scientific fact that some may consider politically incorrect.

     In global warming, for instance, CEI admits that ground-based temperature measurements "have shown a warming of the planet of about 0.1 to 0.15 degrees per decade in the last century." But they point out that these measurements are based on computer models that may be faulty and that far more accurate measurements using "microwave sounding units" aboard satellites actually show a slight per decade cooling of the planet.

     The fear of reducing cropland around the world may also be misplaced. According to CEI, "the amount of arable permanent cropland worldwide has been increasing at a slow but relatively steady rate over the past 15 years." It is a 20th Century phenomenon that mankind has increased its crop production on land already under cultivation rather than clearing new land. "This has resulted in saving 10 million square miles — the total area of North America – of rain forests, wetlands, and mountain terrain from being plowed down," says the report.

     These scares about global warming and world starvation have been the staples of arguments for aggressive population control. Yet, in an essay by noted Harvard scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, even the fear of overpopulation is unfounded. According to Eberstadt, also connected to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, the real problem facing mankind in the 21st Century will be depopulation.

     Eberstadt admits that global population growth "continues at an extraordinary tempo." But he says this "population explosion" is the result entirely of health improvements and of life expectancy. "World population increased not because people were breeding like rabbits, but because they stopped dying like flies," says Eberstadt.

     Eberstadt reports that "as the twenty-first century commences, the tempo of population growth looks to be in unmistakable decline." The growth rate, for instance, has declined a full percentage point from 2.2 percent in 1960 to where it is today. This has occurred for a reason almost entirely new to the human race — "secular fertility decline" — which is "sustained and progressive reductions in family size due to deliberate birth control practices."

     Eberstadt reports that "almost half the world's population is thought to live in countries characterized by subreplacement fertility," that is, the phenomenon whereby countries no longer replace their own populations. The danger is that "we do not know how far below replacement national fertility can go, or how long it can stay below the replacement level."

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