Green fanatics v. the facts of economic growth

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
30 June 2008

Because I am in the process of packing and moving I have had no time to write articles for this week’s edition. This is why I am posting previously published articles. However, these articles have been chosen because their content is still highly relevant. The following article was published on 12 February 2007.

Rabid ‘conservationists’ have to a certain degree successfully implanted in the public mind the idea that the capitalism is the environment’s number one enemy; that without the wise intervention of politicians capitalism would ruthlessly plunder the planet, exhaust its natural resources and leave a legacy of pollution that would be an environmental nightmare. And why? Because of the greed and stupidity of a profit-driven system that selfishly pursued “growth at any cost”.

Terrifying, isn’t it? Fortunately there isn’t a word of truth in any of these green accusations. Yet this absurd anti-growth propaganda is uncritically accepted by the mass of journalists and teachers despite heaps of evidence to the contrary.

So why do greens deliberately ignore evidence that favours growth? Ideology is the answer. Green fundamentalists and fellow travelling journalists consciously ignore the lessons of history while sneering at the insights of economics. History is treated like a leper and economics is presented as cold-hearted rationalism, an ideological tool used to promote profit at the expense of people and the environment. What is needed, they claim, is ‘sustainable development’(read mass poverty).

Bob Brown is a typical green fanatic whose ignorance of economic growth is constantly on display. This was the genius who maligned the development of Tasmania’s natural resources as “resource robbery”; pulp mills, zinc mills, aluminium smelters, mining, logging etc., are all “dinosaur industries” (sic) according to this genius (The Australian, Letters, 27 September 1991). It does not matter a dam to him and his fellow greens that Tasmania has an economic advantage in these industries and that they are not only vital to Tasmania’s development but also to Australia’s economic well-being.

It doesn’t matter to the greens that these industries significantly raise living standards and that without them living standards would be primitive. Clearly a world without these industries would not be post-industrial, as claimed by Brown, but primitive. The Greens don’t care that investment in these industries would significantly raise living standards; they seem intellectually incapable of grasping the fact that these are actually resource generating industries that are located at the higher stages of production. To suggest that shutting down any one of them would make Australia more prosperous should be too ludicrous for words — but not, unfortunately, for most lefty journalists.

These higher stages of production provide vital inputs for all the lower stages of production. If, for instance, there was no logging at all then all processes dependent on wood products as inputs would collapse. You don’t have to be brilliant to realise that reducing the flow of these inputs would raise prices, cut output, investment and jobs, One only has to look at what happened to America’s North West and the price of timber or examine the effects of Clinton’s recycling policy on newsprint to see the truth of this statement.

In the greens’ utopia industry will be small-scale and labour-intensive; water, wind and solar power will replace central power generation; communities will be small, largely ,self-sufficient and the large-scale division of labour will be a thing of the past. But our ancestors once lived in such an ‘idyllic society’ — it was called Medieval Europe where poverty was abject and life for the masses was “...poor, nasty brutish and short.” It was economic growth that lifted the Western masses out of the misery and poverty of the Middle Ages and gave them the highest living standards in history. Living standards vastly superior to that enjoyed by any medieval monarch or eastern despot..

Even so-called hard-headed scientists can get caught up in green fantasies. Back in 1990 Dr Brian Robinson, then chairman of the EPA, attacked 200 years of economic development, calling it “regrettable.” He was then reported as spouting the usual green gibberish about pollution and the Earth’s dwindling resources. In short, Dr Robinson’s address was an undisguised attack on economic growth and Australian living standards

And yet growth is the only hope the poor of the Third World have: It is the only thing that can save them from famine, child labour and backbreaking work in the fields, from premature aging and from the degradation that goes hand-in-hand with abject poverty. To attack growth is to attack the poor. These attacks are particularly sickening when they are made by affluent middle class professionals, bureaucrats and politicians. Do they really think our prosperity is some mysterious act of nature? That it was always so? Where do they think it came from? The truth is that the Bob Browns are as ignorant of economics and economic history as are most of our churchmen, journalists, teachers and politicians.

Let the historical record speak for the defence. The population of England grew from 1.5 million in 1066 to about 4.8 million in 1348; but by 1377 the Black Death had slashed the population to something like 2.8 million. (Incidentally, this caused a dramatic increase in real wages.) By 1600 the population of England and Wales had climbed to 5 million, where it stabilised until 1700; population growth then began to accelerate, rising to 6 million by 1750.

The country’s first census in 1801 put the population of England and Wales at 9 million; by 1831 it was 16 million and by 1845 it had reached 28 million. Mass immigration to America and the colonies greatly understated the true rate of population growth. If the greens were right about population then the poorest countries would be the most heavily populated. So how about this: The UK has 638 people per square mile, Holland 1,213, Japan 830 and Belgium 877. For China and India it is about 216 and 335.

I rest my case