Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [15]
“A lightbulb when off in my head,” says Hayward. “I thought to myself, ‘What if I did that same treatment for the environment?’ It’s mostly good news in the U.S., only nobody knows about it. Air pollution is falling, most everything is getting better. Most of the data show improvements, and most of the causes of those improvements are economic growth and technology.” As Hayward put it in the introduction to the 2007 edition, “Above all, this index is designed to shine a spotlight on, and deepen our understanding of, environmental progress—the side of the environmental story that is seldom told.”
The media tends, naturally, to run to green groups for information on the environment. But Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Worldwatch Institute are not objective watchdog organizations, which is how the press often presents them. They have an agenda, and it involves presenting worst-case scenarios for their shock value. A little-publicized Greenpeace faux pas that occurred in 2006 is instructive. The group inadvertently posted an unfinished press release on its Web site, which read in part, “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FAC-TOID HERE].”
Green groups are interest groups, too, and as such they tend to present the public with biased information. “My concern,” writes the statistician Bjorn Lomborg, “is the asymmetric flow of information that comes from [the media] trusting environmental organizations without the healthy critical angle one would normally put forward had the organizations been, for instance, business conglomerates.”
But the bigger problem than bias is that the information coming from these groups is often dead wrong. “The key environmental indicators are increasingly negative,” says a 1999 Worldwatch Institute report, even though that statement was plainly untrue at the time and remains so today. According to Hayward’s recent indices, the amount of toxic chemicals used in U.S. industry has declined by 60 percent since 1988. Between 1976 and 2001, ambient air pollution levels for lead have dropped by 97 percent; carbon monoxide levels have fallen by 72 percent; and sulfur dioxides by 67 percent.
It gets better. The amount of forest land in the United States actually increased between 1990 and 2002, after being stable since 1920. Between 1982 and 2003, soil erosion rates fell by 43 percent, and the use of “conservation tillage” techniques—to help preserve soil—is more widespread today than ever and continues to expand, so much so that between 1989 and 2004, the percentage of cropland acres that were not tilled at all increased from 5.1 to 22.6.
On the global warming front, CO2 emissions are still rising, but their rate of growth in the United States is declining. Between 1992 and 2000—during the Clinton administration—CO2 emissions rose 12.8 percent. If current trends hold, between 2000 and 2009—during the Bush administration—they will have grown by half that amount. What’s more, the United States has lowered methane emissions substantially in recent years, by 12.8 percent since the 1990 base line year used in the Kyoto Protocol. “This is significant, ” reports Hayward, “because methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2—23 times more potent, according to most estimates. The reduction in methane emissions of approximately 4 million tons since 1990 represents the equivalent of a reduction in CO2 emissions of about 90 million tons.”
The greens would have you believe that America’s population growth and economic prosperity come at the expense of our ecosystem. That’s a curious notion given that the aforementioned positive environmental trends have coincided with tremendous U.S. economic growth. In inflation-adjusted (2000) dollars, the nation’s GDP increased by some 227 percent between 1967 and 2006, which, if anything, suggests a positive correlation