Would Someone Please Tell That Greta Kid

We’ve Just Had the Best Decade in Human History. Seriously

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news

Matt Ridley
The Spectator


Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

NZ: Increasingly A Closed, Controlled Economy

The Objection Industry

The benighted Resource Management Act ("RMA") was sold to the electorate as a way to achieve economic growth in a manner consistent with responsible resource management.  It has proved to be nothing of the kind.  As so many legislative overreaches demonstrate, the RMA does the exact opposite to its stated intent.  It has been used to stop development in its tracks while a very expensive, litigious court process inches forward, adding costs by the day.

At root, the RMA undermines property rights.  What is mine is no longer mine; it is owned substantially not by the legal owner, but the "community".  Others now have a property right that warrants them (via the courts) deciding when and how one's property may be deployed, exploited, and used. 

Duncan Garner, writing in Stuff, excoriates the RMA, writing up just one case.  It involves an RMA-meddling local council.  The council is unnamed.  That's deliberately done (see below).  One presumes the reporting is accurate.

Letter From New Zealand (About NZ)

FranO'Sullivan Writes a Speech for the PM

Who owns what: for an answer, start here

By Fran O'Sullivan

NZ Herald

Saturday Sep 15, 2012

Mr Speaker, I rise today in this House to introduce legislation to vest all natural resources - water, geothermal steam, airwaves, aquifers and, for the avoidance of doubt, all minerals, ironsands, magma, rare earth deposits, coal, lignite, methane and uranium in this country and the exclusive economic zone that surrounds our shores - in a new Crown entity representing the combined interests of all the people of New Zealand.

Mr Speaker, my Government considers natural resources like water, geothermal steam, and the aquifers that underpin our rich agricultural plains to be public goods that are part of the common wealth of all New Zealanders.

Catching Australia, Part II

The "Luck" Won't Last

Just how substantial is Australia's competitive advantage.  Huge--in every respect.  At least that is the received wisdom.  But some Australian's beg to differ. 

Here is a decidedly negative view out of Sydney.  See what you think.

More Swamps Than Christchurch

The Liquifaction of the Left

One of the most destructive carnards concreted into the mind of greenism and environmentalism is the proposition that natural resources are fixed, finite, and limited. Once gone, they are gone forever. Therefore, conservation of said resources is a moral imperative.

Statists warm to this proposition reflexively, that is, without thinking. To conserve on a grand scale requires big government: to regulate, limit, control, restrict, order, prescribe, proscribe, and ban. Without such a big intrusion into the lives and endeavours of citizens, disaster will fall upon the entire race. Therefore, statists join the moral crusade. Advocating for big-brother government suddenly makes one morally good. Saving the planet and saving humanity has a nice moral ring to it, making big government itself a moral imperative.

Socialists likewise find the proposition of limited resources needing to be conserved a convenient doctrine. It justifies pre-emptive property rights of the state over private citizens. It also gives moral cover to advocating for more government taxation and expropriation to fund things like "green industries" and "green energy". You just have to take a glance at President Obama's "new" energy strategy. Instead of "drill, baby drill" it is "spin, baby, spin", referring of course to the windmills he is spending billions of dollars worth of citizen's property to manufacture and deploy.

So, we have the ideological Grand Coalition of our times: greenists, environmentalists, statists, and socialists. Ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for "the Left".

There is one small problem. This monumental intellectual and political construction is built upon a simple fallacy, known as the fallacy of composition. It beggars belief that in a world self-proclaimed to be so smart and so rational that the very same wise-in-their-own-estimation are actually operating with a grand intellectual and political edifice built on more swamps than Christchurch, or more volcanoes than Auckland.

The fallacy of composition assumes or asserts that the attributes of the parts must sum to the attribute of the whole. In this case, since each specific natural resource is clearly finite, natural resources as a whole must, therefore, be finite. Once you explode this childish error, the modern moral edifice for greenism, statism, and socialism is largely exploded, revealing beneath the actual rictal grin of an immoral lust for control and power over the earth and mankind. Babylon redivivus.

So, let's explode the fallacy. It was neatly done by Sheik Yamani of OPEC when he ironically opined that the steam age did not end for lack of wood (a finite natural resource); the coal age did not end for lack of coal; nor will the oil age end for lack of oil. Technological advances made steam and coal redundantly superfluous. The whole is gloriously far more than the sum of the parts in this case.

To change the analogy: imagine a dining room table on which a finite number of apples is placed every evening for the meal. More and more people come to eat every evening so it is obvious that the size of everyone's meal will reduce, assuming everyone gets a turn at the table. Until one evening, the table has not just apples, but oranges on it. Then pears are added. Then . . . you get the point. While each of the foods is finite and limited, by being able to add more types of foods, the supply of food becomes functionally limitless. The attributes of the part are not necessarily the attributes of the whole. Schoolboy error.

At this point the Grand Coalition usually retreats to moral mutterings about the need to be prudent, and careful, and risk-averse. All of those Yamani examples are in the past. We face the future. The planet is at stake. It more prudent to conserve rather than consume, we are gravely told. In fact the opposite is more likely. The more society conserves, under the nannying aegis of the Grand Coalition insisting on what's best for us all, the less likely replacements are to be found through technological innovation, enterprise, creativity, and skills. In other words the Grand Coalition's doctrine of finite resources requiring conservation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Grand Coalition gets for us all what it has asked for.

Now we know there is currently no shortage of oil in the world. But there is an actual shortage of supply because the Grand Coalition insists upon restricting it. Facing the apples on the table, believing that starvation awaits, the Coalition insists on reducing the number of apples available and putting some into storage (for when the apples run out). The only people benefiting from this nannying prudishness are the apple growers, who find that the price of their apples rises and rises, because they are now in "shorter" supply. "See, we told you that was going to happen," shriek the harridans of the Grand Coalition.

The Wall Street Journal has just provided us with a perfect case study of the myopic, ignorant stupidity of the Left and the great damage they do to mankind. It is a case of technological innovation that looks to make oil increasingly redundant. It is but one illustration of how, when it comes to natural resources, the whole is very definitely far greater than the sum of the parts.

In the early 1980s, George P. Mitchell, a Houston-based independent energy producer, could see that his company was going to run out of natural gas. Almost three decades later, the results of his effort to do something about the problem are transforming America's energy prospects and the calculations of analysts around the world.

Back in those years, Mr. Mitchell's company was contracted to deliver a substantial amount of natural gas from Texas to feed a pipeline serving Chicago. But the reserves on which he depended were running down, and it was not at all clear where he could find more gas to replace the depleting supply. Mr. Mitchell had a strong hunch, however, piqued by a geology report that he had read recently.

Perhaps the natural gas that was locked into shale—a dense sedimentary rock—could be freed and made to flow. He was prepared to back up his hunch with investment. The laboratory for his experiment was a sprawling geologic formation called the Barnett Shale around Dallas and Fort Worth. Almost everyone with whom he worked was skeptical, including his own geologists and engineers. "You're wasting your money," they told him over the years. But Mr. Mitchell kept at it.

The payoff came a decade and a half later, at the end of the 1990s. Using a specialized version of a technique called hydraulic fracturing (now widely known as "fracking" or "fracing"), his team found an economical way to create or expand fractures in the rock and to get the trapped gas to flow. . . .

As late as 2000, shale gas was just 1% of American natural-gas supplies. Today, it is about 25% and could rise to 50% within two decades. Estimates of the entire natural-gas resource base, taking shale gas into account, are now as high as 2,500 trillion cubic feet, with a further 500 trillion cubic feet in Canada. That amounts to a more than 100-year supply of natural gas, which is used for everything from home heating and cooking to electric generation, industrial processes and petrochemical feedstocks. . . .

In the energy industry, use of the new technology quickly gathered speed. The know-how was applied across North America, in such shale formations as Haynesville, mostly in Louisiana; Eagle Ford in South Texas; Woodford in Oklahoma; Horn River and Montney in British Columbia; Duvernay in Alberta; and the "mighty Marcellus," the huge formation that spreads from Pennsylvania and New York down into West Virginia.

Gas output rose dramatically, and the anticipated shortfall turned into a large surplus. As the volume rose, the inevitable happened—prices came down. Substantially. Today, natural-gas prices are less than half of what they were just three years ago.

Suddenly there are not just apples on the table, but now oranges. This pattern has been repeated for centuries. The only impediment is the wowsers of the Grand Coalition, who believe they know what is best for us all. Bless their little cotton socks.

When Christians realise the entire edifice of the Grand Coalition rests upon a basic schoolboy error in inductive reasoning the more distasteful the niggardly faux morality of the Grand Coalition becomes. Moreover, as Christians come to understand and believe in the superabundant generosity of the Living God manifested in the reckless, prodigal, super-abundance of His creation for our exploitation and enjoyment, the insult to the injury becomes detestable.

Money, Greed, and God--Part IX

An Inexhaustible Resource

The eighth myth—and last of the economic myths discussed by Richards in his book Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem is the Freeze Frame Myth which assumes that natural resources in aggregate are fixed and limited and that eventually the human race is going to run out of them.

This is a very important chapter. Much of modern apocalyptic scaremongering turns around the belief in the finite nature of resources. The world will be in crisis when oil runs out, for example. Or, water will become all used up and all living things will die.

Most often this myth is related to scaremongering about population growth—the more people, the more quickly scarce natural resources will be consumed. It appears such a common-sense assertion that once uttered, few doubt its truth. The solution usually offered is to restrict and control population growth by persuasion or compulsion, and to lower living standards so that everyone consumes less, thereby conserving for future generations.

Richards writes:

Whenever I speak about environmental issues, I always get asked about the “fact” that we're depleting the earth's resources. But it's not a fact. The truth, despite untutored common sense, is just the opposite. As long as we can preserve our economic freedom and the spirit of enterprise, we will not use up all our resources, nor will be run out of food, water, or energy. (Richards, p.185)

There are two kinds of natural resources—renewable and non-renewable. Trees are an example. Water is another, since it is naturally recycled. Other resources, such as oil, are finite and non-renewable. Once all the oil is used up, that's it—at least as far as oil is concerned. But some qualifications are required.

In the first place, we do not know how much copper, gold, iron, or oil resources exist. All we know at any one time is what we know. Discovering additional reserves costs money. What is very clear, however, is that when consumption rises or supplies shrink, the price increases. Higher prices justify funding additional exploration, mining and extraction. In addition, known sources of oil (for example oil-shale and oil sands) which hitherto have been ignored because of higher costs of extraction suddenly become economic to exploit with oil prices being higher.

Known reserves tell us how much it's worth to know about right now, not how much total oil there is to discover or exploit. We can be confident that we're nowhere near running out of oil simply because oil companies aren't hoarding oil and the price of gasoline isn't a million dollars a gallon. (Richards, p.187)

Moreover, as prices for oil rise, investing in substitutes becomes economically justified. So, alternative energy sources are investigated and developed. (No government initiatives or plans or programmes are required.) Under the personal property and free trade system that's what has always happened. Everybody that shops in the supermarket looking for the best deals understands this dynamic. So, as prices for oil rise, so does its supply as new and known reserves are exploited. Moreover, new (replacement) sources of energy are discovered and developed.

In fact, people in every era of recorded history have worried about running out of whatever resource they're using at the time. England began to experience lumber shortages in the 1600's. They got so severe in the 1700's tha the island came close to being stripped of its forests. People feared a complete loss of wood. So what happened? Wood became too costly to use as a fuel in most places. That encouraged innovation with other resources, like coal. The English eventually switched to coal, and over time, English forests returned. . . .

So after the switch to coal, did all of England rest easy and quit worrying about running out of resources? Hardly. In 1865, a prominent social scientist named W. Stanley Jevons wrote a book proving to his satisfaction that England would soon exhaust its coal, and the economy would grind to a halt. It didn't happen, and there's still plenty of coal available more than 140 years later.

Did such experiences teach the doomsayers to qualify their warnings? Nope. The same unqualified claims of disaster quickly emerged with petroleum as well and have continued down to the present, despite one prediction after another biting the oil-stained dust. (Richards, p. 190f)

As Sheik Yamani, founder of OPEC put it, “The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but nor for a lack of oil”.

Moreover, when it comes to energy, the earth is not a closed system. Every day more energy pours onto the earth's surface via the sun. But how to harness it—that is the problem? It is always the same problem—and human ingenuity and knowledge and skill is required to solve it. But, with those magic ingredients there currently is, nor will there be, a shortage of resources. A Chinese proverb says, “if you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people.”

We conclude this series of posts, leaving the last word to Richards:

We know market economies grow. So why do we often fall for claims that contradict what we already know? Because we forget what late economist Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource”--the creative imagination of human being living in a free society. The more human beings in free societies there are, the more inventors, producers, problem solvers, and creators there are to transform material resources and to create new resources. Man, not matter, is the ultimate resource.

This is the most important economic truth, and Christians should have expected it all along. It's ironic that a nonreligious economist like Julian Simon would see that truth so clearly, while so many of our Christian leaders miss it.

One Christian leader who didn't miss it was Pope John Paul II. In his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, he said, “Indeed, beside the earth, man's principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth's productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied”. Read that again: “Man's principal resource is man himself”. Grasp that, and you'll know why we're not going to run out of resources. (Richards, p. 206,7)

Such a stirring and hopeful reality does not lead us to place our hope in man. For it is God Himself Who has endowed man with such gifts and appointed him as His sub-creator. Remove God from the operating world-view and hope eventually translates into fear and the counsels of despair.That is why , in our day, we live amidst a Culture of Catastrophism and superstitious dread, two hundred and fifty years after the Enlightenment first "banished" God from Nature, and asserted the autonomy of the human mind.