Ray Harvey

The population of the entire world could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space about the size of Jacksonville, Florida.

Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s land surface is empty.

If you allotted to each person 1,250 square feet (which is quite a bit), all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, world food supplies exceed requirements in all world areas, amounting to a surplus approaching 50% in 1990 in the developed countries, and 17% in the developing regions.

Problems commonly blamed on ‘overpopulation’ are the result of bad economic policy. For example, Western journalists blamed the Ethiopian famine on ‘overpopulation,’ but that was simply not true. The Ethiopian government caused it by confiscating the food stocks of traders and farmers and exporting them to buy arms. That country’s leftist regime, not its population, caused the tragedy. In fact, Africa, beset with problems often blamed on ‘overpopulation,’ has only one-fifth the population density of Europe, and has an unexploited food-raising potential that could feed twice the present population of the world, according to estimates by Roger Revelle of Harvard and the University of San Diego. Economists writing for the International Monetary Fund in 1994 said that African economic problems result from excessive government spending, high taxes on farmers, inflation, restrictions on trade, too much government ownership, and over-regulation of private economic activity. There was no mention of overpopulation.

The government of the Philippines relies on foreign aid to control population growth, but protects monopolies which buy farmers’ outputs at artificially low prices, and sell them inputs at artificially high prices, causing widespread poverty. Advocates of population control blame “overpopulation” for poverty in Bangladesh. But the government dominates the buying and processing of jute, the major cash crop, so that farmers receive less for their efforts than they would in a free market. Impoverished farmers flee to the city, but the government owns 40% of industry and regulates the rest with price controls, high taxes and unpublished rules administered by a huge, corrupt, foreign-aid dependent bureaucracy (Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun).

The world’s population is expected to max out at around 8 billion by 2050. Then it starts to decline.

That’s when the real trouble begins.

From the moment oil first made it into the mainstream, peak oil and the imminent depletion of fossil fuels have been vehemently predicted.

A by-no-means exhaustive list of those predictions might run something like this:

“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the last twenty, and will probably characterize the next ten or twenty years, is nevertheless, not only geologically but historically, a temporary and vanishing phenomenon – one which young men will live to see come to its natural end” (1886, J.P. Lesley, state geologist of Pennsylvania).

“There is little or no chance for more oil in California” (1886, U.S. Geological Survey).

“There is little or no chance for more oil in Kansas and Texas” (1891, U.S. Geological Survey).

“Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, perhaps a ten-year supply” (1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines).

“Reserves to last only thirteen years” (1939, Department of the Interior).

“Reserves to last thirteen years” (1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division).

“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).

“At the present rate of use, it is estimated that coal reserves will last 200 more years. Petroleum may run out in 20 to 30 years, and natural gas may last only another 70 years” (Ralph M. Feather, Merrill textbook Science Connections Annotated Teacher’s Version, 1990, p. 493).

“At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil … will be used up within your lifetime” (1993, The United States and its People).

“The supply of fossil fuels is being used up at an alarming rate. Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use” (Merrill/Glenco textbook, Biology, An Everyday Experience, 1992).

(Give particular heed to that last sentence.)

Quotes like these could fill a thousand pages easily.

There comes a point, however — and we reached it long ago — when one needs to stop swallowing these scare-mongering scenarios.

There comes a point when one needs to look at the entire history of doomsday predictions and learn something from their long and undistinguished history of incontrovertible failure.

There comes a point, finally, when one needs to question what motivates these people.

To the millions of you who believe the latest round of dire forecasts, I ask you this in all seriousness:

What do you really think — that all the other apocalyptic predictions and predictors, over all the centuries and millennium, were wrong, but people like James Howard Kunstler and Richard Heinberg have at last got it right?

The fact is that anyone can say whatever she wants about anything. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true.

The 1970s book Limits to Growth, for instance, is chock full of reams of “hard data” proving mass famine and the end of the world as we know it — all to occur in a just couple of short decades from when it was written — but none of it came to pass. Not one word of it.

Thomas Malthus’s economic predictions of population-caused famines also failed stupendously, and Malthus himself — a guru of present-day environmentalists — eventually came to reject his early writings. No matter:

This doesn’t stop neo-Malthusians like environmental high priest Lester Brown from forecasting a “2004 or 2005 worldwide famine.”

Or Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University laying “even odds that by the year 2000 Great Britain will no longer exist.”

Neither does it stop any of the endless predictions concerning global warming, species extinction, or forest depletion — for instance, the famous statement made by biologist Norman Myers, which sent environmentalists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes, that “2 percent of all tropical forest was being destroyed per year,” and that by “2000 we will have lost a third of the world’s tropical forest” (Myers cited in Goudie 1993:46), which flew so far afield it would be laughable were it not so sickening.

(The Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] puts tropical deforestation in the 1980s at 0.8 percent. In 2001, satellite imagery, which is precise, shows that tropical deforestation had declined to 0.46 percent.)

The history of humankind is replete with false prognostications. It’s time to ask why these predictions are not only always wrong but why they are always so spectacularly wrong.

Here is a crux:

In calculating the amount of natural resources, whether the resource is fossil fuel, crude oil, bauxite, bitumen, gold, or anything else, there is a vital principle at work; it is a principle that doomers of all persuasions have failed to discover and no longer, I think, have the capacity to grasp:

“No matter how closely it is defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not fully known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed. Even if the quantities of a particular resource were exactly known, such measurements would not be meaningful, because humans have a near-limitless capacity for developing additional ways to meet our needs: developing fiber optics, for instance, instead of copper wire …” (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2. Emphasis mine.)

The following is another secret about natural resources, which any legitimate graph or study will confirm:

The more a resource is used, the more that the supply of that resource increases.

It will sound counterintuitive, but only at first. Here’s why:

We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use the resource. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity. The more we use of it, the more adept we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more of it we use, the more of it we’re able to find.

The whole history of resource supply-and-demand has followed this exact principle.

Fossil fuel is no exception:

Observe any non-biased chart on the subject, and it will show that over the last century, oil supply has risen significantly, not diminished, as has virtually every other resource, so long as we’ve continued using it.

Quoting Peter Huber and Mark Mills:

Most of what people think they know about energy is so very wrong that their convictions, heartfelt though they may be, lie beyond logical contradiction or refutation….What most of us think about energy supply is wrong. Energy supplies are unlimited; it is energetic order that’s scarce, and the order in energy that’s expensive….Supplies do not ultimately depend on the addition of reserves, the development of new fuels, or the husbanding of known resources. Energy begets more energy; tomorrow’s supply is determined by today’s consumption. The more energy we seize and use, the more adept we become at finding and seizing still more.

What most of us think about energy demand is even more wrong. Our main use of energy isn’t lighting, locomotion, or cooling; what we use energy for, mainly, is to extract, refine, process, and purify energy itself. And the more efficient we become at refining energy in this way, the more we want to use the final product. Thus, more efficient engines, motors, lights, and cars lead to more energy consumption, not less (Peter Huber and Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well).

Some of the real data about fossil fuel is this:

Humanity consumes about 345 Quads of fossil fuel each year. A quad is a quadrillion British Thermal Units.

Of those 345 Quads, the United States consumes approximately 100.

The United States consumes by far the most, but — and here is a fact too often neglected in discussions of U.S. fossil fuel consumption — the United States also produces by far the most.

The inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels, so strenuously predicted since the 1880’s, is a notion that’s invariably built upon a fraudulent premise: it’s built off the data of what today’s technology makes accessible.

This reasoning, as we’ve touched upon already, is demonstrably flawed.

No one seriously disputes that with better technology, and better power, we could retrieve far more [fossil fuel]. We already know where to find centuries’ worth of coal – global deposits hold 200,000 Quads. Oil shale deposits hold 10 Million Quads; heavy oils are already being extracted by brute force from the Canadian Athabasca deposits, and bioengineered bacteria could make the earth’s vast deposits of these oils economically accessible everywhere within a decade or less. Even more abundant is the energy locked up within uranium and other radioactive elements. The world’s oceans contain over 10 trillion Quads’ worth of deuterium, a fuel that we will in due course learn to unlock with nuclear fusion. And nothing very fundamentally new will be required to unlock it (Ibid).

Energy begets energy.

The more energy we use, the better we become at developing, extracting, and refining ever more.

Stopping or even slowing the use of fossil fuel would not, contrary to what you’ve been told, solve this (non-existent) fossil fuel problem: on the contrary, it would bring progress to a grinding halt; but even more than that, it would do so by shutting down the conceptual mind, which is the uniquely human method of survival.

It would blast us back to the stone age.

Which is precisely what many environmentalists, especially those of the better informed variety, want.

There exists no technology that can survey and measure the total quantity of oil and potential oil beneath all the land and sea, including tar sand and shale oil and the conversion of coal to oil.

So where exactly the doomers get their dire predictions is unclear.

What motivates these doomers is even more obscure.

And more frightening.

A quote from The Wall Street Journal, January 2005:

The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.

To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that’s trillion – over a century’s worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.

Please note particularly that last paragraph.

And, while you’re at it, do yourself another big favor:

Ignore all the dire predictions about peak oil and the end of fossil fuels that you’ve been hearing for the last one hundred years.

Ignore the catastrophic scare-mongering that books like The Party’s Over and The Long Emergency propound.

At every point in human history, the individual has been attacked by some government somewhere, on one side of the globe or another, always for the sake of some group or collective.

In this century alone, to cite only a few of the more conspicuous examples, the individual was subordinated in Communist Russia to the proletariat; so too in Communist China, let us forget the millions upon millions of proletarians murdered or imprisoned under these romanticized regimes.

In Nazi Germany, the individual was subordinated to the “superior race.”

In Socialist Europe, in present day Germany and France, “labor” or the masses or The Environment all trump the individual.

In the United States as well claims concerning the environment threaten, as we speak, the individual’s right to her own life and property.

And the scare-mongering only increases: misinformation about fossil fuels has spawned, among a traditionally secular left, such a glut of doomsday predictions that they rival or eclipse any heard from the Religious Right — the only real difference being, instead of telling us to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” we’re told “learn to conserve and farm, for the end of the industrial society is at hand.”

But whether secular or non-secular, dogma is dogma, oppression is oppression, and the misguided doomsday predictions we hear from environmentalists are ultimately every bit as misbegotten as any doomsday predictions we hear from the Religious Right – and, one might well add, ultimately just as banal.

In one form or another, this propaganda is as old as mankind herself — the only real difference being the agenda.

Which agenda is this: let your big benevolent government regulate and control fossil fuels and all other energy besides, and let this same big benevolent government control your property as well, and thereby your life.

It’s called Environmentalism. But it’s really Neo-Marxism.

And Marxism by any other name is, and always will be, the same plain old discredited Marxism.

The most obvious place to begin any real discussion of water is in pointing out that right now on planet earth, water in its potable form is about the most abundant resource there is. No one even passingly acquainted with the subject seriously disputes this.

In the words of water specialist Fredrik Segerfeldt: “Water is a finite resource. In principle, though, the supply of water is so great as to be infinite for all human purposes” (Water For Sale, 2005, p. 13).

No less than that notoriously leftward-leaning institution called the United Nations reported: “The world uses only 8 percent of the total water that exists on the planet.”

The UN adds: “Water is a renewable resource [and thus] can be used over and over again” (Water for People, Water for Life: The United Nations World Water Development Report, 2002).

Among even slightly less liberal hydrologists, however, this 8 percent figure is regarded as high.

Here are a few more water statistics for you to guzzle down:

Two-thirds of the earth is water.

The vast majority of that is either salt water or frozen water.

Salt water evaporates and comes back to the earth in the form of fresh water.

The amount of water on the planet is static. Which means: all the water that exists on earth has, for the most part, always existed on earth. The amount remains essentially the same because water recycles itself through evaporation and precipitation.

Currently, two and a half million liters of water are available each year for every man, woman, and child on the planet. This translates to about 19,000 liters per day, per person, which is an astronomically large amount, certainly far more water than any one person could consume in an entire month, let alone one day.

Water can be desalinated (i.e. converted from salt water into fresh water) relatively easily and inexpensively.

Even in the midst of such overwhelming abundance, there is a water crisis in the world.

Why?

“The problem,” says Terry Anderson, of Montana State University, “is that water is often found in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The reason water is frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time is that “it’s cheaper than it should be, which causes people to overuse it.”

Why is it cheaper than it should be?

In a phrase, government subsidies.

As a result, we find ourselves ceaselessly subject to the mantra-like chanting of enviros: “Conserve water, use less water, put bricks in your toilets, don’t flush, take shorter showers (if you must shower at all), use 5 gallons less per day.” Et cetera.

Let us examine briefly how effective these conservation measures really are — and how necessary.

To begin with, it should be noted that far and away the majority of water used is not used for direct consumption, nor for bathing, toilet flushing, or watering the lawn — these constitute only a tiny fraction. Rather, the vast majority of water is used for agriculture.

Thus, since crops require X amount of water to grow and flourish, the conservation measures that are espoused by enviros add up to such an insignificant amount of water saved that it might as well be flushed down the toilet.

This, incidentally, is another fact also not in serious dispute.

Water economists we’ve talked to nod assent at the following statement, which comes to us from the late Julian Simon:

“The ridiculousness of such ‘conservation’ measures as not putting water on the tables of restaurants or not flushing the toilet every time is discussed in a later chapter.”

Enviros have many responses to such statements, but having listened to them all for decades now, I assure you that they all stem from the same principle: an utter unwillingness to believe that the entire ecological philosophy is predicated upon, and propagated by means of, an ideology whose every major premise, almost without exception, is fraudulent.

Fully 80 to 90 percent of water, then, is used in agriculture. That is the reason water used in agriculture is so sensitive to price.

The reason there are cases of absolute shortage and rationing is that price is not allowed to respond to market conditions, but rather is fixed at a low subsidized price in many agricultural areas. For example, farmers near Fresno, California pay $17 for an acre-foot of water, while according to the U.S. General Accounting Office the ‘full cost’ is $42 a foot. In some areas in California farmers pay $5 per acre-foot, whereas the Los Angles water authorities pay $500 per acre-foot. Such subsidies encourage farmers to plant crops that use water heavily, which diverts water from urban areas…. Water economists are agreed that if governments stop subsidizing water to farmers, and allow water to be bought and sold freely, water shortages would no longer appear. But bureaucratic government restrictions often prevent those who have rights to more water than they need from selling their water rights to those who are willing to pay for the water; the bureaucrats fight tooth and nail to protect their own powers, and the results are amazing stories of governmentally caused inefficiency and true scarcity leading to [government supervised] rationing (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, p. 153).

The environmental solution — which, tacitly or explicitly, the rightwing has also at least partially accepted — is this: create more laws to prevent new infrastructures from being developed, which infrastructures also transport water from places where there is too much water to places where there is too little. Instead, let us institute coercive conservation measures that ultimately add up to too little water to make a noticeable difference.

The forgotten factor in this is the private sector — forgotten because, according to both rightwing and left, lobbyists, pressure groups, and bureaucrats alike are all better suited to run our lives and the life of the economy than the individuals who make up that society and that society’s economy.

We see the evidence of the above principle in practice every day: the private businessman, the private taxpayer — in short, the individual — are each subordinate to whatever given pressure group pushes the hardest to get its agenda passed. Right now of course it’s “climate change.”

With regard to water, though, what is finally the point? Profligacy and wanton waste? Coercive conservation laws to better “preserve” miniscule amounts of water, which in actuality is a stupendously abundant resource?

No, neither.

The point is to let the law of supply and demand work.

To objectify this, take a quick look at the present-day history of Macao, China, starting in about 1985, when authorities signed a concession contract with a private water industry. The results: the greatest leap in quantity and quality of water in all of Asia.

Then take a look at the massive $3.4 billion water projects planned by the massive left-wing Peruvian government in 1993, which ended it total failure and waste.

Or the Mahaweli Development Program in Sri Lanka that took “44 percent of all public investment,” the costs of which “rose so high as to make the new farmland hugely expensive, forcing government to then subsidize the land,” and which in turn “created severe social tensions, because the money for the subsidies had to be taken from other items of expenditure, and because those allotted lands were considered to have obtained unfair advantages” (Fredrik Segerfeldt, Water For Sale, p. 20).

Or take a look at Ethiopia’s titanic bureaucratic nightmare called the Water Management Program in the 1990’s, where “eight different authorities were involved … resulting in much unnecessary duplication and heavy wastage … Added to which large parts of the country were still left out of the water and sewerage networks” (Ibid, p 21).

This is the sort of gross ineptitude — inherent, almost by definition, to governmental bureaucracy of any kind — that your rightwing and leftwing brothers and sisters have so much confidence in, and in turn would have you place all your confidences in.

Don’t do it.

Not for the thing most vital to life: H2O.