Ronald Bailey, Reason.com
Wednesday, April 17, 2002

In his 1971 Sierra Club book, "Energy: A Crisis in Power," Holdren declared that "it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population." Oil and gas are not "energy," but they are the cheapest and most easily transportable sources for it. Nevertheless, Holdren now concedes that Lomborg is right: The world is not running out of energy.

But as Lomborg notes at the beginning of his chapter, some environmentalists are once again warning about impending oil shortages. Kenneth Deffeyes predicts that world oil production will peak between 2004 and 2008 and never rise again.

Just two months prior to Holdren’s review of Lomborg, Scientific American published a very favorable review of "Hubbert’s Peak" under the title "The End of Oil." The reviewer asserted that "if nothing is done to reduce the increasing global thirst for oil, energy prices will soar and economies will be plunged into recession as they desperately search for alternatives." Back in March 1998, Scientific American published "The End of Cheap Oil," which suggested a growing petroleum scarcity.

In his chapter, Lomborg analyzes current trends in coal, oil, and natural gas supplies and prices and explains how the transition to other energy sources is likely to take place over the next few decades. Holdren grudgingly commends Lomborg, declaring that he "has some generally sensible things to say about the large contributions that are possible from increased energy end-use efficiency and from renewable energy."

Holdren claims Lomborg selectively quotes the literature on energy, yet he gives no counter-examples of what he thinks the proper literature is. Holdren also complains that Lomborg doesn’t delve deeply enough into the politics of energy, particularly the fact that much of the world’s oil reserves are in the volatile Middle East. But this is an unreasonable demand; Lomborg’s chief goal is to dispel environmentalist misinformation about future resource availability.

The third attack reviewer is John Bongaarts, a vice president at the Population Council. Like Holdren, Bongaarts essentially concedes that Lomborg is right. Bongaarts notes that "people are living longer and healthier lives" and "women are bearing fewer children," among news highlighted by Lomborg. Bongaarts even admits that "environmentalists who predicted widespread famine and blamed rapid population growth for many of the world’s environmental, economic, and social problems overstated their cases."

Bongaarts also concedes that "Lomborg correctly notes that poverty is the main cause of hunger and malnutrition" and that despite an increase in world population from 1 billion in 1800 to 6 billion today, "diets have improved. Lomborg and other technological optimists are probably correct in claiming that overall world food production can be increased substantially over the next few decades. Average current crop yields are still below the levels achieved in the most productive countries . ..."

Yet Bongaarts makes the unsupported claim that future increases in food supplies will cost more, even though food prices have been declining steadily for two centuries. The fact is that all leading agencies, such as the International Food Policy Research Institute, project lower food prices.

Sadly, Bongaarts cannot resist deploying the inflammatory accusation from Paul and Anne Ehrlich that humanity is "turning the earth into a giant human feedlot." That is simply not true. Most global food agencies project that the area of the earth’s surface devoted to agriculture may grow from 11 percent to 12 percent by 2030. Other analysts, such as agronomist Paul Waggoner, believe improvements in agricultural productivity may be so rapid that less area will be devoted to farming and more land will revert to nature.

Going Extinct

Finally, Thomas Lovejoy critiqued Lomborg’s biodiversity chapter. Lovejoy was U.S. director of the World Wildlife Fund for more than a decade and is now the chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank; he’s been a biodiversity alarmist for a long time. At a 1979 symposium at Brigham Young University, he announced that he had made "an estimate of extinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to be conservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity between one-seventh and one-fifth."

If Lovejoy had been right, between 15 and 20 percent of all species alive two decades ago would be extinct right now. No one believes that anywhere near that many extinctions have occurred.

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