My great-grandfather Eduard, who had the fine judgment to make America his home, is still vividly remembered in family lore. He was, among other things, a very modern man. His opinions — he had many of them — were typically progressive, sometimes strenuously so. He had studied at Heidelberg University, then one of Europe’s better-known centers for research in the natural sciences, and ever after fashioned himself a champion of knowledge, reason, and critical inquiry.
He also had a particular theory about automotive transportation: He was firmly convinced that the horseless carriage, running as it did off a volatile and highly flammable fuel known as gasoline, was a contraption liable to explode at any moment. He lived long enough to see his theory put to the test. The mass manufacture of passenger cars took place during his lifetime. As it happened, in America during the Roaring Twenties, there were few instances of spontaneously exploding automobiles — if any. Even so, to the end of his days he traveled by car only under protest — and only if the gas tank were left as close as possible to empty, since that condition, in his estimate, lowered the probability of vehicle detonation.
My great-grandfather’s eccentric personal relationship with the internal- combustion engine did not, I would submit, make him any less modern a man. Quite the contrary: One might instead see in his perspective something quintessentially modern — or at least, representative of our era. We might even say that, in his own modest way, he was a pioneer. For the very sort of reasoning that shaped his behavior towards the automobile now promises to be embraced on an immense scale, guiding — or more accurately, misguiding — the actions of governments around the world. It is the sort of reasoning that gave rise to the global-climate agreement in Kyoto, Japan, last week. It is a style of reasoning that has been embraced by the U.S. government’s environmental apparatus — from Vice President Gore on down; indeed, it inspires much — perhaps most — government activity involving what we now call the “global environment.” This reasoning sails under the flag of ” scientific knowledge,” but that is a false flag.
Two generations ago, Friedrich Hayek offered a penetrating examination of a peculiarly modern version of “the abuse of reason”: a syndrome he labeled ” scientism.” As Hayek described it, “scientistic” thinking garbed itself in the trappings of science (including the jargon of science) while neglecting, ignoring, or even defying the approach to the pursuit of knowledge that is at the very heart of the scientific method. “Scientism” nicely captures the outlook of our new global thinkers, who are busily engaged today in saving the planet through far-reaching demographic and economic therapies.
Just as my great-grandfather offered seemingly technical explanations to justify his premonition of exploding jalopies, today’s global thinkers bring a pretense of science into combat with the systems that obsess them — systems which they nevertheless ultimately do not understand.
In fairness to our contemporary global thinkers, the systems they worry about appear immeasurably more complicated than the internal-combustion engine. The interplay between demographic, economic, and environmental changes looks extraordinarily complex even at the national level, and still more difficult to apprehend when the whole world is the object of study. But for this very reason a truly scientific approach to these issues would be alert to the limits of available data, to the potentially conflicting interpretation of observations, and perhaps above all to the possibility that facts and knowledge at our disposal might allow us to test — and thereby falsify — some of the theories or hypotheses that we currently entertain. The most ardent proponents of far-reaching action in the name of the “global environment,” however, also seem to be the least willing to examine critically the scientific evidence that purportedly necessitates the policies they recommend.
My great-grandfather refused to give up on his crotchet just because evidence piled up against it. He adopted what the philosopher Karl Popper once termed “immunizing tactics or stratagems” for protecting his cherished theory against falsification. The result was, in the main, mild entertainment for the people who knew him.
When the modern state, on the other hand, subscribes to an ambitious agenda for the “global environment” and employs those selfsame immunizing tactics and stratagems to protect its supposedly rationally established policy priorities, the results are likely to be neither amusing nor harmless.
Think for a moment about the spectacle in Kyoto. The hundreds of delegates who assembled there were instructed by their governments to work on a treaty that would commit countries to controlling or reducing their emissions of so- called “greenhouse gases” in the years ahead in the name of preventing a significant bout of “global warming” by the end of the 21st century. Politics aside, consider just the scientific constraints under which they labored.
For one thing, there is an unresolved dispute among specialists as to actual temperature trends in our atmosphere over the past several decades: Depending on whose data one uses, we can suggest that the atmosphere has been warming, or cooling, or both. For another thing, there is the evident uncertainty about the impact of changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases on atmospheric temperatures: Suffice it to say that researchers in this realm have yet to devise models that can accurately account for the past, much less predict the future. To confuse matters further, the likely impact of human activity on the concentrations of greenhouse gases found in the atmosphere remains a matter of imprecision, given our limited current understanding of the capacities of “carbon sinks” (forests, oceans, and the like) for absorbing the carbon dioxide released into the air.
Even estimating man-made emissions — perhaps the least vexatious of the issues just raised — is more than somewhat problematic. In the judgment of the researchers who devised the method now commonly used for calculating the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions from human use of fossil fuels, for example, their global estimates for any given year could be 10 percent too high or low. These are, however, global margins of error, which tend to smooth out even greater imprecisions in subsidiary components. This means that we can be even less confident in the measurements of smaller units — such as, for example, emissions at the national level. Forget for a moment about the chain of presumptions needed to link a given level of “greenhouse gas” generation by a specific population to a particular change in global temperatures in subsequent years: The negotiators at Kyoto cannot even be confident that the country targets they eventually set for changes in emissions will exceed the margins of error on current production!
Let me be clear: The theory that human activity might have an impact on global temperatures is inherently plausible. With further research, it should eventually be possible to specify the dynamics of any human contribution to climate change — if this theory is validated. Moreover, it would clearly be unreasonable — indeed, hazardous — to demand that stewards of the public weal stay their hand until the very last scintilla of doubt over some pressing policy issue has been finally erased. A number of measures that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions could be recommended for broad implementation today — but such measures derive their merit from the likelihood that their benefits would exceed their costs. No such claim could be made by the conferees at Kyoto, whose agenda, if successful, would dictate a radical and expensive reconfiguration of global patterns of economic activity that might (or might not) affect the climate in a way that might (or might not) protect the quality of life on this earth. Their cavalier approach to knowledge, to cite Karl Popper once again, is fundamentally nonscientific.
Commentators out of sympathy with advocates of “scientistic” solutions to problems of the global environment sometimes call environmentalism a new secular faith. But that formulation blurs the important distinction between religion and magic. What we saw at work in Kyoto, and see as well in many other seats of self-styled “global thinking,” might better be described as the sway of secular superstition.
In his book on the decline of magic in pre-modern England, the historian Keith Thomas recalled the source of magic’s powerful allure: “As an alternative to helpless impotence, the savage falls back upon the substitute activity of magical ritual. . . . By its agency he is converted from a helpless bystander to an active agent.” Thomas further observed that “the role of magic in modern society may be more extensive than we yet appreciate.”
Indeed so: when the undersecretary of state, Timothy E. Wirth, reportedly explains that “overpopulation” is the root cause of the atrocities in Bosnia (a place, by the way, where fertility levels were subreplacement even before Tito’s death); when the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund warns Congress that a $ 200 million cut in annual U.S. population aid will mean an additional 17 to 18 million Third World pregnancies per year; when the vice president of the United States writes of an impending ” environmental holocaust without precedent,” and justifies the ambitious international program he wishes to enact as part of a “larger war to save the earth,” we must pause and take note.
Some critics might write off these outbursts as expressions of a millenarian worldview pure and simple, but there is a passion in these declarations that suggests their authors seek something more. Acceptance is not enough: They want us to clap our hands and believe.
The affection such global thinkers demonstrate for towering new edifices of worldwide economic and political controls, through which their good works would be enforced, can perhaps be ascribed in part to the deep and abiding appeal of magic, even to the modern man. After all, the “substitute activities” to which Keith Thomas referred must be convincing to the followers of the cult — and those activities may seem all the more convincing and real if they entail demonstrable sacrifice. To observe that Kyoto-style global environmental policies would impose widespread economic sacrifice is hardly a devastating criticism to Kyoto’s devotees. That sense of broadly felt sacrifice is precisely what the global thinkers prize. This is what Al Gore meant when he told the summiteers in Japan: “Let us resolve to conduct ourselves in such a way that our children’s children will read about the ‘Spirit of Kyoto’ and remember well the place and time where humankind first chose to embark together on a long-term sustainable relationship between our civilization and the Earth’s environment.”
Some time ago, I participated in an unclassified intelligence-community conference on environmental degradation and national security in postCommunist Europe — research, it was intimated, that had been requested by the highest levels of the Clinton administration. As everyone knows, the Soviet-bloc governments bequeathed an appalling environmental legacy to their successors: Dying forests, poisoned water, and filthy air all figure in this dismaying tableau. At one point, a medical specialist at this conference reviewed the array of health risks these Eastern European environmental problems could pose to local populations, and his prognosis sounded dire indeed. But I wasn’t sure I had understood him correctly, so I asked a question. Which would, I inquired, have a greater anticipated impact on mortality and morbidity in Eastern Europe in the years ahead: a “silver bullet” that somehow redressed all of its environmental ills this very moment — or a 20 percent reduction in cigarette smoking? He waved his hand impatiently. “The smoking, of course,” he replied. Then he stopped, took a breath, and went on to explain why that wasn’t a very good question.
I beg to differ. What one might call the “microenvironment” matters greatly to the well-being of every person on the planet. What is more, we not only understand the factors that shape this micro-environment far better than we understand the forces at play in the so called “global environment”; we can craft policy interventions for it that offer the promise of a significant human benefit at a less significant human cost. Too often, our new global thinkers appear to be unable to see the trees for the forests. If they would only pay more attention to the micro-environments in which our billions of fellow human beings live, they might glean a rather different impression of our current “environmental condition” — and of the “environmental challenges” lying immediately before us.
Consider, for one example, the availability of food — a potentially critical factor, one might say, in any person’s micro-environment. Although national and international data on population and food supplies are far from perfect, the trends they outline are unambiguous. Between the early 1960s and the mid1990s, there has been a major and indeed historically extraordinary improvement in the human diet. Changes in low-income countries appear to have been particularly dramatic. According to estimates by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, per capita caloric supplies in developing countries have risen by fully 30 percent over this period.
Yet even those numbers may understate the scale of improvement. For those figures attempt to measure only crude caloric availability. They take no account of the shift in these places toward higher-cost calories (dairy products, meats, fish, fruit, and the like) that constitute an obvious, if unmeasured, improvement in the quality of diet. Likewise, they do not adjust for the improvements in storage and refrigeration that have increased the proportion of caloric “supplies” that poor people can actually use as food. Equally important, they take no measure of the advances in public health that have permitted vulnerable populations to metabolize an increasing portion of the foodstuffs they possess: Curing a case of cholera, for example, can “save” a stricken child as much as 600 calories of food energy each day.
The earth has not yet been ridded of mass hunger, and nutritional progress in some regions — especially, sub-Saharan Africa — has been distressingly tenuous. At the same time, we can be fairly confident that we understand the general components necessary for instituting a framework that will elicit sustained — and self-sustaining — nutritional advance almost anywhere in the world.
Access to safe drinking water also qualifies as a major micro-environmental concern. Yet despite uncertainties in the data, global trends are again unambiguous: The quality of drinking water available to human populations looks to be steadily and markedly improving. One of the reasons for this improvement, incidentally, is the rapid urbanization of “Third World” populations — a tendency the State Department, in its recently released document on “Environmental Diplomacy,” apparently views with some alarm.
In the very poorest countries, the World Bank believes, over 70 percent of urban populations had access to safe water by the early 1990s; the figure was much lower for rural populations — still under 50 percent — but even so, half again as high as it had been a decade before. Perhaps most notably, if the bank’s figures are accurate, over five-sixths of South Asia’s citydwellers, and fully four-fifths of its rural folk, now have access to safe drinking water. (“South Asia,” remember, includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.) Clearly, there is still enormous room for improvement. But once again: We know what needs to be done here, and, generally, how to do it.
A final factor that bears self-evidently upon the quality of the micro- environment is health and mortality. We have reasonably reliable data on global mortality trends over the past half-century, and what they detail is a veritable global explosion — of health and longevity. Between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, according to the estimates of the U.N.’s Population Division, life expectancy at birth for the “less developed regions” as a whole jumped by over 20 years — that is to say, by more than half. Over that same period, infant mortality is estimated to have dropped no less remarkably — in the “less developed countries” as a whole, for example, levels are thought to be over three-fifths lower today than they were 40 years ago.
In all, the medical innovations, technological advances, and economic growth that so many of the new “global environmentalists” seem to view with such ambivalence have fomented a revolution in survival chances for individual members of our species. This is a signal and tremendously heartening change in the overall human micro-environment. It is a change, in fact, that a humane and scientific environmentalism would appreciate, and celebrate.
Unfortunately, international data on health and mortality today point to the emergence of very serious micro-environmental problems in different regions of the world. For the first time in the modern era, in fact, hundreds of millions of people live in countries that, though technically at peace, nevertheless find their life expectancies falling. In sub-Saharan Africa, by the estimates of the U.N. Population Division, life expectancy was probably lower in the early 1990s than it had been in the early 1980s in over half a dozen countries — and that tally does not include the gruesome special cases of Liberia and Rwanda. In the former Soviet Union, the so-called “transition process” has coincided with the most massive public-health reversals ever to beset a modern industrial society outside of war. The situation is perhaps most acute in the Russian Federation, where an upsurge of “excess mortality” may have claimed nearly 3 million lives since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
These micro-environmental setbacks confront us here and now. Unfortunately, the “global environmentalists” and “environmental diplomats” who are so alert to the interconnectedness of the world in other contexts have been uncharacteristically quiet about them. How we should go about addressing these problems is not mysterious — though the work that lies before us will doubtless be difficult. But we will not require magic to accomplish it.
Nicholas Eberstadt is a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard Center for Population and Development studies.
