Global Warming, Ethanol, DDT and Environmentalism's Dark Side

While well meaning, environmentalists have been tragically wrong.






So during the decades in which DDT was not used, when the world bowed to undoubtedly well-intentioned environmental activists, about 50 million people—overwhelmingly African children—died, mostly unnecessarily.

Ethanol provides another, though far less dramatic, example. For years, biofuels were heralded as the promising alternative to fossil fuels, which would reduce our carbon output, improve the environment, and provide needed energy. Yet it turns out biofuel's environmental impact is much more complicated.

In 2008, Time magazine wrote about ethanol's dubious environmental benefits in a cover story entitled, "The Clean Energy Scam." The article warned that forests, wetlands, and grasslands were being sacrificed in a rush to farm crops that could be turned into gasoline. More recently, the peer-reviewed journal Science reported on a study finding that cap-and-trade accounting systems understate the emissions created by the production of biofuels. The study concluded that cap-and-trade programs could encourage biofuel production that would displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover by 2050.

So the once environmentally favored solution to our energy problems—and still a politically-favored one—is now recognized as a potential environmental catastrophe. It's worth noting that, beyond biofuel's environmental effects, using food for fuel has a significant impact on the worldwide food supply. As more crops and land are dedicated to producing fuel, the costs of food will climb, which could exacerbate problems of poverty and hunger, particularly in already impoverished countries.

Given this experience, the public would be wise to be cautious in whole-heartedly embracing the policy prescriptions of environmentalists. The movie, Not Evil, Just Wrong, makes the connection between the DDT saga and what's going on with climate change today. Prominent environmentalists promise that they are confident that man is causing the Earth to warm, and they don't want to contemplate (at least publicly) alternative theories about how the sun might be responsible for warming, that the warming isn't unprecedented and therefore could be naturally occurring, or to linger on potential problems on their own temperature readings that might make warming seem more extreme than it is. They don't want to consider the costs of policies that they want to oppose in the name of combating global warming, or just how ineffectual those policies might be. Yet the public should consider what a significant decline in worldwide wealth will mean, particularly for those who are already poor.