How Near is Doomsday?

People like to have the daylights scared out of them. For kids, there is Frankenstein and Dracula; for adults, there is The Limits to Growth.

But while Dracula makes no pretense to be anything but entertainment, The Limits to Growth masquerades as a scientific work. It is not simply bad science (as some have charged after discerning the authors’ flagrant misrepresentations), it is the very opposite of science. For science is the search for truth on the basis of hard evidence; but Meadows & Company have collected one-sided evidence to fit a faith—faith in doomsday. When the data flatly contradicted their faith, they simply ignored them, and in at least two cases, they shamelessly doctored them to produce a desired result.

The cause-effect relationships built into the program (such as pollution due to overpopulation) are based on arbitrarily selected, and sometimes doctored data; worse, the authors have modeled no less than the whole world in single loops, which amounts (for example) to the assumption that overpopulation in Bangladesh will cause pollution in the United States. The model totally ignores the negative feedbacks built into any civilization. Everything grows in this model except the countermeasures. There are no price mechanisms to force conservation of scarce resources and to spur invention of substitutes; there is no advance in the technology of pollution abatement; there are no growing per-acre yields; there is no economic muscle provided by the growing GNP for all of these and other defense mechanisms. Only the killers grow exponentially, and the world stands by in frozen horror as it is being done in.

The limits to growth / D. H. Meadows, et. al. / 205 pages / LR Price $2.95

A time to CHOOSE—AMERICA’S ENERGY FUTURE / Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation / 528 pages / LR Price $4.95

No time to Confuse / M. A. Adelman, et. al. / 156 pages / LR Price $3.35

U.S. ENERGY POLICY: A PRIMER / E. J. Mitchell / 103 pages / LR Price $3

TWO CHEERS FOR THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY / W. Beckerman / 238 pages / LR Price $7.95

THE DISASTER LOBBY / M. J. Grayson & T. R. Shepard, Jr. / 294 pages / LR Price $7.95

THE COMING DARK AGE / R. Vacca / 221 pages / LR Price $7.95

Resources, as Meadows & Company understand them, are something in a finite barrel whose bottom must eventually be reached. In reality, the barrel has a very elusive bottom, for nonrenewable does not mean irreplaceable. As one of an endless row of examples, take copper, which, we are told, will be among the first to run out. It is mainly used in the electrical industry, because of its high conductivity, and in a sense, it is a replacement already, for gold and platinum have even higher conductivities. What if its price rises so high that copper telephone lines become uneconomical? They will be made of aluminum (as is the case in many parts of the world already). And when the aluminum runs out? It won’t get the chance; telephone lines of the future will be made of glass fibers to guide laser beams. And when will glass run out? When there is no more sand in the deserts.

And so it goes; with rare exceptions, materials in past history have not run out; they have been replaced and became unnecessary. The bottom of the barrel is nowhere but in the Club of Rome’s computer program.

But one does not have to go as far as the facts, for the bottom-of-the-barrel attitude is self-contradictory. If resources will run out anyway, why use them slowly and prolong the agony? If there is anything more ludicrous than the world as Meadows & Company see it, it is the world they recommend. The printouts show a world where pollution is roughly the same as a few years ago (in reality, it is abating), per capita food consumption does not radically differ from today’s world (half of mankind goes hungry), and industrial output stagnates. Of course, this semi-starved, semi-polluted, and semi-industrialized world will be put out of its misery by the steady decline of resources enforced by the bottom-of-the-barrel theory.

For this last point, at least, the authors have found a solution: a pair of scissors, with which they cut off the printout at the point where the decline of resources begins to become obvious and embarrassing. The text is silent on the point.

The whole exercise in browbeating laymen with scientific jargon proves no more than that if you keep drinking from a finite bottle, you will eventually empty it. Most people do not need a computer for that.

And yet the authors have unwittingly demonstrated something else: the resilience of such a model, even under the authors’ crippling assumptions. To make the doomsday machine commit suicide under all conditions, the computerized soothsayers had to resort to doctoring the data. Figure 32 shows a curve whose (killing) rise has been arbitrarily manufactured in flat contradiction to the data on the opposite page. The falsehood that it shows “a comparable trend” is supported by an optical illusion due to a 25 percent scale change (of which the reader is not told). This pushes the decisive part of the chart off the page, and the overwhelming evidence to the contrary is thus simply spirited out of the reader’s sight.

Such swill has been belched out by the publishing houses since the middle sixties and lovingly gobbled up by the mass media, until every politician in the country changed his vocabulary from justice and motherhood to environment and ecology. Cleaning up the air and water may well have been the starting point, but this objective is hardly discernible in the actions of the present environmental organizations any more. From the population controllers to Nader’s Raiders, they share an irrational and obstinate refusal to face the technical (let alone economic) facts; they also share the use of environmentalism as a horse on which to crusade against technology and free enterprise.

Environmentalism has become the movement of an affluent elite. Under all the talk about pollution and conservation is the unmistakable desire to impose a life style on others in order to preserve that of the environmentalists. Advancing technology and rising affluence have crowded “their” roads with the cars of the riff-raff who can no longer be made to work as servants in their homes, who instead crowd “their” beaches and “their” national parks. “There are too many of you others,” say the zero-population-growth organizations. “Not in our back yard,” say the crusaders against new technology. “Stop the others from obtaining our privileges,” they all say by their actions, if not by their words.

It is an old, old story; one of its variants was that of the old-style redneck who wanted to “keep uppity niggers in their places.” The Sierra Club is pitching a similar line, but with a great deal more hypocrisy.

There are other economists who have not turned into demagogues and astrologers. Two important books on energy and growth (respectively) are Mitchell’s U.S. Energy Policy: A Primer and Beckerman’s Two Cheers for the Affluent Society.

Mitchell, professor of business economics at the University of Michigan and Director of the American Enterprise Institute’s National Energy Project, points out that energy shortages are caused by government policy: There can be no “gaps” between demand and supply in a free market, but they must appear with price controls. “Gapologists” (as Mitchell calls them) project demand and supply curves into the future and ponder what to do about the gap between them. Why is there no milk gap or diamond gap? Because the market is allowed to clear. Among the many aspects of energy economics which this high-caliber book examines is the question of resources and the much misunderstood term “proved reserves,” which is the equivalent of inventory on the shelf in other businesses. (Your town probably has no more than a 12-day supply of shoes on stock; therefore, the doomsdayers would conclude, on the thirteenth day people will have to begin going barefoot.)

Beckerman’s book is far-reaching, thought-provoking, and highly rewarding. It is also well-written and spiced with the author’s wit. (“Economic growth has managed to keep going up to now without any supplies at all of Beckermonium, a product named after my grandfather, who failed to invent it in the 19th century.”)

The Disaster Lobby is a journalistic masterpiece. It describes the “Age of Unreason” and points out the absurdities of the various ecology fads, the phoniness of the self-proclaimed consumer advocates, the abuse of the judicial system by various pressure groups, and the rest of the nonsense which started blooming in the late sixties. It is delightfully written, and of all the books reviewed here, by a long shot the most readable.

The authors are at their best when on their own professional field of journalism, and they provide some first-hand insights into how media bias works. Thus, former Look editor Jack Shepherd (colleague, but not relative, of author Shepard) wrote an article scourging the nuclear industry with “truth-but-not-the-whole-truth” type falsehoods, including a list of mishaps that allegedly took place at the AEC Rocky Flats plant in Colorado, ended by “46 workers got cancer; 14 have died.” That turns out to be the truth, but the whole truth is that this incidence of cancer is no larger than that at any cattle ranch, stock exchange, or nudist colony. In fact (presumably due to the frequent AEC medical check-ups), it is a good deal lower. Shepherd was presented with the complete facts in this and the remaining cases, but refused to modify his distortions, and they were published; a clear case of foul dishonesty. One can only hope that the similar tactics used endlessly by Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reasoner are due to no more than gross incompetence; the hope is charitable, if not very plausible.

There are two small criticisms to be made of this otherwise delightful book. On some issues (such as nuclear power or the population explosion) it is shallow; by getting more facts and figures from the experts, the authors could have made their point not with a slingshot, but with a cannon. The other point is that they treat the “Age of Unreason” as history, and in the final chapter, Sic transit Bill Kunstler et. al..., they sigh with relief that it is all over. Would that they were right! But only the Alaska pipeline has been given the go-ahead; nothing else has changed since the book was written. DDT remains banned, anti-nuclear superstitions are promoted more vigorously than ever before, and where is H. Bruce Franklin (the radical English professor whose disruptive conduct at Stanford is described in the book)? He is suing the University of Colorado, not for firing him, but for not ever hiring him! And the ACLU, which once defended civil liberties, has joined the suit. Nondum transit Bill Kunstler neque alii.

Grayson and Shepherd point out that the eco-fanatics value fish higher than people. But they even value some species of fish higher than others, for their opposition to thermal “pollution” discriminates against the species thriving in the slightly warmer water. There is no end to their irrationality, or for that matter, to their callousness. The Friends of the Earth have no sympathy for coal miners, whose death-rate per unit of electric power produced is no less than 50 times higher than that of uranium miners. The Sierra Club would rather accept the pollution by overloaded fossil-burning plants than the radioactivity of nuclear plants, which amounts to less than one percent of that to which the average U.S. citizen is exposed from natural sources and medical equipment. The Environmental Defense Fund sues utilities when they try to enlarge their capacity, and when the power runs out, they sue them again.

Such irrationality is alien to Roberto Vacca, a doomsday prophet of a quite different ilk. The author of The Coming Dark Age, an Italian systems engineer, knows what computers can and cannot do, and he can evidently see through the fradulence of the environmental extremists. Vacca explains why he does not like Wiener’s cybernetics, but he may not be aware that it was Norbert Wiener who suggested that systems do not grow beyond a certain size: If dinosaurs had grown any bigger, their feet would have been crushed by their weight, and if skyscrapers are built any higher, too much space goes for elevator shafts.

Vacca axiomatically applies a somewhat different (and unproven) proposition: When systems get too big, they collapse. He forecasts a cataclysm of Western civilization of such magnitude that even, wars with millions of casualties would be irrelevantly puny by comparison.

The author warns, and rightly so, against mistaking numerical correlations for cause-effect relationships. For example, the statement “The more churches in a city, the higher its crime rate” is perfectly true, since both are proportional to the size of the city.

The author fails to note counter-examples. The Soviet railroad system is bigger than any single U.S. system, and though it is continually on the verge of collapse, it manages to bungle on. So does the Soviet mail (which handles fewer pieces of mail than the USPS, but which administers all telephone, radio, and TV networks and handles most of the money traffic). The combined mail/telephone system of Western Europe is bigger than the U.S. Postal Service, but it makes a vastly better job of delivering the mail. (The Italian Post Office not excepted. When it is overwhelmed by the flow of mail, it survives by trucking it to the paper mills for recycling, unlike the U.S. Post Office, which dumps it into Lake Michigan!)

Like the authors of The Limits to Growth, Vacca ignores the automatic defense mechanisms built into any civilization. (In his case, particularly the reliability through redundancy: some subsystems take over as others fail.) The supposition that any system has a critical size is entirely unproven. But even if it is assumed true, there is still a vast difference between some subsystems failing to “cut the system down to size” and the whole thing blowing up in a Vacca-envisioned cataclysmic “knock-out.” However, Vacca’s book is not, by any means, Limits-type swill. It is well worth reading, though not believing.

None of which is to say that a cataclysm of Western civilization is impossible. But if it does come, it will not be for the reasons given by Vacca, and certainly not for the reasons built into the Club of Rome’s puerile doomsday machine. Reviewed by Petr Beckmann