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Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists A Conservative Manifesto

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I'm not surprised that the reviewers appearing in Amazon.com disagree profoundly on the whether this is a "good" book. I've read "Hard Green" closely several times, discussed my likes and dislikes with its author, and have written three published reviews, and I'm still torn over whether I like or dislike this book.

Huber is simply magnificent at debunking the myths of radical environmentalism. If you are a "true believer" or a fan of Brown, Carson, Capra, Colburn, etc. etc. this book is a must read. It will challenge you to go beyond the fundraising letters and newsletters that often constitute "research" for most environmentalists.

Huber's achievement, though, is compromised by two things. The first is noted by several other reviewers: a writing style that is often "flippant" and "strident," and the absence of source citations or other evidence of careful research and fact checking. Most of us would have preferred more footnotes and a more nuanced writing style.

The second shortcoming, not mentioned yet by other reviewers, is Huber's unexplained dismissal of free-market environmentalism (FME), an important new movement inside the environmental movement that calls for greater attention to sound science and market-based, rather than government-based, solutions to environmental problems.

Huber doesn't mention a single scholar who has been active in this field -- Terry Anderson, Richard Stroup, Jane Shaw, Fred Smith, Bruce Yandle, etc. Worse, he makes sweeping concessions to anti-market environmentalists on issues such as public goods that reflect little awareness of the current state of the debate. And while he is careful to avoid explicitly advocating public ownership of open space and wilderness areas on a massive scale, many readers will come away from this book believing that is part of his agenda.

For advocates of a new kind of environmentalism based on sound science and private, voluntary action, Huber's book is both a blessing and a curse. Recognizing its limits, I still urge everyone to read it and make up their own minds.

There are only two or three people who can think and write on new subjects like Peter Huber. Richard Posner and Andrew Ferguson, maybe. In the mid 1980s Huber rethought and led a quiet revolution in the law of suing people. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Huber rethought and led a quiet revolution in telecom law. Huber's newest book will be an affront to V.P. Gore supporters but should have a much larger and positive effect than Gore on environmentalism: people who love the outdoors and the environment will worry in a new way how best to protect it.

I don't have time to read everything that looks interesting. This I read and recommend to others.

Logical and consistent, Peter Huber does not suffer fools on either side of the political spectrum. This is a remarkably balanced account of what's wrong with standard left environmentalism and what we should do about it.

In a relentless assault on the ideas that underlie the modern environmental movement, lawyer and engineer Peter Huber knocks the props from under some of the fundamental assumptions of what he calls the Soft Greens.
"Hard Green" is primarily a book about morality, analysis and policy, not a debate about data. In the most persuasive part of his book, Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, shows that computer models of complex systems, like global climate, are worthless.
The problem is not that our computers are too feeble to give us answers if we ask the right questions. The problem is that we do not know enough to ask meaningful questions.
Huber shows that, if even one feedback loop is missed or mis-sized, the models all end in catastrophe. When you get the same output no matter what the input was, that is not science.
It is anti-science, or, as Huber calls it, trans-science.
"Hard Green" covers a great deal of territory. While Huber uses logical analysis to demolish computer modeling, he uses historical experience to demonstrate, again convincingly, that the concepts of "sustainability" and "carrying capacity" are meaningless.
Thomas Malthus, 200 years ago, made the classic statement of carrying capacity. Since then, every limit anyone has proposed has been shattered. "No law of geophysics, biology, engineering or economics decrees: So far, but no farther," Huber writes.
But logical arguments mean little to the sizable segment of the SG movement that is frankly anti-rational. Huber has a challenge for these mystics, too.
The predictions of catastrophe have not come true, nor is there any evidence doomsday is close. Huber singles out Charles Perrow, Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich and Amory Lovins as prophets whose prophecies never come true.
Perrow, a Yale sociologist, started predicting inevitable catastrophes in the mid-'80s, and though none has occurred yet, he is still doing it. He was predicting a Y2K computer disaster as late as Jan. 6, 2000.
Obviously, something other than evidence is fueling the SG theology.
In its place, Huber offers "A Conservative Manifesto," which states that wealth is greener than poverty, free markets are greener than minute regulation, genetically engineered crops are greener than organic foods and that "living in three dimensions" is greener than living in two, as the Soft Greens do.
"Living in three dimensions" means extracting our power from the sterile depths of the Earth (nuclear, gas, oil or coal, in descending order of preference) instead of plowing under wild green to raise "biomass" for boilers or smothering it with windmills.
"The peasant hunched over his cow-dung fire is not efficient, not green; he is just poor," writes Huber in the shortest summary statement of his approach.
He also rejects the idea that green wealth is a zero-sum game. When it comes to the rich nations and the poor nations, "The notion that our wealth derives from -- worse still, causes -- their poverty is arrant nonsense."
Human ingenuity, he says, will solve our problems, unless the regulators stifle it.
But expecting ingenious solutions is just as much a prediction as expecting a catastrophe through a computer model, though without the fraudulent mathematical flounces and furbelows that garb the Club of Rome.
Huber is not so dense as to miss this, and he rejects untrammeled market solutions; but he does not give any practical advice about how to pick the problems that can safely be left to the market and those that cannot.
Markets fail, notably in providing roads; and human ingenuity does not always come through, even if the problem is something as urgent as malaria.
But the world is complex and humans are complex. It is not reasonable to expect to predict very precisely the results of their interaction, though the Soft Greens are never shy to try.
"Hard Green" does not tell us exactly how to proceed, but it is a compelling argument against the environmental movement as it exists now. Who, for example, would disagree with him when he says we would be better off if, instead of using Superfund billions to dig up chemicals in one place and bury them in another, we had spent the money buying up beaches, forests, rivers and mountains and leaving them wild?

The issues addressed in this book gained popular attention with the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972. Peter Huber begins by contrasting Theodore Roosevelt's concept of wilderness conservation with Al Gore's theory of a coming environmental "avalanche." Huber's assessment of the issues is incisive and the product of long deliberation by a very talented MIT engineering professor. Combined with his sophisticated knowledge of law, he writes analysis of the caliber that won Ronald Coase a Nobel Prize in economics. The reader is lead to a very convincing set of conclusions and gains confidence in reasonability. The material is suitable for either the environmental scientist with an advanced degree or the high school student wishing to read an informative and entertaining book. Peter Huber is such a good writer that no reader will wish to skip a single page.

Hard Green's primary fault is that it's glib and superficial and bounces all over the subject matter without penetrating deeply into what are undeniably important issues.

To get the most out of Hard Green, you have to read what the Greens themselves are saying. Indeed, they may well be more effective critics of themselves than Huber is. A publication called 'Synthesis / Regeneration', a journal of Green political thought, spends its 48 pages without mentioning conservation or traditional environmental issues even once. Instead, laughable theories are created: We should eliminate all private business. No, we should let some private business operate, if they're small enough. No, we should only run worker-owned cooperatives. Every line item of production should be voted on by The People. No, they should vote on packages selected by politicians. These folks play lip service to having learned the lessons of the collapse of communism, but in the end, their prescription is little more than Soviet-style Communism with an environmental twist.

Huber's point is simple and clear: The world doesn't work as Greens want it to. A modern plutocrat car, the Mercedes-Benz S420, is safer, more fuel-efficient, faster and pollutes far, far less than the VW Microbus still driven by many Greens. A modern power plant pollutes less than burning trash in your backyard, as the Greens want you to do. Want to use solar or wind power? You'll have to clear thousands of acres of pristine forest to make room for the plants. Better to save the forests and get power from underground stuff like oil and uranium.

Finally, no, the world isn't running out of resources. Every time it threatens to, our capitalists go to work and find more. And on that unhappy day when they don't? They'll figure out something else to use.

So, what lets us save the environment? Wealth. What kills it? Poverty. The more resources you have, the more willing you are to devote some of them to pollute less. If you're dirt poor, you'll do what it takes to survive. If you have a few bucks, you'll spend some of them to see rainbows.

This stuff only makes sense, and I believe Huber is right despite his sometimes over-glib tone. Truth to tell, the Green publications make an even worse case for their policies then Huber. If you want to be able to heat your house, power your computers and run your car, well, you're not green at all.

Since the mid-1970s there has been a movement to second-guess modern environmentalism. A recent book that makes extensive use of history in its critique is by Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes regular columns for Forbes Magazine.

The title Hard Green comes from a basic distinction Huber makes between "hard green" and "soft green." Huber argues that environmentalism was invented by Teddy Roosevelt, who when
using the term "conservation" really meant "environmental policy." T.R. and his contemporaries had seen the loss of natural environments and the depletion of natural resources, and they experienced it as an aesthetic loss. This is hard green. Hard greens believe the only real scarcity results from loss of wilderness. Since humans live on the surface of the planet, conserving the surface is what counts, and human needs should be provided not by exploiting the surface but by mining materials from beneath the surface.

According to Huber, T.R.'s environmentalism was complete; nothing needed to be added. But then, according to Huber, there arose a new environmentalism in the late 1970s that is concerned
with invisible threats. This is soft green. Soft greens see threats in phenomena that are highly dispersed or distant in time, phenomena that can only be found by computer modeling. Soft greens follow the Precautionary Principle. They assume that if high doses of a substance are harmful, low doses must be harmful too.

However well intentioned it is, Huber argues, soft is not truly green, for it lacks a sense of proportion. Soft green programs are prescriptive and complex and must be administered by large bureaucracies. Soft green computer models over-predict harms. Soft green economic theories are unrealistic and conjectural. Soft green remedies, which spend resources to redress imaginary harms, do not in the end conserve wilderness; to the contrary, they reduce wealth, which is what truly produces green. Thus, ironically, soft green programs ultimately produce environmental degradation. Huber considers soft green morally corrupt, likening it to communism.

The hard green manifesto is to save the environment from the softs. In other words, the distinction Huber's makes is between 'right green' and 'wrong green.'

One of the pleasures in reading Hard Green is keeping up with Huber's hard-driving intellect. Huber offers very perceptive critiques of classic environmental theories, including Malthus'
population hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, and the theory of externalities. Huber argues that these doctrines err, first by not recognizing that nature repairs itself, and second by not considering human adaptation through market processes. For these reasons, Huber argues, the projected environmental disasters have not occurred and will not in the future.

But Hard Green also contains unsettling discrepancies. For example, Huber presents the hard/soft distinction as a clean differentiation between traditional conservation and modern environmentalism. But this creates difficulty in knowing how to address modern environmental problems such as air pollution. Modern air pollution problems are categorically distinct in character from those that were recognized before the mid-20th Century. How does the hard green philosophy deal with modern air pollution? Not very well, actually. While Huber asserts that hard greens are concerned about pollution, he notes that their concern runs only to the aesthetics of pollution. That is, the reason pollution is unacceptable is that it is ugly. It also follows, taking his premise out to its logical extension, that unseen substances must be harmless. Thus, a hard green would be concerned about a visible smoke nuisance but not the toxicological effects of smoke's chemical constituents. Nor would a hard green be concerned about lead exhausted from leaded gasoline, toxic industrial emissions, or exposure to radiation, all of which have toxic properties that are not visible. All of these implications contradict what we have learned over the last fifty years.

To rescue the hard green concept from the observation that it is inapplicable to modern environmental problems, Huber admits that unseen substances might be harmful. But his rescue effort only digs itself deeper by arguing in addition that since one cannot know which substances are the harmful ones nothing should be done about them as a class and that their harm will be mitigated by dilution.

The only consistent thread running through this set of arguments is Huber's denial that modern environmental problems should be addressed as such. Taken literally, Huber's argument defines
them into nonexistence. Indeed, one gets the sense that since he doesn't like the remedies for modern environmental problems he has to deny their existence so that the remedies won't be
necessary. Defining away modern environmental problems makes it unnecessary to address the practical questions associated with them: how to determine the extent of such hazards? how to assign responsibilities? who shall be liable for breach of a responsibility? With modern environmental problems defined into non-existence, early 20th Century conservation approaches are all that is required.

And so, when one plays out Huber's argument one finds it difficult to accept for two fundamental reasons: (1) that modern environmental problems are categorically different in nature from early 20th Century conservation, and (2) that in consequence T.R. couldn't have meant "environmental policy" when he said "conservation" because the kind of problems that gave rise to environmental policy as we know the term now had not occurred yet. Thus, it is an anachronism for Huber to call T.R. an "environmentalist," at least as we use the term now, and that mistake leads to unwarranted inferences.

In all, Hard Green is a provocative work that because of its persistent application of central ideas to all manner of policy questions could become, as touted, a conservative manifesto. But
the historian is challenged to examine the quality of the factual premises upon which the whole construct is based.

This book sets out a comprehensive conservative position on the environment, declaring that Hard Greens (conservative) share the large objectives (actual or merely claimed) of the Soft Greens (liberal), but disagree with and reject much of what they diagnose as the source of despoliation and environmental decay.

Accordingly, Hard Greens reject most of the solutions that Soft Greens prescribe. Libertarian activist Huber takes on chapter by chapter the big issues of environmental discourse, from scarcity and pollution to efficiency and waste disposal. Hard Green is a strongly argued critique of environmentalism from the political right. Huber argues that Soft Green environmental policies do exactly the opposite of what they intend, and lays out a clear program for a Hard Green approach to the environment. By making you re-examine your assumptions, this book makes the richest contribution ever made to the greening of the political mind.

This book is a must read for anyone who really cares about preserving the environment. The author has combined his knowledge of true science with a lawyer's logic to destroy old myths and chart new pathways to keeping the planet truly green.

Peter William Huber (1952- ) is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for Forbes. He holds both a doctorate in engineering from MIT and a JD from the Harvard Law School. Huber's previous books include Liability and Galileo's Revenge.

Al Gore wrote a book called "Earth in the Balance", where he talked about so many environmental issues. In Hard Green you'll find that what Al Gore left out of his book is what you need to know. Taking on the Environmentalists hard hitting arguments Huber dispels many of the commonly held "truths" and shows you that what you have heard and read isn't exactly the way it works.

Huber is a very articulate and highly educated man with ideas that will take you into the 21st environmental millennium. Huber empowers the people with ideas that make common sense a reality and take all the mumble jumbo out of the liberal left and the power brokers in the environmental movement.

Huber is convincing with his ideas about how our resources such as fuel, food, minerals and water are not running out but how they will last for a very long time. Huber presents a detailed look at how people are resourceful in finding alternatives for replacement of what they need.

One of the most misunderstood ideas that the liberals' are constantly using is that the world is running out of natural resources, Huber on the other hand delves deep into this issue and shows that earth, like man, evolves and replenishes what it needs to sustain life and growth.

Tackling other issues like global warming, pollution, saving national forests Huber completely blows holes in the liberal arguments. Also Huber tackles the issue of recycling and conserving and again makes the convincing argument, that what the left tells you isn't the complete story. Huber's book is the definitive conservative answer and for those truly concerned about the environment, this is the one book you really need to read.

I had kind of a strange reaction to this book. One concept Peter Huber presents is the idea of conservation in the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. His point is that conservation is achieved but setting aside large chunks of land, and letting that land be "wild land". Fine by me, you'll get no argument from me on that point. I don't think that anybody who is serious about conservation would have a problem with that approach. From that point on, is where myself and many of the "soft greens" start to disagree with Huber. He talks about how the ideas of resource limitation and over population are just myths proported by soft green (who are the bad guys in his mind) who are over dependent on simplistic computer models. He states that only free markets can overcome pollution and industrial waste problems. Some of these concepts are hard to swallow.

He uses the classic tactic of generalizing his oppontent's arguments until they become silly. When you do this, it is hard to take your arguments too seriously. I think the real value of this book is not so much his ideas, but that he challenges the environmental community to re-evaluate its thinking. There has certainly been over zealous claims and predictions in the environmental community. Huber is stabbing at the foundations that helped produce these. I'm still a student and I don't have a wealth of experience to draw upon, so I really can't say with a high degree of certainty that Huber is totally right of totally wrong (it sounds like he is being overly optimistic about a market based solution to our environmental woes). This book certainly pisses people off, but if because of the book causes an "environmentalist" re-thinks his/her core beliefs, then it has served a purpose.