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The Really Inconvenient Truths

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Iain Murray has done a real service with The Really Inconvenient Truths. Perhaps a majority of us are now environmentalists. Yet the track record of environmentalist legislation and regulation is unenviable. There are problems with the incentives created by many bills.

The ban on DDT might have saved the live save the lives of a few birds, but it has cost deaths of Africans from malaria. Ethanol increases food prices. The endangered species act creates perverse incentives. There are what we might term as unintended consequences, as far as most environmentalists are concerned. It is important to note, however, that there does exist a lunatic fringe of the environmentalist movement, who will interpret part of the results discussed in this book as a job well done.

In some respects The Really Inconvenient Truths is unremarkable. Much of its analysis derives from common sense economics. Some of its examples are already known. This in not the first time someone has noted a connection between malaria and the DDT ban. However, The Really Inconvenient Truths is quite remarkable in the current political environment. This is a very politically incorrect book. As Murray himself notes, there is certain populist fervor among environmentalists. Murray deserves credit for taking on such a emotionally and politically charged issue.

Part of the problem of environmentalism is the conceit of social democrats and socialists who think that the world is made better through conscious planning. Yet most environmentalists are just normal well intentioned people, whose faith in government solutions has caused them to implement the wrong solutions. Why is it that the environmentalist movement retains its momentum despite the severe unintended consequences of its policies? This movement is dangerous because it is based on emotion, rather than the type of cool headed reasoning found in The Really Inconvenient Truths. Sound reasoning is important here because many lives are at stake. Bravo!

As anyone who pays any attention to current events knows, energy and food prices are spiralling upward. Many do not know the reasons for that.

In this scholarly review of the subject, Iain Murray explores those issues and several others. He not only provides the reasons for many of our current predicaments, he also supplies solutions.

As the subtitle states, this book deals with 'seven environmental catastrophes that liberals don't want you to know about - because they helped cause them.' Although many environmentalists likely have good motives, the unintended consequences of the policies that they push have been and continue to be disastrous for our planet and the human race.

One example is the ban on the 'dreaded DDT'. Mr. Murray does a great job of showing how that ban has resulted in the deaths of a countless number of children in Africa due to malaria.

Another is ethanol. Murray makes the case that the ethanol mandates enacted by the U.S. Congress have led to much higher food prices and shortages. Additionally, it is ineffective in battling the 'problem'. Ethanol may produce 1/3 less greenhouse gas than gasoline, but it uses more gasoline to produce it than it replaces.

The Yellowstone Fire of 1988 is another great environmental tragedy brought about by the policies of so-called environmentalists. The war against logging and the anti controlled burn crusades created a powder keg. The fuel buildup was so huge that a massive fire was inevitable.

In the case of The Endangered Species Act, Mr. Murray shows how it has created disincentives to protect some of the species it claims to champion while at the same time wreaking havoc on our economy.

There are several other disasters that leftist environmentalist policies have caused. As Murray says, 'Liberal environmentalism, with its focus on box-checking rules, preference for word over substance, and its obsession with punishment of the guilty, has on too many occasions failed to prevent environmental damage, and in the meantime has harmed the economy and the humans whose well-being the economy represents.'

This is an important and timely book. From skyrocketing energy prices to high priced food and shortages of the same, the policies of the radical environmentalist movement are greatly damaging the world food supply, economy, and the environment. This book should be read by all voters and policymakers.

I once proudly called myself an environmentalist. Now I am a conservationist and a steward.

I believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there!

Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance".

I am now embarrassed by all of that.

Why? Because I fell for the hype and did not do simple things like check sources and see if what I was being told was backed up by other testimony. Sometimes, simple facts get in the way (like Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" book predictions never quite came true, like those predictions in the videos I showed to my class) and make it hard to follow that line of reasoning any longer.

So, what are the 7 environmental catastrophes:

1. DDT & Malaria in Africa
2. Ethanol as fuel
3. The "Pill" and its effect on fish downstream from water treatment plants.
4. The burning of Yellowstone and other National lands
5. The Cuyahoga River burning
6. The Endangered Species Act "Shoot, Shovel and Shut up!"
7. The Aral Sea

Positives:

This book is extremely well-written and approachable. It is also well-documented with more than 300 footnotes.

His commentary on DDT & Malaria is not only well thought out, but correctly placed as the first disaster since it causes around 1 Million deaths per year. He does not deny that DDT can have an affect on large birds, but he points out that it was not the use of DDT that caused it, but rather the mis-use of it. DDT is effective in small doses and does not need multiple applications to control bug populations. The multiple applications is a mis-use that makes it dangerous for birds (although it begs the question: Is any bird species worth 1 million lives every year - we are now up to nearly 40 million dead due to malaria carried by mosquitos). It does not cause human birth defects as Rachel "Silent Spring" Carson suggested. He skewers her research. Why it is still held up with pride as the start of the modern environmental movement is a mystery to me.

His commentary on Al Gore (do as I say, not as I do) and what he characterizes as the Church of Eco-Paganism are brilliant. He builds on Michael Crichton's commentary along the same lines and calls it a form of eco-Lutheranism (not to insult Lutherans - I am one and thought it was brilliant) since it is based on "Not on works, but on Faith alone," which is why the high priest of the movement, Al Gore, can use more than 20 times the electricity of the average Tennessean, own 2 more homes and jet around the world while telling us to cut back - he has the Faith!

The commentary on the Endangered Species Act was strong and largely built on an essay by the author of Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt. It studies the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act in which some people kill endangered species or destroy their habitats so they don't lose their property rights to a series of federal mandates.

Negatives:

His commentary on ethanol is strong, but goes overboard. His math sometimes does not make sense. He claims (correctly, I'm pretty sure) that all of the gasoline must be 10% ethanol. A few pages later he notes that if this were to happen an extra 55 million acres of corn would have to be planted. Well, we're already doing it. He also cites sources that claim we'd have to clear cut forests to plant all of this corn. I live in the cornbelt (Indiana) and I grew up on the farm. Every farmer has fields that are devoted to hay, straw or pastureland that will be converted to fields before we start clearing forests. Plus, increased yields (an achievement Murray points out in this chapter) will make up some of the difference as well.

The Aral Sea disaster (it was drained to provide water to meet Soviet cotton crop targets) is awful, but can only loosely be placed at the feet of environmentalists. He cites it as an example of poor choices of central planning and a cautionary tale to central planning schemes like Kyoto or carbon credits, but this is a loose association at best.

So, in sum, this is a pleasure to read. Well-cited, but not a perfect book.

There are some issues which the press doesn't present in a one-sided fashion: the ones they refuse to mention at all.

If you want to learn about problems which you won't hear about otherwise, this book is the place to start. If you read only the section on malaria you'll never look at environmentalism the same way again.

Plus, this is the perfect Earth Day gift!

I'll make it simple: this is the best book written about the environment in the past five years. It's a well-researched, well-written, never boring look at the way that the liberal passion for central planning has damaged just about every aspect of the natural environment. Although the subject mater may seem dry at first glance, this book actually makes it fun. It's a must-read.

Iain Murray's book tells a dismal tale of the issues that the environmental movement failed. Patrick Moore (Greenpeace founder) has often talked about the reasons he left the movement he founded. He has mentioned the dismal view of humans, the radicalization of the movement, the lack of science-based policy pursuit. Iain Murray does not tell you that it is so, he shows you the issues that the movement abandoned and disregarded because it was convenient.

The people involved in either side of this debate are often angry and defensive. The debate has been dirty for a long time. What struck me with Murray's book is his gentle voice, his descriptive, evidence based narrative. I grew up in the green movement; my first political engagement was in the Norwegian version of Friends of the Earth's youth group. I soon got disillusioned, and had I known the seven truths that Murray tells, I might have left sooner than I did.

If you are serious about your desire do conservation work, if you are serious about your dedication to make the human footprint on earth smaller, read this book. There are other alternatives out there, where you can contribute to a greener, wealthier world. A world where humans flourish and the environment is protected. Don't by into the dismal view of the Malthusian totalitarians. As Murray shows in this book, their policies kills people and hurts the environment.

Mr. Murray has written a very interesting and informative book on how dogmatic environmentalists have often actually worsened environmental problems or human living conditions or both. Mr. Murray demonstrates that a main part of the problem of the environmentalist dogma is the hostility to property rights. He demonstrates how this rejection of property rights led to the fires of debris on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio. Also relevant is the vanishing of the Aral Sea in Central Asia.

Mr. Murray also discusses other environmentalist made crises like the banning of the insecticide DDT and the emergence of malaria in Africa and other areas. Other notable crises discussed include the take over of crop land for ethanol production and the environmental restrictions that created fire prone areas near housing developments and national parks in the United States.

To his great credit Mr. Murray has exposed a lot of the fallacies of Al Gore's unscientific rant An Inconvenient Truth.

In essence Mr. Murray demonstrates that religious and dogmatic environmentalism has most often worsened both the environment and the human condition.

Mr. Murray covers a lot of the same ground as John Berlau in his excellent book Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health!. However these authors often do write about different topics. For example Mr. Berlau writes about the environmentalist opposition to adequate flood protection in New Orleans and the use of asbestos that could have prevented the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I feel Mr. Berlau writes a bit better. But still Mr. Murray has written an excellent work that merits the widest readership.

Although the tone of the writing sometimes put me off, I found the six of the seven examples well documented and argued. The author's conclusions were fully supportable from the evidence. However, the equating of "Liberals" to "Environmentalists" is not as exact as the author would like us to believe. But his analysis of environmentalism as a new and powerful secular religion (based in Mother Earth as God) is directly on target. To look at the seven (actually eight) cases:

(1) Global Warming & Al Gore. Although Gore and the media claim there is general scientific consensus on global warming and that the warming is due to man's intervention, that statement is false. At the time of this review (12/08), there is evidence that the aveage world temperature has been increasing about a degree per century, but there is no irrefutable evidence that this is coming from any actions of man. (See Solomon, "The Deniers") Al Gore is making millions with his propaganda efforts to panic the American population with a doomsday scenerio that cannot be supported by scientific evidence. Sounds like a scurrilious politician to me.

(2) The banning of DDT based on the propaganda work by Rachel Carson reversed the control of malaria and other diseases that had been achieved by the 1960s, and tens of millions of humans have died as a result. This is well-trodden ground, fully supportable by scientific evidence, but has not been reversed due to the environmental lobby. Even worse, Carol Browder, Clinton's head of the EPA, even banned Diazinon, the most effective controller of ticks and other pests since DDT, and now Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Fever are exploding in the US. One can argue that environmentalists are abject racists in seeking to ban the effective control of malaria in Africa, not caring about the people there because they are black, but I invite them to come to my ranch and spend a week outside. They will be bitten from one to five times by ticks, and I would like to see their lily-white, elitist reaction when they realize the possibility that they contracted Lyme disease.

(3) Ethanol. The problem of burning food for energy instead of eating it for survival is covered extremely well. As a cattle rancher (horrors, I raise animals for FOOD!), I see the rise in the price of corn due to its diversion into a source for ethanol. Using ethanol in place of gasoline will cause widespread hunger throughout the Third World, but again, environmentalists are not concerned since they are all yellow, brown or black anyway and we need to start lowering the population. (When will the 3rd World wake up and see what is going on?)

(4) Contraception pollutants: Estrogen released into the water is drastically altering animal reproduction. Again, this is based on solid evidence, but totally ignored by environmentalists who see this as a by-product of the wonman's right to control her own body and enjoy sex whenever she desires. OK, I understand the issue, but why can't we talk about it? Oh, I forgot, one doesn't point out the "unintended consequences."

(5) Yellowstone & Forest Fire Control. We have gone back and forth on the issue of fighting fires or allowing nature to take its course. However, allowing the forests to build up extensive amounts of underbrush and then attempting a "controlled burn" is a recipe for disaster. And so it has proved. Particularly when the Government bans logging or the cutting of fire control roads and the like. The moral: government management is worse than private ownership and management. Again, the evidence is irrefutable.

(6) The Cuyahoga River on fire. This is the weakest of the cases, but the fire happened because the State of Ohio issued permits for dumping into the river over the objections of the local Clevelanders. Cleveland had already taken steps to clean up the river (and Lake Erie), but higher government intervention brought about the debacle. The moral here is that the more remote a government is from the scene, the less effective it is (for example, FEMA.) So why are we attempting to interject the Federal Government into everything?

(7)Endangered Species. Yep, this Act has had a host of unintended consequences, all bad, and the entire idea is probably so badly flawed as to be unworkable. In many cases, the Government's right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and ecologically insignificant insects and animals are considered much more important than human beings. Have you ever noticed how animal rights activitists love animals but hate people? (Other people, of course.)

(8) State Planning (Communism) At Work. The case is about the disappearance of the vast majority of the Aral Sea on the altar of state planning. Once again, the actions of a powerful government, unstoppable by local individuals, wreaked an ecological disaster.

So the answer? Return the land to the people through local control and private ownership. Oh, I forgot (& here's where the liberals come in), liberals and environmentalists always know what is best for us, and their answer is always another federal agency or government regulation. Welcome to fuddle, muddle, and catastrophy.

This is an excellent book and should be required reading in all American high schools.

Iain Murray makes an important contribution to the debate about environmentalism, global warming (or the new catchall "climate change") and the left-wing's desire to bring individual activities under government control - provided, of course, that the left-wing is the government.

Murray is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute whose colleagues have also produced excellent books on the same general subjects. I highly recommend Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health! and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism). Along with two or three other books, such as Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition, you will be both very well-informed on the global warming . . . oh, I mean "climate change" . . . myth and able to rebut any left-wing argument with facts, not falsehoods.

Murray's work does not duplicate Berlau or Horner, rather he makes his examination from a somewhat different perspective.

Murray focuses his aim on Al Gore's falsehoods and exaggerations. One of the biggest distortions in Al Gore's movie and book is about a "threat" to polar bears. Gore claims "[a] new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers". The study Gore refers to is neither scientific nor accurate and Murray shows why. (The polar bears in question died as the result of a storm, not "global warming".)

What is important that a poorly drafted law from the time when left-wingers were claiming that the world was about to enter a new Ice Age - - - just four decades ago - - - calls for potentially endangered animals to be classified as such. The endangerment need not be proven. But the economic consequences can be devestating as left-wing groups rush to file lawsuits to block all kinds of economic activity on the spurious claim that polar bears will be further endangered.

Other environmental catastrophes that the left-wing doesn't want to talk about are also covered, such as the alarming rise of artificial estrogen found in streams, rivers and lakes. This artificial estrogen vastly increases the instance of "intersexed" fish which cannot breed and, ultimately, to the destruction of fish stocks. The left-wing, Murray explains, won't talk about this because the artificial estrogen is excreted by women taking birth control pills and to criticize another left-wing dogma is not permitted.

Likewise, as Berlau did so well, Murray points out the because of the left-wing's groundless campaign to ban DDT, thousands of children die from malaria. No tears for them from the left-wing. In fact, as Murray explains, many on the left are pleased to see any reduction in human population.

Murray's writing style is relaxed, but he provides sources for every claim he makes. (You don't see Al Gore doing that.)

In short, Murray is good to the cover's claim: he exposes "Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You To Know About - Because They Helped To Cause Them".

"The Really Inconvenient Truths" is an excellent exposition of the fallacies of the left-wing environmentalist and climate change myths. Well worth the time to read - and I suspect, underline as well. It is good stuff.

Jerry

While this book's title seems to indicate that it is about global warming, it is more of a popular history through environmentalism since the 1960s. And that is what makes it so valuable - and so devastating. The incompetence of environmentalists has led to much worse destruction of the environment than if we had done nothing at all. So the book does not address global warming per se (thought he does to an extent in the first chapter), but by revealing the results of previous environmental shrieking, he shows that we really shouldn't over react this time either. And we should be squinting extra carefully at the proposed solutions to climate change as, given the record, they are likely to make things much, much worse.

Murray walks us through seven incidents or issues that environmentalism has utterly botched. The book ranges far and wide on environmentalism, so that by the end we not only have explored those seven, but we know something positive about economics (for instance, how burning corn as ethenal in our cars results in less efficient care performance, more polluted atmosphere, and less food going to African aid - we literally are burning the lunch of someone in the third world), and positive solutions to environmental issues. One of my favorite chapters in the book shows how the chemicals from birth control pills are destroying fish populations, but the environmentalists refuse to do anything about it because it conflicts with the assumption that zero-consequences sexual activity is a good thing.

The book is well documented, and it is well written as well, but I found the last few chapters lagged a bit. This could also be because I read it in a single day. The last chapter, however, was a real gem, showing what we can do to help the environment without running to statist regulations, which he shows are simply disastrous to the environment.

All in all, highly recommended.