First the good news - Remember all that stuff you've heard about the world coming to end? Overpopulation leading to inevitable famines; trace chemicals leading to epidemics of cancer, reduced sperm counts, and early onset puberty; GMOs leading to frankenstein flora; cell phones leading to brain cancer; powerlines leading to alzheimers disease; global warming that reaches some bizzare tipping point that leaves us all under 3 foot of warm water and human development leading to massive species extinction? Ronald Bailey has written a carefully and extensively researched book that shows that most if not all of the environmental hype over the last 40 years has been nothing but hype - fearmongering cloaked in science, but otherwise having no scientific support.
The bad news is is that even though Bailey provides a calm, even-handed, fact-based treatment of the topic, he would likely be as popular at a lefty cocktail party as Charles Darwin would be at a convention of creationists, or Christopher Hitchens at a Baptist revival. Large numbers of people want to believe that the world is coming to an end, that man's rapacious overconsumption has doomed the planet, that we are all being poisoned by the actions of evil corporations. This pathological need has existed since the beginning of time, and there have always been charlatans, well meaning and otherwise, willing to give the people what they want.
Unfortunately, Bailey is the type of guy who will spoil a good paranoia party by bringing facts as a housewarming gift - kind of the calm well spoken erudite commentator who is nonetheless the iconoclast in the punchbowl. If you have built your worldview around dogs and cats lying together, boiling seas, plagues of locusts and the world becoming a New Jersey toxic waste dump writ large, do you really want somebody to burst your bubble and tarnish your credibility by showing your fears are largely unfounded? I didn't think so!
In seriousness, the book is valuable on several levels. Bailey discusses confirmation bias at length. If you tend to be skeptical of the endless progression of environmental crises de jour, then Bailey provides page after well-written page of evidence that the emperor is indeed wearing no clothes. Each page is jammed with footnotes and numbers and statistics, yet written in a very readable style.
Even If your confirmation bias isn't getting stroked, Bailey is performing a service by highlighting shortcomings of thought patterns. Slavish adherence to the precautionary principle assumes that the status quo is not more risky than the range of plausible outcomes going forward. Mandates for extensive testing of new drugs may cost more lives than they save as people die during the testing phase. Organizations such as Greenpeace may have ulterior motives for scaremongering, i.e. soliciting donations etc. etc
It is important to note that Bailey is by no means an idealogue. He famously changed his mind on the impact of global warming in the late 1990s, going from skepticism to sipping the kool-aid. However, he anticipates the solutions will be less Naomi Klein post-capitalist redistributionist new world order and more traditional human ingenuity and markets. You can hear the 'never let a good crisis go to waste' crowd gnashing their teeth and rending their garments at the prospect that global warming will be resolved without forcing onerous changes on the developed world.
Yet i digress. This is a very very good book. Read it. Share it with your 'environmentalism as a religion' type friends. Even if it doesn't change your mind or theirs, it will give you all something to think about.
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Ideas as interesting and it is well sourced. The ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2016