Climate Change Policies: Challenging the Activists.

• Author: Cordato, Roy
• Position: Brief article - Book review

Climate Change Policies: Challenging the Activists By Colin Robinson

London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2008.

Pp. 158. 10.00 £.

Climate Change Policies consists of six essays by different authors, plus an introduction by the editor, Colin Robinson. The chapters do not provide much in the way of new information or insights, but nonetheless they are worth reading, particularly for those who may not have given these issues much thought. Because the book is short and for the most part well written and nontechnical, some useful information can be gleaned without a significant investment.

Some of the best ammunition for "challenging the activists" appears in chapter 2, "Global Alarmism," by Russell Lewis, and in chapter 4, "Governments and Climate Change Issues," by David Henderson. Lewis examines some of the more infamous ecoalarmist predictions of the past fifty years. All these predictions of environmental disaster have turned out to be wrong. For example, in 1968 Paul Erlich, probably the most famous environmental doomsayer of the twentieth century, predicted that population growth would plunge the world into famine and starvation by the 1970s and 1980s, with tens of millions of deaths. According to Lewis, Ehrlich's proposed policy response to this prospect included "taxes on children and giving responsibility prizes to each couple for every five years of childless marriage." He also advocated stopping "all food aid to any country experiencing chronic food shortages" (p. 28). Fortunately, these policies were not implemented. In fact, as Lewis notes, food has become more plentiful even as global population has increased over the past half century, and food prices have continuously declined.

Lewis reviews similar claims by ecoalarmists with regard to oil and other resource depletion; threats from DDT usage, which led to a global ban on DDT and the subsequent deaths of millions of people from malaria; acid rain; and global cooling (the climate-change fad of the 1970s). He notes that the individuals making these predictions view humans as mindless robots with no ability to innovate and adapt. As he points out, "[T]echnological advance really does make all the difference" (pp. 27-28). He unfortunately does not emphasize that without market prices driving incentives and conveying information about scarcities and preferences, little technological change will occur. People have the ability to innovate and to adapt, but the incentive to do so in a...