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9/23/2015 The End of Doom Reason.com

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The End of DoomGood news! Dire predictions about cancer epidemics, mass extinction,overpopulation, and more turned out to be a bust.Ronald Bailey | Sep. 22, 2015 6:00 am

"The human predicament is driven byoverpopulation, overconsumption of naturalresources, and the use of unnecessarilyenvironmentally damaging technologies andsocioeconomicpolitical arrangements toservice Homo sapiens' aggregateconsumption," declared notorious doomsterPaul Ehrlich and his biologist wife AnneEhrlich in the March 2013 Proceedings of theRoyal Society B. They additionally warned,"Another possible threat to the continuationof civilization is global toxification," which has"expos[ed] the human population to myriad

subtle poisons."

In 1968, Ehrlich infamously prophesied in The Population Bomb, "The battle to feed all ofhumanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions ofpeople are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."Ehrlich was wrong then, and he and his wife are wrong now. The world is not going to beoverpopulated, run out of resources, or see the outbreak of massive cancer epidemics due toexposures to synthetic chemicals. Let's take a close look at five threats that failed tomaterialize, despite the warnings of 20th century doomsayers.

The Cancer Epidemic

In 2007, an American Cancer Society poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans believed that therisk of dying of cancer is going up. And no wonder, with authorities such as the prestigiousPresident's Cancer Panel ominously reporting that "with nearly 80,000 chemicals on themarket in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their dailylives and are un or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential

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environmental carcinogens is widespread." One member of that panel, Howard Universitysurgeon Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall Jr., went so far as to declare in 2010 that "the increasingnumber of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even thoughwe may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm."

There's just one problem with the panic: There is no growing cancer epidemic. Even as thenumber of manmade chemicals has proliferated, your chances of dying of the disease havebeen dropping for more than four decades. And not only have cancer death rates beendeclining significantly, ageadjusted cancer incidence rates have been falling for nearly twodecades. That is, of the number of Americans in nearly any age group, fewer are actuallycoming down with cancer. What's more, modern medicine has increased the fiveyearsurvival rates of cancer patients from 50 percent in the 1970s to 68 percent today.

In fact, the overall incidence of cancer has been falling about 0.6 percent per year since 1994.That may not sound like much, but as Dr. John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society,explains, "Because the rate continues to drop, it means that in recent years, about 100,000people each year who would have died had cancer rates not declined are living to celebrateanother birthday."

What's going on? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ageadjustedcancer incidence rates have been dropping largely because fewer Americans are smoking,more are having colonoscopies in which polyps that might become cancerous are removed,and in the early 2000s many women stopped hormone replacement therapy (whichmoderately increases the risk of breast cancer).

How did it come to be the conventional wisdom that manmade chemicals are especially toxicand the chief sources of a modern cancer epidemic? It all began with Rachel Carson, theauthor of the 1962 book Silent Spring.

In Silent Spring, Carson crafted an ardent denunciation of modern technology, hostility towhich drives environmentalist ideology to this day. At its heart is this belief: Nature isbeneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and oftenthe source of moral evil. Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for thepoliticization of science that afflicts our contemporary public policy debates.

Rachel Carson surely must have knownthat cancer is a disease in which therisk goes up as people age. And thanksto vaccines and new antibiotics,



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Americans in the 1950s were livingmuch longerlong enough to get anddie of cancer. In 1900 average lifeexpectancy was 47, and the annualdeath rate was 1,700 out of 100,000Americans. By 1960, life expectancyhad risen to nearly 70 years, and theannual death rate had fallen to 950 per100,000 people. Currently, lifeexpectancy is more than 78 years, andthe annual death rate is 790 per100,000 people. Today, although onlyabout 13 percent of Americans are overage 65, they account for 53 percent ofnew cancer diagnoses and 69 percentof cancer deaths.

Carson realized that even if peopledidn't worry much about their own

health as they aged, they did really care about that of their kids. So to ratchet up the fearfactor, she asserted that children were especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects ofsynthetic chemicals. "The situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing,"she wrote. "A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today,more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease [her emphasis]."In support of this claim, she reported that "twelve per cent of all deaths in children betweenthe ages of one and fourteen are caused by cancer."

Although it sounds alarming, Carson's statistic is essentially meaningless out of context,which she failed to supply. It turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer wasrising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.The American Cancer Society reports that about 10,450 children in the United States will bediagnosed with cancer in 2014 and that childhood cancers make up less than 1 percent of allcancers diagnosed each year. Childhood cancer incidence has been rising slowly over the pastcouple of decades at a rate of 0.6 percent per year. Consequently, the incidence rate increasedfrom 13 per 100,000 in the 1970s to 16 per 100,000 now. There is no known cause for thisincrease. The good news is that 80 percent of kids with cancer now survive five years or more,up from 50 percent in the 1970s.



So did the predicted cancer doom ever arrive? No. Rememberoverall incidence rates aredown.

With regard to cancer risks posed by synthetic chemicals, the American Cancer Society in its2014 Cancer Facts and Figures report concludes: "Exposure to carcinogenic agents inoccupational, community, and other settings is thought to account for a relatively smallpercentage of cancer deathsabout 4 percent from occupational exposures and 2 percent fromenvironmental pollutants (manmade and naturally occurring)."

Similarly, the British organization Cancer Research UK observes that for most people"harmful chemicals and pollution pose a very minor risk." How minor? Cancer Research UKnotes, "Large organizations like the World Health Organization and the International Agencyfor Research into Cancer have estimated that pollution and chemicals in our environmentonly account for about 3 percent of all cancers. Most of these cases are in people who work incertain industries and are exposed to high levels of chemicals in their jobs." Like theAmerican Cancer Society, Cancer Research UK advises, "Lifestyle factors such as smoking,alcohol, obesity, unhealthy diets, inactivity, and heavy sun exposure account for a muchlarger proportion of cancers."

Overpopulation

"To ecologists who study animals, food and population often seem like sides of the samecoin," wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1990. "If too many animals are devouring it, the foodsupply declines; too little food, the supply of animals declines." And then the kicker: "Homosapiens is no exception to that rule."

The Ehrlichs predicted that if the global climate system remained stable "it might take threedecades or more for the foodproduction system to come apart unless its repair became a toppriority of all humanity." They added, "One thing seems safe to predict: starvation andepidemic disease will raise death rates over most of the planet." It's 25 years later and insteadof going up, the global crude death rate has dropped from 9.7 per 1,000 people in 1990 to 7.9now.

More than two decades later, despite a distinct lack of apocalypses in the intervening time,the couple was still singing the same tune. For example, during a May 2013 conference at theUniversity of Vermont, Paul Ehrlich asked, "What are the chances a collapse of civilizationcan be avoided?" His answer: 10 percent.

Did the Ehrlichs just get the timing wrong? Is the threat of overpopulation still looming over



us?

In September 2014, demographers working with the United Nations Population Divisionpublished an article in Science arguing that world population would grow to around 11 billionby 2100. Nearly all of that increase—4 billion people—was projected in subSaharan Africa.

But Wolfgang Lutz and his fellow demographers at the International Institute for AppliedSystems Analysis beg to differ. In their November 2014 study, World Population and HumanCapital in the TwentyFirst Century, Lutz and his colleagues take into account the fact thatthe education levels of women are rising fast around the world, including in Africa. "In mostsocieties, particularly during the process of demographic transition, women with moreeducation have fewer children, both because they want fewer and because they find betterways to pursue their goals," they note. Given current age, sex, and education trends, theyestimate that world population will most likely peak at 9.6 billion by 2070 and then beginfalling. If the boosting of education levels is pursued more aggressively, world populationcould instead top out at 8.9 billion in 2060 before starting to drop.

Falling fertility rates are overdetermined—that is, there is a plethora of mutually reinforcingdata and hypotheses that explain the global downward trend. These include the effects ofincreased economic opportunities, more education, longer lives, greater liberty, andexpanding globalization and trade. The crucial point is that all of these explanations reinforceone another and accelerate the trend of falling global fertility. Even more interestingly, theyall emphasize how the opportunities afforded women by modernity produce lower fertility.

Insight into how the life prospects of women shape reproductive outcomes is provided in a2010 article in Human Nature, "Examining the Relationship Between Life Expectancy,Reproduction, and Educational Attainment." In that study, University of Connecticutanthropologists Nicola Bulled and Richard Sosis divvied up 193 countries into five groups bytheir average life expectancies. In countries where women could expect to live to between 40and 50 years, they bear an average of 5.5 children. Those with life expectancies between 51and 61 average 4.8 children. The big drop in fertility occurs at that point. Bulled and Sosisfound that when women's life expectancy rises to between 61 and 71 years, her total fertilitydrops to 2.5 children; between 71 and 75 years, it's 2.2 children; and over 75 years, womenaverage 1.7 children. The United Nations' 2012 Revision notes that global average lifeexpectancy at birth rose from 47 years in 1955 to 70 years in 2010. These findings suggestthat it is more than just coincidence that the average global fertility rate has fallen over thattime period from 5 to 2.45 children today.

In any case, it is a mistake to decry people as just consumers of resources. With the advent of



democratic capitalism, they are also creators of new technologies, services, and ideas thathave over the past two centuries enabled billions to rise from humanity's natural state ofabject poverty and pervasive ignorance.

Killer Tomatoes

Given the wellestablished advantages of modern biotech crops, including such benefits to thenatural environment as lessening pesticide use, preventing soil erosion, tolerating drought,and boosting yields, why do many leading environmentalist groups so strenuously opposethem?

Much of that answer is historically contingent. Just as biotech crops were beingcommercialized in the 1990s, they ran into a perfect storm of food and safety scandals inEurope. In order to protect beef farmers and suppliers, British food safety authoritiesdownplayed the dangers of "mad cow" disease, which was spread by feeding cattle infectedsheep's brains. The agency in charge of French public health permitted human transfusions ofHIVcontaminated blood, despite the existence of screening technology. And the asbestosindustry was revealed to have exercised undue influence over its regulators in evaluating therisks posed by that toxic mineral.

These incidents of fecklessness "led tostrong distrust and caused people tothink that firms and public authoritiessometimes disregard certain healthrisks in order to protect certaineconomic or political interests," arguesFrench National Institute ofAgricultural Research analyst SylvieBonny. Consequently, the events"increased the public's attention tocritical voices, and so the principle ofprecaution became an omnipresentreference." So when biotech crops werebeing introduced, much of theEuropean public was primed to takeseriously any claims that this newtechnology might carry hidden risks.

Bonny points out that opposition to



Jason Keisling

biotech crops arose first among"ecologist associations," includingGreenpeace and Friends of the Earth.In fact, hyping opposition to biotechcrops served as a lifeline to theseorganizations. Bonny notes that in thelate 1990s, Greenpeace in France wasexperiencing a serious falloff inmembership and donations, but thegenetically modified organism (GMO)issue rescued the group. "Its antiGMOaction was instrumental instrengthening GreenpeaceFrancewhich had been in serious financialstraits," she reports. It should alwaysbe borne in mind that environmentalistorganizations raise money to supportthemselves by scaring people. Moregenerally, Bonny observes, "For somepeople, especially many activists,biotechnology also symbolizes thenegative aspects of globalization andeconomic liberalism." She adds, "Sincethe collapse of the communist ideal hasmade direct opposition to capitalismmore difficult today, it seems to havefound new forms of expressionincluding, in particular, criticism ofglobalization, certain aspects ofconsumption, technical developments,etc."

These concerns obviously go wellbeyond any scientific considerationsregarding the safety of biotech crops

for health and the environment, and have had significant negative consequences for theacceptance of this useful technology around the world, especially in poor countries.



No one has ever gotten so much as a cough, sneeze, sniffle, or stomachache from eating foodsmade with ingredients from modern biotech crops. Every independent scientific body thathas ever evaluated the safety of biotech crops has found them to be safe for humans to eat."We have reviewed the scientific literature on [genetically engineered] crop safety for the last10 years that catches the scientific consensus that has matured since GE plants becamewidely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted sofar has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops,"asserted a team of Italian university researchers in September 2013. And they should know,since they conducted the largest ever survey of scientific studies—more than 1,700—thatevaluated the safety of such crops.

A statement issued by the board of directors of the American Association for theAdvancement of Science (AAAS), the largest scientific organization in the United States, onOctober 20, 2012, pointblank asserted that "contrary to popular misconceptions, GM cropsare the most extensively tested crops ever added to our food supply. There are occasionalclaims that feeding GM foods to animals causes aberrations ranging from digestive disorders,to sterility, tumors and premature death. Although such claims are often sensationalized andreceive a great deal of media attention, none have stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny."The AAAS board concluded, "Indeed, the science is quite clear: crop improvement by themodern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe."

In July 2012, the European Commission's chief scientific adviser, Anne Glover, declared,"There is no substantiated case of any adverse impact on human health, animal health, orenvironmental health, so that's pretty robust evidence, and I would be confident in sayingthat there is no more risk in eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food."

At its annual meeting in June 2012, the American Medical Association endorsed a reportarguing against the labeling of bioengineered foods from its Council on Science and PublicHealth. The report concluded, "Bioengineered foods have been consumed for close to 20years, and during that time, no overt consequences on human health have been reportedand/or substantiated in the peer reviewed literature." In December 2010, a EuropeanCommission review of 130 E.U.funded biotechnology research projects, covering a period ofmore than 25 years and involving more than 500 independent research groups, found "noscientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food andfeed safety than conventional plants and organisms."

Catastrophic Climate Change

Let's start by accepting that global warming is real. There are two ways to address concerns



about climate change: adaptation and mitigation. In 2014, the United NationsIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued two reports addressing theseoptions: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (hereafter theAdaptation report), which describes adaptation as the "process of adjustment to actual orexpected climate and its effects"; and Climate Change 2014: Mitigation (hereafter theMitigation report), which defines mitigation as "a human intervention to reduce the sourcesor enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases."

The IPCC reports offer cost estimates for both adaptation and mitigation. The Adaptationreport reckons that, assuming that the world takes no steps to deal with climate change,"global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of around 2°C arebetween 0.2 and 2.0 percent of income." The report adds, "Losses are more likely than not tobe greater, rather than smaller, than this range."

In a 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, Yale economist WilliamNordhaus assumed that humanity will do nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Nordhaususes an integrated assessment model that combines the scientific and socioeconomic aspectsof climate change to assess policy options for climate change control. His RICE2010integrated assessment model found that "of the estimated damages in the uncontrolled(baseline) case, those damages in 2095 are $12 trillion, or 2.8% of global output, for a globaltemperature increase of 3.4°C above 1900 levels." Nordhaus' estimate evidently assumes thatthe world's economy will grow at about 2.5 percent annually, reaching a total GDP of roughly$450 trillion in 2095.

What might the world's economy look like by 2100 using various policies with the aim ofmitigating or adapting to climate change? In 2012, the IPCC asked the economists in theEnvironment Directorate at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development topeer into the future and devise a plausible set of shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) tothe year 2100. The OECD economists came up with five baseline scenarios. Let's take a lookat a couple of the scenarios to get some idea of how the world's economy might evolve overthe remainder of this century. The OECD analysis begins in 2010 with a world population of6.8 billion and a total world gross product of $67 trillion (in 2005 dollars). This yields aglobal percapita income just shy of $10,000. For reference the OECD notes that U.S. 2010per capita income averaged $42,000.

The SSP2 scenario is described as the "middle of the road" projection in which "trends typicalof recent decades continue, with some progress towards achieving development goals,reductions in resource and energy intensity at historic rates, and slowly decreasing fossil fuel



dependency." If economic and demographic history unfolds as that scenario suggests, worldpopulation will have peaked at around 9.6 billion in 2065 and fallen to just over 9 billion by2100. The world's economy will have grown more than eightfold, from $67 trillion to $577trillion (2005 dollars). Average income per person globally will have increased from around$10,000 today to $60,000 by 2100. U.S. annual incomes would average just over $100,000.

In the SSP5 "conventional development" scenario, the world economy grows flat out, which"leads to an energy system dominated by fossil fuels, resulting in high [greenhouse gas]emissions and challenges to mitigation." Because there is more urbanization and becausethere are higher levels of education, world population will peak at 8.6 billion in 2055 and willhave fallen to 7.4 billion by 2100. The world's economy will grow 15fold to just over $1quadrillion, and the average person in 2100 will be earning about $138,000 per year. U.S.annual incomes would exceed $187,000 per capita. It is of more than passing interest thatpeople living in the warmer world of SSP5 are much better off than people in the cooler SSP2world.

The OECD analysis adds with regard to climate change in this scenario that the much richerand more highly educated people in 2100 will face "lower socioenvironmental challenges toadaptation result[ing] from attainment of human development goals, robust economicgrowth, highly engineered infrastructure with redundancy to minimize disruptions fromextreme events, and highly managed ecosystems." In other words, greater wealth andadvanced technologies will significantly enhance people's capabilities to deal with whateverthe deleterious consequences of climate change turn out to be.

As noted above, the IPCC estimates that failure to adapt to climate change will reduce futureincomes by between 0.2 to 2 percent for temperatures exceeding 2°C. Yale's Nordhaus is oneof the more accomplished researchers in the area of trying to calculate the costs and benefitsof climate change. In his 2013 book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economicsfor a Warming World, Nordhaus notes that a survey of studies that try to estimate theaggregated damages that climate change might inflict at 2.5°C warming comes in at anaverage of about 1.5 percent of global output. The highest climate damage estimate Nordhauscites is a 5 percent reduction in income, though the muchcriticized 2006 Stern Review: TheEconomics of Climate Change suggested that the businessasusual path of economic growthand greenhouse gas emissions could reduce future incomes by as much as 20 percent.

Future temperatures will perhaps exceed these, but transient climate response temperaturesover the remainder of the century are likely to be close to the 2.5°C benchmark cited by theIPCC. In the scenarios sketched out above, a 2 percent loss of income would mean that the



$60,000 and $138,000 per capita income averages would fall to $58,800 and $135,240,respectively. Stern's more apocalyptic estimate would cut 2100 per capita incomes to$48,000 and $110,400, respectively.

So how much should people living now on incomes averaging $10,000 per year spend tomake sure that people whose incomes will likely be six to 14 times higher aren't reduced by acouple of percentage points? As Nordhaus observes, "Most philosophers and economists holdthat rich generations have a lower ethical claim on resources than poorer generations."

Making the extreme set of assumptions that all countries of the world begin mitigationimmediately and adopt a single global carbon price, and widely deploy current versions oflow and nocarbon technologies such as wind, solar, and nuclear power, the IPCC's 2014Mitigation report estimates that keeping carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 parts permillion (ppm) in 2100 would result in "an annualized reduction of consumption growth by0.04 to 0.14 percentage points over the century relative to annualized consumption growth inthe baseline that is between 1.6 percent and 3 percent per year." The median estimate inreduced annualized growth in consumption is 0.06 percent.

The IPCC Mitigation report notes that the optimal scenario that it sketches out for keepinggreenhouse gas concentrations below 450 ppm would cut incomes in 2100 by between 3 and11 percent. How much would that be? As was done with regard to the losses from a lack ofadaptation, let's look at how much the worstcase mitigation scenario might reduce futureincomes. Without extra mitigation, the increase of global gross product to $577 trillion in themiddleoftheroad scenario implies an economic growth rate of 2.42 percent between 2010and 2100. Cutting that growth rate by 0.14 percentage points to 2.28 percent yields anincome of $510 trillion in 2100, reducing per capita incomes from $60,000 to $57,000 percapita. Growth in the conventionaldevelopment scenario is cut from an implied 3.07 percentto 2.93 percent, reducing overall income from over $1.015 quadrillion to $901 trillion, andcutting average incomes from $138,000 to $122,000.

All of these figures must be taken with a vat of salt since they are projections for economic,demographic, and biophysical events nearly a century from now. That being acknowledged,projected IPCC income losses that would result from doing nothing to adapt to climatechange appear to be roughly comparable to the losses in income that would occur followingefforts to slow climate change. In other words, it appears that doing nothing about climatechange now will cost future generations about the same as doing something now.

If the results of adaptation and mitigation are more or less the same for future generations,how to pick which path to follow? Given what we know about the competence and efficiency



Jason Keisling

of government, it seems likely that what governments try to do to mitigate climate changemay well turn out to be worse than climate change. The better path is one that helps futuregenerations deal with climate change by adopting policies that encourage rapid economicgrowth. This would endow future generations with the wealth and superior technologiesnecessary to handle whatever comes at them, including climate change.

Mass Extinction

Many biologists and conservationists are urgently warning that humanity is on the verge ofwiping out hundreds of thousands of species in this century. "A large fraction of bothterrestrial and freshwater species faces increased extinction risk under projected climatechange during and beyond the 21st century," states the 2014 IPCC Adaptation report."Current rates of extinction are about 1000 times the likely background rate of extinction,"asserts a May 2014 review article in Science by Duke University biologist Stuart Pimm and hiscolleagues. "Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times thebackground rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day," warns the Center forBiological Diversity. That group adds, "It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by midcentury."

Eminent Harvard University biologistE.O. Wilson agrees. "We're destroyingthe rest of life in one century. We'll bedown to half the species of plants andanimals by the end of the century if wekeep at this rate." University ofCalifornia at Berkeley biologistAnthony Barnosky similarly notes, "Itlooks like modern extinction ratesresemble mass extinction rates."Assuming that species loss continuesunabated, Barnosky adds, "The sixthmass extinction could arrive within aslittle as three to 22 centuries."

Let's assume 5 million species. IfWilson is right that half could be gone

by the middle of this century, that implies that species are disappearing at a rate of 71,000per year, or just under 200 per day. Contrast this implied extinction rate with Pimm and his



colleagues, who estimate that the background rate of extinction without human influence isabout 0.1 species per million species years. This means that if one followed the fates of onemillion species, one would expect to observe about one species going extinct every 10 years.Their new estimate is 100 species going extinct per million species years. So if the worldcontains 5 million species, then that suggests that 500 are going extinct every year.Obviously, there is a huge gap between Wilson's offthecuff estimate and Pimm's morecautious calculations, though both assessments are troubling.

But this is not the first time biologists have sounded the alarm over purportedly acceleratedspecies extinctions. In 1970, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,predicted that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of livinganimals would be extinct. That is, as much as four out of every five species of animals wouldbe extinct by 1995. Happily, that did not happen. In 1994, biologist Peter Raven predictedthat "since more than ninetenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in mostareas within the next thirty years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areaswill vanish with it." It's now more than 20 years later and nowhere near 90 percent of therainforests have been cut down, and no one thinks that half of the species inhabiting tropicalforests have vanished.

In 1979, Oxford University biologist Norman Myers suggested in his book The Sinking Arkthat 40,000 species per year were going extinct and that the world could lose a millionspecies, or "onequarter of all species by the year 2000." At a 1979 symposium at BrighamYoung University, Thomas Lovejoy, a former president of the H. John Heinz III Center forScience, Economics, and the Environment, announced that he had made "an estimate ofextinctions that will take place between now and the end of the century. Attempting to beconservative wherever possible, I still came up with a reduction of global diversity betweenoneseventh and onefifth." Lovejoy drew up the first projections of global extinction rates forthe Global 2000 Report to the President in 1980. If Lovejoy had been right, between 15 and20 percent of all species alive in 1980 would be extinct right now. No one believes thatextinctions of this magnitude have occurred over the last three decades.

What did happen? As of 2013, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)lists 709 known species as having gone extinct since 1500. A study published in Science inJuly 2014 reported that among terrestrial vertebrates, 322 species have become extinct since1500. That's not nothing, but those assessments amount to just 1 percent of all vertebrateterrestrial species alive today.

Don't Panic



Why does it matter if the population at large believes these dire predictions about humanity'sfuture? The primary danger is they may fuel a kind of pathological conservatism that couldactually become a selffulfilling prophecy.

The closest thing to a canonical version of the "precautionary principle" was devised by agroup of 32 leading environmental activists meeting in 1998 at the Wingspread Center inWisconsin. The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle reads:"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionarymeasures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully establishedscientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bearthe burden of proof. The process of applying the Precautionary Principle must be open,informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involvean examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action."

Why was this new principle needed? Because, the Wingspread conferees asserted, thedeployment of modern technologies was spawning "unintended consequences affectinghuman health and the environment," and "existing environmental regulations and otherdecisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequatelyhuman health and the environment."

As a result of these unintended side effects and the supposed regulatory inadequacy, theconferees insisted, "Corporations, government entities, organizations, communities,scientists and other individuals must adopt a precautionary approach to all humanendeavors" (emphasis added). Contemplate for a moment this question: Are there anyhuman endeavors at all that some timorous person could not assert raise a "threat" of harmto human health or the environment?

Promoters of the precautionary principle argue that its great advantage is that implementingit will help avoid deleterious unintended consequences of new technologies. Unfortunately,supporters are most often focusing on the seen while ignoring the unseen. In his brilliantessay "What Is Seen and What Is Unseen," 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiatpointed out that the favorable predictable effects of any policy often produce many disastrouslater consequences.

Banning nuclear power plants reduces the imagined seen risk of exposure to radiation whileboosting the unseen risks associated with manmade global warming. Prohibiting a pesticideaims to diminish the seen risk of cancer, but elevates the unseen risk of malaria. Demandingmore drug trials seeks to prevent the seen risks of toxic side effects, but increases the unseenrisks of disability and death stemming from delays in getting effective drugs to patients.



Mandating the production of biofuels attempts to address the seen risks of dependence onforeign oil, but heightens the unseen risks of starvation.

Electricity, automobiles, antibiotics, oil production, computers, plastics, vaccinations,chlorination, mining, pesticides, paper manufacture, and nearly everything that constitutesthe vast enterprise of modern technology all have risks. On the other hand, it should beperfectly obvious that allowing inventors and entrepreneurs to take those risks hasenormously lessened others. How do we know? People in modern societies are enjoying muchlonger and healthier lives than did our ancestors, with greatly reduced risks of disease,debility, and early death.

The precautionary principle is the opposite of the scientific process of trial and error that isthe modern engine of knowledge and prosperity. The precautionary principle impossiblydemands trials without errors, successes without failures.

"The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing withoutknowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all," explained Aaron Wildavskyin his 1988 book Searching for Safety. "An indirect implication of trial without error is that iftrying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; thisvery lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards."Wildavsky added, "Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them bytaking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials."

Should we look before we leap? Sure we should. But every utterance of proverbial wisdom hasits counterpart, reflecting both the complexity and the variety of life's situations and thefoolishness involved in applying a short list of hard rules to them. Given the manifoldchallenges of poverty and environmental renewal that technological progress can help usaddress in this century, the wiser maxim to heed is "He who hesitates is lost."

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