TERRIFIC READING – AT 10:46 A.M. ET:  I sometimes run across a piece that becomes a "must read," and so I recommend it.  The Wall Street Journal has just run a detailed article debunking the myth that the world is "running out of" resources.  It's become a religious belief of the environmental movement, and it's just wrong.

I went to a speech by Larry Summers about three years ago in which he made the point that the world has never run out of anything.  As the author of the Journal piece, Matt Ridley, points out, the human race has something called "innovation," that acts as a counter to shortages.  The human race comes up with new ways to do things, or to make greater use of what we have. 

We have been warned repeatedly that we're running out of 1) petroleum, 2) water, 3) farmland, 4) food, 5) and probably TV shows.  But the fact is that it never really happens.  From Ridley's article: 

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation.

COMMENT:  This is an important piece because it leads us to a rational discussion of "climate change," which has become part of the environmental religion.  We'll take care of this problem, too, if it is one.

Read the piece and save it.

April 26,  2014