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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

Jerry (Gerald?) sent the email about President elect Obama's appointment of 
John P. Holdren (the global watrming scientist) and we have discussed other 
scenarios of the sustainability of the present lifestyles of humans.

  This anaylis/commentary from today's NYT illustrates why it is hard to just 
accept the 'gloom and doom ' predictions of even very smart, very well 
meaning men.  They are so often 'wrong'.  Look at some of the past 
predictions of Holdren and other well known 'phrophets' from the past.  
Anyway, take from it what you will.  

I'm going to continue to be the best steward of natural resources that I can 
and wil;l continue to urger others to do the same, but I just can't, yet, 
waste a lot of time worrying about whether hairspray (which I have never 
usedZ) is going to cause the extinction of mammals.  The rest, I'm figuring 
out as I go.............

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TierneyLab

Putting Ideas In Science To The Test

December 23, 2008, 11:43 am 

Science Advisor’s Unsustainable Bet (and Mine)

By John Tierney

My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor 
prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet 
to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet 
wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable 
and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is 
“sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the 
pessimists.

Dr. Ehrlich made the best-seller lists in the 1960s with apocalyptic visions 
of imminent international famines, food riots in America and catastrophic 
shortages of natural resources because humans were exceeding the planet’s 
carrying capacity. (JC’s comment lists some of his failed prophecies.) In 
1971, he and Dr. Holdren wrote an essay wrote warning that if “population 
control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the 
technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.” 

They declared that “present technology is inadequate to the task of 
maintaining the world’s burgeoning billions, even under the most optimistic 
assumptions,” and of shortages of food and water that would have to be 
overcome in the next two decades for humans to “be to be granted the 
privilege of confronting such dilemmas as the exhaustion of mineral resources 
and physical space later.”

But the predicted famines and resource shortages never arrived. Instead, the 
amount of food consumed per capita around the world increased over the 
following decades, and the prices of food and natural resources continued 
their long-term downward trend. Even though poor countries rejected the 
coercive population-control policies advocated by Dr. Ehrlich, even though 
population boomed, even though the store of minerals in the Earth was finite, 
people adapted and ended up better off. Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Holdren would 
have lost their bet whether they’d picked food or energy or other natural 
resources. 

Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on 
exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing 
the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 
2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since 
plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural 
resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and 
prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as 
Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that 
the trend was downward long before 1950, too. 

What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: 
Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his 
winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural 
resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or 
food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to 
new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by 
any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. 
They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy 
predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 
this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources. 

In 2005, I found a more adventurous prophet willing to bet on resource 
scarcity. Matthew Simmons, an expert on the oil industry and the author of 
“Twilight in the Desert,” bet $5,000 against me and Rita Simon, Julian’s 
widow, that the average price of oil, in 2005 dollars, would exceed $200 per 
barrel in 2010. (Here’s my column on the bet; here’s the Wikipedia entry on 
it; here’s an analysis of where we stood earlier this year by Stuart 
Staniford in the Oil Drum.)

Last week, the price of oil hit a four-year low, dropping below $35 per 
barrel, but Mr. Simmons remained optimistic of winning our bet. He told Jay 
Hancock of the Baltimore Sun that 2010 is “an eternity” away and predicted 
the price of oil would shoot back up. Well, anything’s possible. But I’m glad 
I followed Julian Simon’s advice to bet low. Now if only I could get Dr. 
Holdren to put up some money . . . .

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/