Earth Day is coming this weekend, and it is worthwhile to remember that the impulses behind environmentalism are genuine. Environmentalists are right to want to protect so much of what is beautiful in this world. But on this first Earth Day of the new century, and 30th overall, environmentalism has gone seriously, sadly wrong. Its diagnosis of what is wrong, and its preferred solutions, are straight out of the '70s.
Malthusian collapse can only be a few decades away.
Government, government, and more government. This Earth Day, it is useful to know that there is another way to look at our small planet and another set of solutions to the real environmental problems that beset it. And to get a good look at that alternative to conventional environmentalism, I suggest a dip into a new book by Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institute. The Soft Green tragedy has been to raise them on a flimsy platform of dubious science and meddlesome regulation, regulation that has been inefficient at its occasional best and positively harmful at its much more frequent worst. Huber acknowledges that pollution is a problem, and offers the sulfur dioxide trading mechanism of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments as a model for market-based approaches to dealing with pollution.