The rest of the world doesn't keep its carbon books in balance. But America does. Huber thinks environmentalists are wrong in their entire view of how to preserve the environment. They're mistaken, he argues, to celebrate renewable resources, decentralized power supplies and pesticide-free agriculture. Expanding the use of solar power would require using land that could be preserved as forest.
Pesticides boost crop yields, making it possible to grow more food on less acreage.
He also makes a powerful case that economic growth and rising wealth are the ally of the environment, not the enemy. Huber is a lively polemicist, and he does an excellent job of arguing the conservative critique. Huber's hero is not James Watt, as his targets might suppose, but Theodore Roosevelt, the father of the conservation movement. Roosevelt didn't fret about trace pollutants that pose a danger only if you believe speculative and highly fallible scientific models. Huber thinks conservatives need to recapture the spirit of a Republican president who saw no contradiction between preserving nature and putting it to recreational use.