Go to Top Chapter III, Air and Water Issues

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III. Air and Water Issues (Con't)

 

 

 

 

 

Water Resources

      Water Resources can be subdivided into two issues, water availability and water pollution. Addressing the issue of water availability first, a UN environmental report entitled GEO 2000 claims that the planet’s water shortage constitutes a “full-scale emergency” where “the world water cycle seems unlikely to be able to cope with the demands that will be made of it in the coming decades.” Indeed, according to the United Nations, “severe water shortages already hamper development in many parts of the world, and the situation is deteriorating.”¹ Once again, however, this is quite exaggerated.

      While there are problems, predicting that water availability will be the world’s number one crisis in the twenty-first century seems far-fetched. It is unlikely there will be any “water wars” as nations fight other nations for dwindling supplies of water. As an Israeli Defense Forces analyst pointed out, “Why go to war over water? For the price of one week’s fighting, you could build five desalination plants. No loss of life, no international pressure, and a reliable supply you don’t have to defend in hostile territory.”² Of course a nation has to abut an ocean to be able to use desalination plants, but the point is plainly made.

      Problems in fresh water accessibility are primarily regional in scope and logistical in nature. Seventy-one percent of the earth is covered with water — some 13.6 billion cubic kilometers. Of that mind-bending amount, oceans make up 97.2 percent and polar ice 2.15 percent. Neither is economically available when fresh water supplies are readily accessible. Therefore, humanity depends on the last 0.65 percent, of which .62 percent is ground­water. Enough fresh water falls in the form of rain to provide 5,700 liters of water for every single person on earth every single day.³ Europeans typically use 566 liters daily. Even water-wasting Americans only use 1,332 liters per person every day. In short, there is more than enough water.

    However, not everyone has equal access to that water. Kuwait has only 30 liters/ person/day while citizens of Iceland have nearly two million liters per person per day.  Surprisingly, while Kuwait has only 30 liters of water available per day per capita, far below the UN/World Bank level of 1,370 liters per day level to qualify as having “absolute water scarcity,” there is no water shortage in Kuwait. Why? It doesn’t depend on rain to provide its fresh water, it depends on desalination. Desalting requires large amounts of energy, but Kuwait also has huge energy resources. Through innovation the cost to desalt sea water is down to 50-80¢ per m³. While more expensive than most people having ready access to fresh water, it is definitely not out of reach.⁴ It clearly shows that there is sufficient water — if the nation’s can pay for it. Once again, poverty is the villain that often forms the root problem, not the environment or resource limitations. Making a desalination infrastructure needed for the total global municipal needs would cost about 0.5 percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).⁵

      Countries that have minimum fresh water have become extremely efficient at exploiting these limited resources. Israel, for instance, has made the desert green using drip irrigation that in some cases recycles household gray water. Yet, according to United Nations and World Bank guidelines, Israel is suffering crippling water scarcity. Israel does face a serious problem, but because water is a scarce resource its value drives innovation and creativity, bringing truth to the saying, “necessity is the mother of invention.” This is something a planned, bureacratized society has never achieved.

      Globally, agriculture uses 69 percent of all fresh water, while industry uses 23 percent, and households 8 percent⁶ Since every ton of grain production uses about 1,000 tons of water, countries in which water is scarce import most of their grain rather than growing it. Israel imports about 87 percent of its grain requirements, Jordan 91 percent, Saudi Arabia 50 percent – and this is not necessarily bad. Looking at it in a different way, this is a very efficient way of importing water.

      Most food production regions of the world are what some call “wasteful” of water. But what is waste? Is there virtue in paying 30¢ per m³ of water in a region to satisfy notions of “efficiency” when water is so plentiful that it only costs 20¢ per m³? It is not until it becomes scarce, as in the Mideast, that it becomes valuable. Once it becomes valuable, people become creative in how they use it — if they have a free market to provide the incentive. There is no need for crippling international government programs to solve a non-existent problem. When agricultural drip irrigation became necessary in India, Jordan, Spain and the Western United States, water use was consistently cut by 30-70 percent while increasing yields by 20-90 percent.⁷

      In summary, “more than 96 percent of all nations have at present sufficient water resources. On all continents, water accessibility has increased per person, and at the same time an ever higher proportion of people have gained access to clean drinking water and sanitation.”⁸ The remaining water availability and accessibility problems are primarily related not to physical water scarcity but to a lack of proper water management  — and poverty. Both are usually caused by government corruption and a lack of free enterprise. The answer, as always, is inalienable rights, free enterprise and a government of the people.

      The second problem, water pollution, was becoming very serious in the United States, and the world, by the mid twentieth century. In the 1960s several rivers were so badly polluted that they actually caught fire and burned, including the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969. This stimulated action, and the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. Today those once-polluted rivers have been cleaned up and have new parks on their banks. Likewise, Lake Erie was so polluted that most fish species could no longer live in its waters — primarily because nutrient pollution, especially phosphorus, created algae blooms that caused severe oxygen depletion in the lake waters. Proclamations that it would take a hundred years for Lake Erie to be restored have proven false. “As the level of raw sewage and phosphorus entering the lake was reduced, water quality improved dramatically. Fish such as the walleye began to flourish again. By the time the 1980s arrived, Lake Erie had begun to play a significant role in recreation and in the economy of Ohio.”⁹

      As discussed earlier, the cause of this pollution was not property rights, or capitalism or free market enterprise. Rather, as economists have pointed out, it is another example of the Tragedy of the Commons. No one owned the rivers and lakes and the cheapest way for companies and cities to get rid of waste was to use the rivers and lakes like sewers. The Clean Water Act forced industry and communities to clean up their effluent before it was dumped into the nations rivers and lakes. Clearly the Act has had some positive environmental benefits. But, similar to the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws, it came with a heavy price.

      Communities with just a few hundred or thousand people had to put in the same treatment facilities as cities of hundreds or millions of people. The cost per person to a community of 3,000 people spread over several square miles was many times higher than for the same population in a city block of New York City. Federal cost sharing helped, but the regulations were overkill for these smaller communities. Had the regulatory promulgation been shifted from the federal level to the state and even  community level, far better and more cost effective solutions could have been found. At the same time those promulgating the regulations would have been more accountable to the electorate they were regulating.

      Rivers and lakes at the global level have also shown tremendous improvement in pollution. Fecal pollution has shown dramatic improvement and seems to be directly correlated to per capita income. Fecal pollution seems to worsen, for example, until average income for the nation reaches about $1,375, after which the rivers get cleaner. However, once income exceeds $11,500, pollution once again dramatically increases. Why? “The explanation seems to be that there is a general downwards trend in fecal pollution so long as people are dependent on river water. However, when a nation gets rich enough, it uses groundwater to a much greater extent, which diminishes the urgency and political inclination to push for ever lower fecal pollution levels.”¹⁰ Once again, need determines value, which drives how much a society is willing to spend on environmental cleanup.

      Similarly, nutrient overloads, which cause algae blooms and oxygen depletion, have diminished dramatically around the world. Oxygen levels have returned to near normal levels for most rivers and lakes of industrialized nations. The wealthier a nation, the greater the oxygen levels in its fresh water, which in turn allows life to return. The biodiversity in the Rhine River, for example, has increased sixfold since 1971, and 20 fold for the Thames River.¹¹

 

Oceans

      Two major problems exist in our oceans: over-fishing and pollution. Taking over-fishing first, the total catch of ocean fish increased until the early 1980s and then leveled off at about 90 million pounds annually.¹² It is estimated that the oceans can produce about 100 million pounds of fish annually.  However, this figure cannot be attained because modern fisheries have caused over-fishing, thereby reducing the breeding stock and keeping the harvest lower than it might otherwise be.

      The reason for over-fishing is the same reason America’s air and water in the past were so polluted — the Tragedy of the Commons. Since oceans belong to everyone, they are no one’s responsibility, and there is no incentive to harvest less than technology allows. “The trouble is,” notes Lomborg, “that the optimal level [of harvest] can only be attained if some sort of ownership can be established over the fish.”¹³ But ownership cannot easily be allocated over the many fish living in the oceans.

      But is a solution even necessary? Harvests, and by assumption fish stocks, have remained relatively stable since the mid-1980s. Besides normal cyclical variation on a regional basis, there is no indication fish stocks are in danger. Other than getting another 10 million tons of harvest, there is no real reason to optimize fish stocks and harvests. Fish consumption represents less than 1 percent of the world’s total calorie consumption¹⁴ and ten million tons would feed the world for only 19 days.¹⁵

      The UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that annual harvests could decline more if fishing pressure increases. Since there are no feasible means to increase the harvest beyond 100 million tons, the only other way to both increase the harvest and protect the existing stocks is through fish farming. This has been so successful on a global basis that although fish catches have not been able to keep pace with the population growth, the total fish production has increased so much that the fish per capita in the late 1990s once again reached record levels.¹⁶

      While the overall global picture looks good, government interference in the United States has resulted in artificial dislocation of the fishing industry. Tremendous pressure from environmentalists who don’t like any human management of any natural resource, as well as recreational fishermen who want no commercial fishing, has led to sometimes outrageous regulatory restrictions. In the early 1990s an attack was launched against the United States tuna industry by environmentalists decrying the loss of some dolphins while harvesting mature tuna in the Eastern Pacific. Dolphins are often associated with schools of mature yellow-fin tuna, and are used as “scouts” to help tuna boats locate the schools of tuna. Unfortunately the dolphin themselves can sometimes be caught in the nets.

      Although the tuna industry had made a tremendous effort in time and money, including the adoption of new net technology to reduce dolphin mortality, it was not enough for the anti-tuna fishing groups. Although most catches killed no dolphins at all, and neither the dolphins or tuna were ever in danger of becoming depleted, environmental protests led to the passage of “dolphin-safe” laws that destroyed the West coast tuna industry. The remaining fleet had to fish in the Western Pacific where younger tuna are caught, producing a inferior product at a higher price. Meanwhile, the Japanese and other individual nations continue to fish the Eastern Pacific – an area that has become void of American commercial fishing.¹⁷ Similar problems are occurring in other commercial U.S. fisheries as well.

      Even fish farming is being attacked in the United States. For instance, because of the Endangered Species Act, commercially bred salmon are not allowed to mix with indigenous salmon, even though in most cases they are genetically identical. Regulations are being promulgated or discussed that either eliminate or severely regulate salmon farms whose fish pens might fail, releasing the artificially bread salmon into the rivers where they might contaminate the nearly identical genetic pool of the indigenous salmon. Yet, the gene pool of indigenous salmon is already contaminated from a hundred years of federal salmon stocking of rivers throughout the United States. Geneticists disagree whether this is even a problem. In fact, by keeping a variety of salmon genes thriving through salmon farming, a broad gene pool is being preserved for future generations.

      The harm done to otherwise viable property owners, be it fishing boats or fish pens, by the arbitrary passage of laws and regulations is once again demonstrated in the ocean fishing industry. One way to avoid these kinds of arbitrary and sometimes capricious laws and regulations is to compensate property owners for the loss of their property as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. As discussed earlier, such compensation would force society to prioritize what is important with the limited resources, rather than destroy or harm individual businesses or families. It would be also beneficial if environmental NGOs in the U.S. were required to obey the same truth in advertising laws and regulations that everyone else has to obey. Currently they are not held accountable for anything they say, regardless of how outrageous it might be.

      Turning now to ocean pollution, the greatest threat is to coastal beaches and estuaries. Even so, since the mid-1960s the installation of water treatment facilities and storm and sewer separation has yielded tremendous gains in cleaning our rivers and direct discharge into the ocean by abutting communities. All forms of  fecal, pesticide, toxic and heavy metal pollution have shown large declines since the 1970s.¹⁸ This is largely because of the Clean Water Act in the United States as discussed in the water pollution section above. Tremendous gains have been made, but at what cost?  And could the same or even greater gains have resulted using a common law  verses a central command and control approach utilized by the EPA?

      Nutrient pollution, primarily from upriver agriculture, livestock and home lawn fertilization, represents one of the ongoing problems for coastal beaches and estuaries. The UN Global Environment Outlook 2000 equated nutrient pollution, and subsequent algae growth and oxygen depletion, as comparable to the global warming problem, which the UN believes to be a threat to the survival of earth.¹⁹ Yet, fertilizer use has plateaued in developed nations and dramatically declined in developing nations.²⁰ Nonetheless, portions of the Gulf of Mexico have become dead zones each year from oxygen depletion because synthetic (50 percent) and animal (15 percent) waste washes down the Mississippi River from upriver sources.²¹ Evidence exists that this has been a periodic problem since even before the use of fertilizers, but has now become an annual phenomenon.

      It is estimated it would cost nearly $4.8 billion to reduce this problem – namely by cutting fertilizer use by 20 percent and creating 5 million acres of wetlands to filter out nitrogen  before it reaches the river.²² But this would not entirely solve the problem.  Oxygen depletion would no longer occur every year, but would occur frequently enough to kill rebounding sea life populations every few years. Further, other species in the Gulf which thrive on additional nitrogen and would suffer if the loads were dropped.

      Although it is right to be concerned, we must also maintain a sense of proportion. While fertilizer and consequent eutrophication [i.e. oxygen depletion] cost the lives of certain organisms in local marine habitats (but provide life to others), it has also made it possible to grow much more food on the same agricultural land. This has saved about 25 percent of today’s forests [from land conversion to agriculture] and will save much more in the future.”²³ So the use of fertilizer not only feeds more people, it has a huge impact on saving forests from being converted to agriculture. Had fertilizer use remained at the 1960 level, we would need at least 50 percent more farmland than the present-day use²⁴ — the equivalent of converting almost a quarter of the global forests.²⁵  Once again, it comes down to prioritizing our limited resources to determine how we protect our environment.

      The major sources are urban runoff (oil from streets and highways entering streams and rivers, and making its way into the oceans) and natural seeps out of cracks in the sea floor. Oil pollution from bunker tanks, accidental spills and offshore drilling operations, by comparison, is relatively small. Such spills result from ships using sea water as ballast to displace empty bunker oil tanks, then flushing them out just before or after arriving in port. Since international treaties have been ratified by most nations forbidding that practice, this source of pollution, fortunately,  has largely been eliminated. The next greatest source is accidental spills, 80 percent of which originates from major accidents.²⁶ Even so, the number of these spills has dropped dramatically, from an average of 24 before 1980 to eight in the 1990s. In 1998 and 1999 there were less than two each year.²⁷

      Regarding spills, the oceans are more resilient than many environmentalists suggest, as was demonstrated with the Exxon Valdez. The Valdez became the poster child of  environmental disaster. While the ship leaked a total of 266,0000 barrels of oil starting on March 24, 1989, it was, in reality, only the twentieth most serious spill of its kind, and was 25 times less serious than the 6 to 8 million tons released by Saddam Hussein from a refinery in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991. Nevertheless, both spills were decried as two of the worst biological disasters of modern times, with environmentalists suggesting it would take decades, and perhaps even a hundred years to recover.

      In the case of the Gulf spill, however, animal life in the sea was “in much better shape than even the optimistic of pundits could have predicted” by 1994.²⁸ Although the coastal areas had been harder hit, they had “largely recovered” as well.²⁹  Today, there is little sign of harm. The same is true of the Prince William Sound in Alaska. Although Exxon had spent over $2 billion in cleanup and more than $5 billion in class action suits, NOAA scientists are “impressed by the degree to which Prince William Sound has rebounded from the spill and its aftermath,” (i.e. the cleanup). There were “rapid increases in plant cover between 1989 and 1991 at the oiled and washed sites [that] significantly reduced the trendline differences between those sites and the unoiled sites.”³⁰ Most recovery occurred during the two years following the spill, with slower recovery since then. [4] 

      Perhaps most surprising, official NOAA investigations have shown that the more than $2.1 billion cleanup probably did more harm than good. Pressure-washing the coast killed much of the marine life. Further, when equally contaminated washed and unwashed beaches were compared, life returned in just 18 months on the uncleaned beaches while the same recovery took three to four years on the “cleaned” beaches.³¹ As Scientific American observed, “the public wants the animals saved — at $80,000 per otter and $10,000 per eagle — even if the stress of their salvation kills them.”³²

      No one denies the Valdez accident was tragic.  It claimed about 300 harbor seals, 2,800 sea otters, 250,000 sea birds, 250 bald eagles and possibly 22 killer whales. But to put the Exxon Valdez “disaster” into perspective (without attempting to justify the damage caused by the Valdez spill), it should be noted that about 57 million birds are killed every year in the United States by cars, another 97.5 million by colliding with plate glass and is roughly equivalent to the number of birds killed by cats in two days in Britain.³³ “Another thought provoking comparison is that the overall pollution was less than 2 percent of pollution caused by powerboats in the US every year.”³⁴ In sum, despite the warm feelings generated by spending over $2.1 billion on cleanup, many experts believer the money  could have been better spent on other needy problems.

 

 

Principles

 

While there are local and regional problems to be sure, many of the issues surrounding global warming, biodiversity, and air and water quality are either not serious, poorly understood, or showing tremendous progress in their improvement. The best way to help protect the environment is to minimize government corruption, allow free markets to work, and base our decisions on sound science.

 

Global Warming is poorly understood, and human factors are likely to play an insignificant role.   Contrary to assertions by the United Nations and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it is unlikely that global warming is caused by man, but represents a recovery from the Little Ice Age in the 1700s. Over 17,000 scientist, two-thirds having advanced research degrees (Masters or Ph.D.) in the hard sciences, have signed a petition to this effect.

 

The Kyoto Protocol would not stop global warming even if it were implemented. Even the United Nations acknowledges that the most the treaty would do is reduce the warming by 0.15^oC from whatever warming was expected without the treaty. However, it would seriously harm the United States economy, costing the US some $10-$15 trillion over the next 50 years. The United States would be forced to either buy tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of pollution credits from developing nations (which would then be pressured not to use fossil fuels or develop economically), or reduce its CO₂ emissions (and therefore energy requirements) by around 30 percent. In short the Kyoto Protocol appears less designed to help the environment than to redistribute wealth and facilitate the creation of a global income redistribution plan.

 

The fertilization effect of carbon dioxide has been shown to increase crop growth from 25 to 50 percent. This fertilization effect is especially prominent for crops stressed by drought, nutrient deficiency, pollution, ozone, and disease. Best of all it is free to the developing nations. If future human food supply is of concern, the potential benefits far outweigh the very uncertain risk of increased global warming from man-caused CO₂ emissions.

 

Chlorofluorocarbons may not be the primary cause of ozone depletion. Natural phenomenon, like volcanoes, appear to play a much larger factor.

 

Natural variation in ozone thickness overwhelms the effects of ozone thinning. Ozone thickness varies by over 50 percent between winter and summer and between the poles and the equator. Since thinning is worst in late winter, damage from increased UV-B radiation is minimal. The same magnitude of increased UV-B radiation caused by the thinning at mid-latitudes is experienced by merely moving 200 km or 124 miles south.

 

Almost all air and water pollution results from the Tragedy of the Commons. Common ownership over resources such as the air or water provides no incentives to care for them. There is every incentive, however, to dump waste into them because it is the cheapest means of disposing of waste.  Therefore, laws and regulations are essential – but must be based on sound science rather than wishful thinking, rhetoric and political pressure.

 

Tremendous gains have been made in reducing air and water pollution in both the United States and the World. Pollution has been reduced by 50 to 98 percent, depending on the pollutant. Most additional improvements will be made only at extremely high cost. As technology and cost permit, future gains can also be made. In the meantime, society needs to prioritize what benefits to society and the environment it is willing to pay for with limited resources.

                       

There is no water shortage in the world — but rather a lack of proper water management. More than 96 percent of all nations have, at present, sufficient fresh water resources. Poverty, caused by corrupt, centrally controlled governments or the lack of real private property rights, is the greatest contributor to inadequate fresh water accessibility.

 

Many highly politicized regulations of ocean fishing and fish farming are doing more harm than good. Regulations are needed. But the only way to avoid politicizing them is to demand that the regulations be based on peer reviewed empirical science.

 

 

Policy Recommendations

 

1.      Provide incentives to increase the wealth of developing nations to improve all levels of environmental protection. As with overpopulation, environmental damage can be reduced only by increasing the wealth of the citizens of developing nations. The Agenda 21 plan must be stopped and a plan to institute private property rights with rigorous common-law limitations strongly encouraged as recommended by Hernando de Soto in his book The Mystery of Capital.

2.      International assistance programs must link trade assistance with lack of corruption and improved free markets. The only way to influence nations to open their markets and rid themselves of corruption, without intruding on their sovereignty, is to link good government to trade and economic assistance. 

3.      Do not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol will not stop or even slow global warming, if it is occurring at all. But it will devastate U.S. and global economies.

4.      Reinstate the use of highly beneficial Freon and Halons. Ozone thinning by CFCs has not been scientifically demonstrated, and these compounds should be reinstated until it is clearly demonstrated that the thinning is actually a health risk. The Law of Unintended Consequences demands that policies not be implemented before the harm of eliminating these valuable chemicals has been fully assessed. Do not permit the United Nations to interfere with the water rights of nation states. Fresh water is not generally limited and where it is, local solutions are often the cheapest and most effective. Most fresh water problems are political, not environmental in nature.

5.      Revise any laws defining the responsibilities of federal, or national, environmental agencies so that they restrict such agencies to providing scientific advice to the states and local governments.  Federal environmental agencies should not become regulatory bodies. If the UN Charter is rewritten giving the Trusteeship Council the responsibility of the global commons, it too should have only advisory powers.

6.      Encourage the development of fish farms in the United States and other nations to supplement the limits to ocean fishing.