CHAPTER 14A DYING PLANET? HOW THE MEDIA HAVE SCARED THE PUBLIC The air is polluted, the rivers and lakes are dying, and the ozone layer has holes in it. (Ann Landers) Most environmental, economic and social problems of local, regional, and global scale arise from this driving force: too many people using too many resources at too fast a rate. (Blue Planet Group) CHAPTER 14: TABLE OF CONTENTS Summary According to a CBS News Survey before Earth Day, 1990, "The American public has an almost doomsday feeling about the national seriousness of environmental problems." The press, environmental organizations, and the public say that pollution in the U.S. and the world is not just bad, but getting worse. One could cite prominent scientists, politicians of every stripe, and religious leaders of every denomination. In 1991, the nation's Roman Catholic Bishops "acknowledged that overpopulation drains world resources". They asked Catholics "to examine our lifestyles, behaviors and policies, to see how we contribute to the destruction or neglect of the environment." Even the Pope issued a 1988 encyclical "In Sollicitude Rei Socialisis" and a 1990 New Year's message on this theme of environmental "crisis" and "plundering of natural resources," and "the reality of an innumerable multitude of people." Luckily, the Pope apparently has "gotten religion" and turned back since then. The environmentalist ideal has suffused the Jewish community, too. The week that I write this, March 9 and 10, 1992, there is taking place in Washington a "Consultation on the Environment and Jewish Life," intended as "a Jewish communal response to the world environmental crisis." The italicized second paragraph of that invitation letter says: "We appreciate the many important issues on the Jewish communal agenda. But the threat of ecological catastrophe is so frightening and universal that we believe we must mobilize our community's considerable intellectual and organizational resources as soon as possible." The signers of the invitation included just about every big gun in the organized Jewish community. Even grammar-school texts and children's books fill young minds with unsupported assertions that mankind is a destroyer rather than a creator of the environment. A couple of decades ago, parents and schools began to present children with material like this from Golden Stamp Book of Earth and Ecology. Our Dirty Air -- The sea of air in which we live - - our sky -- is no longer sparkling clean. Once the smoke from chimneys was whisked away by winds and soon became lost in a clear sky. Then we believed that the sky could hold all the wastes we could pour into it. By some sort of miracle, we thought, the sky kept itself clean. Now there are too many chimneys pouring smoke, ashes, and poisonous fumes into our sky. Where the land has been scoured of grass and forests and there are no crops planted to hold the soil, the slightest breeze whips up choking clouds of dust that spill the dirt into the air. Hour after hour, fumes from millions of automobiles' exhausts are spewed into the air.... In many large cities, there are no clear days at all now. Over portions of the earth, there is a haze, darkest where the population is greatest. Each year air pollution becomes worse as we dump greater loads into the sky. Yet, this is the air we must breathe to live. You can survive for days or even weeks without food, but without air, you will die in only a few minutes. Right now you are probably breathing polluted air. It is air containing poisons. Some of these poisons are kinds that do not kill immediately. They take their toll over the years, and more and more people are becoming victims of respiratory ailments.... No more Clean Waters -- Once the United States was a land of pure, sparkling waters.... But in the few hundred years since America's discovery, its waters have been almost totally spoiled by pollution. The greatest damage has come in very recent years. Still, the people in many cities must drink the water from these lakes and rivers. They make it drinkable by loading it with purifying chemicals. But the chemicals make the water taste bad. There is also a point at which the chemicals used to purify water become poisonous to people, too. Streams in the United States have indeed become open sewers carrying away wastes from industries and dwellings. The wastes are really only moved downstream to the next town or city, where more wastes are added, until the one-pure stream becomes little more than a sluggish stench. Now Lake Erie is dead -- killed by pollution. Lake Michigan may be the next of the Great Lakes to be killed by man. Even sooner, a much larger body of water appears to be doomed -- the giant Gulf of Mexico! By now we have reached the stage that 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth has sold almost a million copies (this book retails meaningless and false information to kids - for example, instructing them to use water-based instead of oil-based paint) ; This Planet is Mine is another best-seller in this genre. It is a sign of the times that "More Pennsylvania high school students are taking environmental education classes than physics." The schools' teachings are having a powerful effect. The consensus view of an informal Fortune survey of high-schoolers on this "issue on which almost everyone agreed" was: "If we continue at the pace we're going at now, the environment is going to be destroyed completely." A 1992 poll found that 47 percent of a sample of 6-17 year olds said that "Environment" is among the "biggest problems in our country these days"; 12 percent mentioned "Economy" as a far-distant runner-up. Compare the almost opposite results for their parents: 13 percent "Environment" versus 56 percent "Economy." Just about all of these assertions of rising pollution are nonsense, as we shall see - but they are dangerous nonsense. A revealing sequence of events: From 1970 to 1984, the widely-reported Environmental Quality Index of the National Wildlife Federation gave numbers purporting to show that environmental conditions were getting worse, as seen in figure 14-1. In a typical year, The New York Times headline for the Index was "Environmental Quality Held Down," and the story began, "The nation's overall environmental well-being declined slightly in 1976...". Figure 14-1 overall Index numbers plotted Despite the impressive name of the index and its numerical nature, it was, according to the National Wildlife Federation which prepares and disseminates it, "a subjective analysis [that] represent[s] [the] collective thinking of the editors of the National Wildlife Federation Staff." That is, the Environmental Quality Index represented casual observation and opinion rather than statistical facts. It included such subjective judgments as that the trend of "living space" is "down...vast stretches of America are lost to development yearly." (Chapter 9 shows the facts on that particular non-pollution issue.) In 1984, as it got harder and harder to reconcile the real facts and the foolish numbers, National Wildlife dropped the numbers and retreated to words only, which are less easy to confute and make ridiculous with the actual data. I hope that my criticism in the first edition helped sink the numerical index by making it seem ridiculous. Several types of public opinion polls confirm the above anecdotal evidence of rising public concern: 1) [Editor: do not replace numbers with "first", etc.] People's answers to poll questions about whether environmental conditions have been getting better or worse during (say) the past twenty years show that many more people believe that there has been deterioration than believe that there has been improvement (see figure 14-2). A 1988 survey found that "eight in ten Americans (81%) were convinced that `the environment today is less healthful than the environment in which my parents lived.'" In 1990, 64 percent said that pollution increased in the past 10 years, and 13 percent said it decreased. Another 1990 poll found that when asked "Compared to twenty years ago, do you think the air you breathe is cleaner today, or more polluted...?" 6 percent said cleaner, and 75 percent said "more polluted". With respect to the "water in the lakes, rivers, and streams", 8 percent said "cleaner" and 80 percent said "more polluted", but these polls were taken in the midst of the Earth Day publicity. In 1991, 66 percent of Americans responded "Worse" to "Overall, do you feel the environment has gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed the same over the past 20 years?", and only 20 percent said "better." Figure 14-2 2) The trends in proportions of people expressing worry about pollution problems show large increases over recent years. In Harris polls a) the proportion who said that air pollution by vehicles was "very serious" rose from 33 percent in 1982 to 59 percent in 1990; b) the proportion who said that "Air pollution from acid rain, caused by sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants" was "very serious" rose from 42 percent in 1986 to 64 percent in 1990; c) there was an increase from 30 percent in 1986 to 49 percent in 1990 saying "very serious" for "Air pollution by coal-burning electric power plants." (However, a 1991 Roper poll found that people thought that the environment would be cleaner five years hence than at the poll date, unlike a similar comparison in 1980. And people's assessment of the environment "at the present time" was less positive in 1991 than in 1980. Also see figure 14-3. Figure 14-3 (Lunch and Rothman?) 3) People expect worsening. In 1990, 44 percent said they "expect pollution to increase", and 33 percent expected decrease. 4) A survey of high school students found that "The only interviewees who didn't share the perspective...that the environment is going to be destroyed completely...were the worst educated of the inner-city youth." This finding is similar to the polls on energy mentioned in chapter 12. It is consistent with the fact that such powerful abstract thinkers as Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes (who wrote a famous book on statistical logic in addition to his work in economics) and several Nobel prize winners in mathematical economics such as Paul Samuelson, Wassily Leontief, and Jan Tinbergen arrived at exactly the same wrong conclusions as did Malthus about the effect of population growth on food and natural resource supplies (see chapter 3). In this subject one will arrive at sound understanding and predictions only if one pays much attention to historical experience and does not allow oneself to be carried away by elegant deductive and mathematical constructions such as exponential growth in a finite system. Education in large quantities would seem to increase one's propensity to rely on such abstractions. (I hope to write more on the nature of the thinking involved in these subjects in a coming book.) One might wonder whether less-well-educated persons are less responsive to environmental issues simply because they know less. But surveys that ask whether "pollution increased in the past 10 years," or "decreased," or "stayed about the same" show that answers are not related to amount of education. (The only striking difference is that females were more likely than males to say "increased" and less likely to say "decreased" - 72 versus 56 percent and 8 versus 19 percent, respectively. There also was a slight gradient downward in "increased with older groups." Consider this important piece of conflicting evidence, however: When asked about the environmental conditions in their own area - whose conditions they know personally - as well as conditions in the country as a whole, respondents rate the local environment more highly and indicate a much lower degree of worry about it than about the environment in the country as a whole. (See figure 14-4). When asked before Earth Day 1990 whether pollution is "a serious problem that's getting worse" for "the country as a whole", 84 percent said "serious", but with respect to "the area where you live", only 42 percent said "serious." As the Compendium of American Opinion put it, "Americans are primarily concerned about the environment in the abstract...most Americans are not worried about environmental problems where they live...most Americans do not feel personally affected by environmental problems." In this instance, people feel that the grass is greener on his or her side of the street - or more precisely, that the grass is browner on the other person's side of the street which the comparer has never even seen. This cuts the logical ground out from under the abstract aggregate judgments, because they are not consistent with the sum of the individual judgments. Fig 14-4 That is, there is a disjunction between public belief and the scientifically- established facts that will be shown in the next three chapters. The discrepancy between the public's beliefs about the environment that they know first hand, and about the areas that they only know second-hand is most revealing. The respondents view the situation they know at first hand more positively than the situation at large. The only likely explanation is that newspapers and television - the main source of notions about matters which people do not experience directly - are systematically misleading the public, even if unintentionally. There is also a vicious circle here: The media carry stories about environmental scares, people become frightened, polls then reveal their worry, and the worry then is cited as support for policies to initiate actions about the supposed scares, which then raise the level of public concern. The media proudly say "We do not create the `news'. We are merely messengers who deliver it." These data show that the opposite is true in this case. Data that show the interplay of media attention to pollution stories and the public's expressed concern are found in figure 14-5; pollution was no worse in 1970 than in 1965, but the proportion of the population that named it one of the three most important governmental problems rose from 17 percent in 1965 to 53 percent in 1970 (and fell thereafter), marking the media attention to the 1970 Earth Day. Erskine, a long-time student of public opinion, labeled this "a miracle of public opinion", referring to the "unprecedented speed and urgency with which ecological issues have burst into American consciousness." Consider this question and the answers to it over just five years: Compared to other parts of the country, how serious, in your opinion, do you think the problem of air/water pollution is in this area - very serious, somewhat serious, or not very serious? Very Serious or Somewhat Serious Air Water 1965 28% 35% 1966 48% 49% 1967 53% 52% 1968 55% 58% 1970 69% 74% These data show the speed with which public opinion can change - or really, be changed, because here there is no possibility that the actual conditions changed radically (and indeed, if they changed, if was for the better, as we shall see).Fig 14-5 Elsom p. 7 A very strange poll result emerged from a November, 1993, poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times. Various groups of elites, and the general public, were asked, "I'm going to read you a list of dangers in the world and after I finish, tell me which one of them you think is most dangerous to world stability". Eighteen percent of the public responded "environmental pollution" and 10 percent "population growth". But of the "science and engineering" members of the National Academy of Sciences, only 1 percent said "environmental pollution" - but an extraordinary 51 percent said "population growth". (The latter is not a typographical error; the percentages add to 100.) The only explanation I can guess at is that many of those NAS members are biologists, whose attitudes toward population growth have long tended to be very negative. (In passing, notice how population growth is simply assumed in the poll to be a danger, which biases the results, of course.) In the next chapter, we'll look at some facts - as opposed to these whipped-up worries. SUMMARY The public believes that pollution in the U.S. is bad, and has been getting worse. These beliefs can be seen to be connected to writings in the press and statements on television. The poll results showing popular belief that pollution at large is bad are logically contradicted and thereby undermined by poll results showing that what respondents know best - conditions in their own areas - are reported as much better than conditions in the nation at large. page # ultres\ tchar14 November 1, 1993