Politics and the Environment :: Environmental Climate Change

The July 9, 2002 release of the World Wildlife Fund’s third â€Å"Living Planet† report - which asserts that the human race is currently consuming resources at a rate 20% percent greater than the Earth’s ability to regenerate - coincided unsurprisingly with the simultaneous release of two counter-dispatches by the Cato Institute. In conjunction with an additional counter-argument published in the Institute’s August 26 edition of â€Å"Policy Analysis,† these two dispatches serve as a fairly accurate example of Conservative/Libertarian criticisms of the environmentalist movement or at least as examples prominent enough to merit scrutiny. The August 26 piece, written by Jerry Taylor, draws heavily on evidence presented by Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of meteorology whom William K. Stevens of the New York Times regards as arguably one of â€Å"the two most persistent and visib!le† scientists skeptical of climate change. The other two dispat ches, written by Reason magazine’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey and the late anti-Malthusian environmentalist critic Julian L. Simon, though both originally published prior to the WWF’s â€Å"Living Planet† report are still relevant because of the prominence of their critique within policy circles advocating free markets and limited government. The Living Planet report, itself, is divided into two distinct parts. The first is the Living Planet Index, which was calculated by measuring population data from 1970 to 1995 for three abstracted categories of wildlife - forest, freshwater, and marine. The data used for the Index was gathered by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). The Living Planet Index is primarily an indicator of ecosystem health as a function of species decline and as such will not be focused on in depth here as it does not pertain directly to the global warming debate. The second part of the report (the WWF’s assessment of humanity’s Ecological Footprint) hopes to measure the amount of the Earth’s biologically productive land that the global population, a nation, and an average member of that nation inhabits in one year. The footprint is measured in Global Hectares: a measurement defined by the WWF as â€Å"one hectare of biologically productive space with world average productivity.† There are currently 11.4 billion hectares of biologically productive land total - one quarter of the planet’s surface. Of these 11.4 billion hectares: 2.0 bil is ocean, 1.5 bil is cropland, 3.5 bil is grazing land, 3.8 bil is forest cover, .3 bil inland water, and .