TRUTH IN THE BALANCE Julian L. Simon Senator Albert Gore, Jr.'s recent book is called Earth in the Balance. But it is truth that is in the balance, rather than our very durable planet. The book is as ignorant a collection of cliches as anything ever published on the subject. And there is lots of tough competition for that abysmal bottom spot. Just about every assertion in the book points in the wrong direction - suggesting that conditions are getting worse rather than getting better, which they are. Lest the reader accuse me of hunting-and-picking for errant soft targets, let's start with the very first topic in the book, soil erosion, and go from there. After the obligatory drama about how "eight acres' worth of prime topsoil floats past Memphis every hour", Gore says that Iowa "used to have an average of sixteen inches of the best topsoil in the world. Now it is down to eight inches". The first footnote in the book says only that his source was "conversations with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship". One cannot check the Iowa situation with his anonymous quote. (Indeed, printed sources are generally scarce in the book.) But we do know the trend of increasing erosion for the country as a whole. If Gore had done his homework, he would have examined the data in the publications of the U. S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. He would have talked to Bruce Gardner, now Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Economics, and to Gardner's teacher at the University of Chicago, Theodore Schultz, who has been watching soil erosion since his days as a farmboy in South Dakota in the 1920s, and who received a Nobel Prize for his work in agricultural economics and human capital. The senator would have read the articles by Schultz, and by respected agricultural economists Earl Swanson at the University of Illinois and Earl Heady at the University of Iowa. Gore would then have found that the facts are exactly the opposite of what he writes. The farms in the United States are becoming less rather than more eroded, on average. Decade after recent decade, fewer rather than more acres suffer from severe erosion. This emerges from comparison of Soil Conservation Service surveys done at intervals since the 1930s. This first item sets the pattern for all the rest. Gore alleges - in the first sentence of the book - that there is a "global ecological crisis", that conditions have been worsening. But in fact all trends pertaining to human welfare have been improving rather than deteriorating. The second specific item Gore mentions is DDT, "which became for me a symbol of how carelessly our civilization could do harm to the world". He gives no data and provides no references, though he later adds that DDT "can be environmentally dangerous in tiny amounts". A touch of research would have turned up tons of writings such as Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Man, by Gordon Harrison, who was director of the Ford Foundation's environmental program. Gore would have learned that with the aid of DDT, "India had brought the number of malaria cases down from the estimated 75 million in 1951 to about 50,000 in 1961. Sri Lanka...reduced malaria from about three million casese after World War II to just 29 in 1964". Then as the use of DDT went down, "Endemic malaria returned to India like the turnaround of a tide". By 1977 "the number of cases reached at least 30 million and perhaps 50 million". Does that suggest that DDT does harm to civilization, or does good? Gradually, it became clear, too, that DDT could be used quite safely. The scary scenarios in Rachel Carson's book, that Gore remembers troubled his mother, turned out to be without foundation. In 1971, amidst the fight that led to the banning of DDT in 1972, the president of the National Academy of Science - distinguished biologist Philip Handler - said "DDT is the greatest chemical that has ever been discovered". Commission after commission, top expert after top Nobel prize-winning expert, has given DDT a clean bill of health, as Gore could find out in Elizabeth Whelan's Toxic Terror and the host of references therein. But evidence on such matters has no place in Gore's book. The third item Gore mentions is Agent Orange, which he uses weasel words to describe as "the suspected cause of chromosomal damage and birth defects". Again no references in Gore's book. And with reason, because though Agent Orange (dioxin) was indeed "suspected" by Gore and his colleagues, it was pronounced innocent in the Federal courtroom when veterans brought suit. There simply is no solid scientific evidence of ill effects from dioxin. In August of 1991, the New York Times front-page headline was "U. S. Backing Away from Saying Dioxin is a Deadly Peril". The story continued, "Exposure to the chemical, once thought to be much more hazardous than chain smoking, is now considered by some experts to be no more risky than spending a week sunbathing". And the Centers for Disease Control now admits that the Times Beach evacuation was unnecessary. But Senator Gore has not gotten the word. Love Canal is next in the book. Gore seems unaware that the solid scientific consensus is that there was no observable damage to humans from living near Love Canal. So far we have only reached page 3. And the entire book is filled with this sort of environmental gossip, backed by no sources, and contradicted by solid data. Though the Senator undoubtedly cares sincerely about environmental and resource issues, his ignorance is willful rather than naive. He has been told in the past that his utterances on these subjects do not correspond with the facts. But he has chosen to ignore the scientific literature. Furthermore, the advisers Gore leans heavily on - Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown - have been proven wrong in every one of the forecasts they have made in the past two decades, a truly astonishing record of consistency. Yet it is still their agenda that Gore puts forth, almost as if he is writing from handouts of the environmental movement. Moreover, Gore is suspicious about others' motives and behavior. He writes that "The statistics about forests can be deceptive too: although the United States, like several other developed nations, actually has more forested land now than it did a hundred yers ago, many of the huge tracts...have been converted from diverse hardwoods to a monoculture of softwood". But the same U. S. Forest Service statistics that showed Gore that the total volume of trees is increasing also show that the volume of hardwood trees is going up, rather than being driven out by softwoods. Just who is deceiving whom? The reader may wonder who is to believed. One crude test is whether people will put their money where their mouths are. So here is my offer: I'll bet a week's or a month's pay with Senator Gore or anyone else that I've got the above matters right and he does not. And I'll go further: I'll bet that just about any broad aggregate trend pertaining to human welfare will improve rather than get worse - health, standard of living, cleanliness of our air and water, natural resource availability - you name it, and you pick any year in the future. First come, first served. It is not surprising that a U. S. senator does not have time for the kind of library digging that an academic researcher does. But that is no excuse for publicising and acting on wrong facts, because it is not harmless - whether as a senator who has a large say in national policy on these matters, or as the President of the United States that some have Gore be. Gore would (asmong other measures) tax the use of new raw materials to force more recycling, establish higher mileage requirements for cars, require "efficiency standards throughout the economy" - all of which would raise costs and increase government intervention in people's lives. All this on the basis of beliefs he holds that are utterly contradicted by the solid scientific facts. Julian L. Simon teaches business at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. His most recent book is Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration. page 1/article2 gore/October 13, 1995