MR. BUSH GOES TO RIO George Bush goes to Rio. And George Bush should feel right at home with the Rio crowd. The core "cross-cutting" issue at the Earth Summit is a long-time interest of George Bush: Reduce population growth. Let there be fewer human beings. The Sierra Club, representative of the organizations that urged Mr. Bush to go to Rio, attributes the "many crises" of the environment to the "one cause" - population growth. And already the draft of the Earth Charter calls for yearly expenditures of $7 billion on demographic activities, much of it to flow from the rich countries to the poor countries. For the typical delegate in Rio, human beings are simply the source of bad things: Carbon dioxide, that the environmental movement believes is surely warming the world and will wash whole countries away. Industrial pollutants that befoul our and water. Consumer waste that will supposedly leave us nowhere to dwell. Putative exploitation of the natural resources of the poor countries that will lead to exhaustion of supplies and shortages. Mr. Bush will have to listen to a lot of speeches in Rio before he hears that humans are creators and builders, the sources of miracles of new knowledge. He will not hear that humanity has finally succeeded in the millenia-long quest to beat back death, and to provide a decent standard of living for most of the world's population. He will not hear that though the rich countries consume a very large proportion of resources, they also create an even larger proportion of resources, including the natural resources that have no useful existence without the knowledge invented in the rich countries. He will not hear that the United States and the West are the source of both the mass entertainment and the high culture which enrich the world through the electronic communications developed in the rich countries. The simple fact is, however, that the Rio gloom-and-doom about a "crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts. Even the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that our air and our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever- better since World War II. Every resource economist knows that all natural resourcs have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades. The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder economic development. In the 1980s there has been a complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences completely reversed its "official" view away from the earlier worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any statistical evidence of a negative connection between population increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth". This U-turn by the scientific consensus of experts on the subject has gone unacknowledted by the press, the anti-natalist environmental organizations, and the agencies that foster population control abroad. And though the Reagan administration built this body of scientific fact into its 1984 stand at the World Population Conference in Mexico City, the Bush administration has done nothing to implement it into policy. Indeed, George Bush is on record as an old-time believer in the old-time gospel that population growth is a bad thing. He even wrote a foreword to a 1974 book called World Population Crisis [check title], by a vehement anti-populationist, Phyllis Piotrow. And though from time to time the president makes conciliatory noises toward the anti-abortion groups - a very different issue than population growth - he seems never to have turned his back on his earlier anti-natalist stand. So he should feel right at home in Rio. The agenda of the environmental movement is to reduce population growth, whatever it takes to do so. Hence they applaud the coercive Chinese programs that punishes people for having more than one child. They cheer on this system that forces women to insert IUDs, then monitors them with X-rays every three months causing who-knows-what genetic damage, then coerces them to abort if they get pregnant anyway, and finally punishes them economically if they evade the abortionist. The environmental activists also favor the Indian program of money incentives for sterilization that led to such gross abuses that Prime Minister Indira Ghandi was forced out of office as a result. And the population-control activists have used their influence with the State Department to activate population- control programs in Africa that use the money of our aid programs to lever African governments into population control programs. There operates an unholy symbiosis with money as the medium of contact. The U. S. wants to buy population control abroad. The poor countries, and the elites in the poor countries, want a flow of money from "North" to "South" with which they can enjoy a windfall. But the city slickers get suckered by the pretended rural yokels, because much of the money winds up in junkets like the $40 million spent on the Rio Earth Summit, and in other rackets. A few wrong moves at Rio by George Bush and population control will eventually blow up in the face of the United States. The U. S. will be called racist in motivation - and with good reason, especially in Africa and Latin America. Maybe Mr. Bush will not lose office because of this issue, as Indira Ghandhi did. But the U. S. could suffer severe backlash in its relations with the Third World. Let's hope that Mr. Bush thinks long and hard before he further abets population control. Julian L. Simon, professor of business adminstration at the University of Maryland and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, wrote The Ultimate Resource and Population Matters. page 1/article2 riosummt/May 13, 1992