Community centers to create wifi enabled listings so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. Comcast supports span as a public service, along with these other television providers, even you a front row seat to democracy. Giving you a front row seat to democracy. Up next, academics and policy advocates discuss environmental policy and weather conditions have progressed over the last few decades. From the American Enterprise institute this is just under 90 minutes. Good morning. Im the director of domestic policy at the American Enterprise institute and its my pleasure to welcome you all to this event, 30 years of environmental progress, is it time at last to be optimistic in optimistic . In 1968 a book was published called the population bomb. The book repurposed the ideas of 18th century economist thomas malus to argue that population growth would soon outpace agricultural growth leading to widespread famine and other social and ecological crises. These ideas took hold of the American Environmental movement which adopted a broadly , pessimistic view of our planets future. Their predictions do not come to pass but alarmism over the effect of population growth on the environment as well as resource scarcity endures among many on the left. In recent years the notion that americans should stop having children to protect the environment has been promoted widely by academics, journalists and other public figures. According to analysts at morgan stanley, the movement to not have children owing to fears of Climate Change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline. Despite these anxieties available data on environmental trends makes it clear that weve made enormous progress in Environmental Issues over the last 30 years, both within the United States and around the world. We are here this earth day then to explore what that progress has looked like, how Environmental Data should shape future Public Policy decisions, and why we should ask and answer why we should be optimistic about americas environmental future. Our speakers this morning are stepen f hayward and roger pil jr. From 2002 to 2012 steven was a fellow here at ai where he authored an annual report on environmental trends and controversies titled the index of leading environmental indicators. The index analyzed and summarized overlook Government Data on the environment most of which demonstrated substantial environmental progress over the last generation. In 2010, steven published mere environmentalism, a biblical perspective on humans and the Natural World which explored the philosophical presuppositions of the modern environmentalist movement. And this mornings discussion will expand on many of stevens themes and evidence contained in that work. Today Steven Hayward is a resident scholar at the university of california, berkeleys institute of government studies and a fellow of the law and Public Policy program at berkeley law. Hes also a professor at pepperdine university, a popular blogger at powerline blog. Com. Hes written a number of books on the history of the American Conservative Movement of particular interest to me, including the two volume age of reagan, excellent book, and another excellent book, patriotism is not enough, harry jafa walter burns and the ar arguments that reshaped american conservatism. Roger pil jr. Meanwhile is a nonresident senior fellow here at ai and a professor in the college of arts and sciences at the university of colorado boulder his work explores science and Technology Policy with a particular focus on energy and climate and the politicization of science he writes the popular substack the honest broker which you are happy to host on the ai homepage these days, in addition to the substack platform, and is the author of several books, including the rightful place of science, disasters and Climate Change, and the climate fix what scientists and politicians wont tell you about Global Warming. Steven hayward will begin this morning with a presentation on leading environmental indicators, roger will then offer some remarks on Climate Change in particular which tends to overshadow other Environmental Issues in Public Discourse, and afterwards steven and roger will discuss what we have learned about the environment in recent years and how the Environmental Movement should proceed. We will then open the floor to q a. If you are watching online, you may submit questions to guydenton aei. Org. Please join me in welcoming Stephen F Hayward back to aei. Happy earth day, everybody. It used to be a big deal. There was a riley on the mall and festivals and American Cities and college campuses. Now it happens kind of quietly and i think therein lies the tail tale with a very large asterisk. My point is we now have arrived at a moment for environmental optimism broadly speaking not just in the United States and wealthy industrial countries but increasingly around the world i think. If you cast your mind back to you know 35, 40 years ago, you may remember every january the World Watch Institute would put out their state of the world report. And it always got a lot of press. Lester brown was the chief instigator of this and he was one of the prominent figures of environmentalism in the 70s and 80s and into the 1990s. It got a lot of press and it was all, the world is doomed, everything is terrible. This was reflected in public opinion. A group used to do an annual poll every other year on the environment and found that you know large majorities of americans thought Environmental Quality in america was getting worse. The roper poll doesnt exist anymore. I had the question the next 10 years will be the last decade. We started this in 1974 1970. 54 years ago and here we are still with tenure countdowns. Everyone remembers the headlines about everything is terrible and we are all going to die. One of the first markers i think of the beginning of a slow change can be traced back to or i like to start with this this is an ad from the New York Times from david brower, also one of the great figures of environmentalism from the 1960s to the 1990s. This is a fullpage ad in the New York Times. You can see the headline economics is a form of brain , damage. It was a letter to the clinton administration. Please do not use the costbenefit analysis the Reagan Administration and Bush Administration used all these years to stop sensible environmental regulation. Not only did the clinton not take that advice and keep using the formulas that developed in the reagan years but when obama came into office in 2009 he installed as head of the regulatory analysis a unit that was started back in the reagan years. He appointed cass son steen. There was grumbling from environmental groups about the appointment they got nowhere. Then the idea of cost benefit analysis went mainstream, in particular 2009 had richard rz and his coauthor william lever mole. And then center left conventional environmental thinkers i think they published a very serious book saying ill paraphrase it this way lets not leave cost benefit analysis to those libertarian rightwing fanatics, we ought to embrace it too because it makes good sense. I dont think very many environmentalists today would use that slogan, environmentalism is a form of brain damage. Environmental economics is now pretty mainstream, even if often poorly done. Im tempted to just use that old dr johnson line that its not that its done well, like you know women preaching or dogs standing on their hind legs if you know that famous old quote from samuel johnson. There were simple charts and graphs of all bad stuff happening. Teenage pregnancy and crime rate and test scores and drug dependency and welfare dependency. Rush limbaugh picked up on it and it became a book sensation. Knowing about air quality statistics in california where i grew up with really bad smog in la, i got to thinking you know the same kind of treatment in the u. S. Would show mostly improvement. Not on everything, but on a lot of big things, and so i thought im just going to copy that format. I put out an annual report, short enough for someone to get through it but have enough substance to say something. It did well with the media. It never was quite the sensation of bill bennetts report because as i put it once to bill, his report was about sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Mine was about polychlorinated biphenyls. Who do you think will get more press . Greg easterbrook came out with his monumentally large book a moment on the earth and the subtitle is the coming age of environmental optimism. I think greg was just 15 years too early his book got savaged by environmentalists for some reason the Environmental Defense fund took a such a disliking to it that they set up an early website this was still the early days of the internet nitpicking you know factual claims and and statistics that could be contested an error here and there but the sweeping point was the entire book should be discredited because he had written in the book environmental commentary is so , fog bound in woe that few people realize measurable improvements have already been made in almost every area. You could not say that then without attracting widespread scorn. Economist magazine at the time observed that suggesting the environment as a cause for optimism is beyond the pale of respectable discourse. Within a few years you began to see the media taking notice i remember in 2000 after i talked to the Editorial Board at u. S. A usa today they talked about hidden environmental gains they gains. They were hidden in plain sight. Things improved but things are still terrible and a lot of environmentalists cannot take yes for an answer. The other thing at the time that i made a not really a stink about but you know the United States still does not have a bureau of environmental statistics to go along with the bureau of justice statistics, the bureau of labor statistics, the bureau of education statistics. Meanwhile almost almost all of our european peer nations have a bureau of environmental statistics and produce annual reports on environmental trends and conditions in their countries. We havent. That did finally change with the epa around 2006, they now have on their website that of course is huge and sprawling and its hard to find things but they have a report on the environment that pulls together the data on environmental problems not just the ones that are under epa jurisdiction, but from other cabinet agencies and other regulatory agencies in the government. You can download the data sets to analyze. When i started 30 years ago i had to do it the oldfashioned way. I had to go to the epa library in San Francisco and look up printed reports and enter those numbers into a spreadsheet by hand but now all the data is available for anyone so that is a step forward but we still do not have a bureau of environmental statistics or any consistent reporting format tell format. Tell a little story about that. I teamed up for several years in the ss with paul portney the longtime president of resources for the future recommending that we ought to have a bureau of environmental statistics, and we testify a couple times before some House Committee on Government Administration and environmentalists would show up to oppose the idea. I can be cynical about it but one person who spoke against it said we do not trust the Bush Administration to do it fairly. But the bush omb had put out a big report about how massive the Health Benefits of the Clean Air Act were. The epa started putting out this lovely chart every year which could be summarized under the heading of decoupling showing the that you can have lots of economic growth, population growth, vehicle miles traveled, and falling conventional air pollution, and here in the last few years falling Carbon Dioxide emissions at the same time. Ill come back to that. Today we see the six main air pollution pollutants of the Clean Air Act era have all fallen well below the national standards, which we keep lowering every so often. There are stubborn pockets like parts of l. A. But when i grew up in the 70s in the l. A. Area, i mount in the san gabriel valley, 2 miles from the mountains. You could not see them. Most of the l. A. Basin now doesnt violate the old one hour standard even one day of the year. But even on the worst days the peak level of ozone is less than half of what an average day was in l. A. In the 1970s and a lot of it is the story of automobiles. Heres the decline curve from 1972 now. I like to point out that its really an automobile story i like to say the real heroes of the Clean Air Act are not so much Environmental Lawyers and judges or even epa issuing mandates, those all play a role, but the real heroes were the engineers who wore pocket protectors who figured out how to redesign our entire combustion systems for autos and lots of other things. The same story is true of nitrogen oxide emissions, both totally and from automobiles and i can say a lot more about the conventional air pollution story in power plants on coal but its true that not everything has improved or things that have improved have stalled out. For a long time we were losing a lot of wetlands. We reversed that the by the beginning of the new century and in the last for years we have started backsliding a little. Not all land is created equal. Another area where we have made no progress at all would be hypoxia in the gulf of mexico which really is a story of runoff from the huge Mississippi River basin. Here you can implicate conflicting environmental policies. Wed like to get the area of hypoxia and nutrient runoff down but we are also saying lets have a lot of corn ethanol which is the wrong thing to do if you were trying to control a runoff in the mississippi basin. Ive got some old data showing that the general trend of nitrate loadings has been going up. A lot of that very choppy variation really does depend on how much rainfall there is in a year in the mississippi basin. What we are not having a lot of quick progress there. Trends have been flat on nitrogen loadings into the goals. Other areas have shown better performance like the chesapeake bay, puget sound data has not been looked at for a long time. Another interesting effort to do serious environmental analysis happened in 2006 when the hind center did the state of the nations ecosystems. This was an extraordinary project involving about over 100 scientists of various specialties, and of course one problem is whats an ecosystem . They had worked very hard to define different kinds of ecosystems in different scales. An ecosystem can be as small as a petri dish or as large as the whole country. They developed about 120 indicators of ecosystem condition and what they found was they only had decent data for about half. Others had some data but there were gaps so they could only draw conclusions about a few of the different ecosystem conditions they thought were important. About 25 of them showed improvement, others just too much uncertainty, but above all the process of doing this took several years. We hosted the project director for this here at aei when the report came out. It was saved it was so laborintensive they didnt keep the project up but its the kind of intensive investigation youve seen a lot more of as environmental studies has matured in the last 30 years. Other people are starting to get into the game and i think maybe the turning point toward environmental optimism started with bjorn lors book in 2000. It was very controversial. You may remember that some danish Scientific Committee formerly charged lomborg with scientific dishonesty. I read the report and i couldnt find a single factual claim disputed, although there were many factual claims in the book you could dispute or hasty conclusions and so forth and they ended up retracting that finding but that shows you how politicized the matter still was. That was just the beginning. By 2005 we have Jack Hollander a meritus physicist from uc , berkeley who described to me that he got in the environment back in his days as a Bobby Kennedy liberal. This began to be a sign that environmental thought was now environmental optimism was not only growing but was more bipartisan. It was not limited. The one that especially jumped out to me was seymour cart. Its a professor of Public Health at the university of pittsburgh and he told the story of how he was at a conference one day of Public Health experts and a speaker said well of course you know air pollution is falling almost everywhere, and he said we all looked around each other. None of us had heard this. We didnt believe it. We had never seen it reported anywhere. He decided to look into similar trends. Thats where he came out with the surprising look at the real state of our planet and we had seymour here at ai to talk about this book because whenever a book like this came out from some unexpected quarter i thought that person needs some attentio