January 2001 -- Secure economic growth, low-cost energy, and open utilization of natural resources comprise the foundation of our Earth's sustainable future.

That's because only nations that are prosperous have the financial means to protect their environments and manage their resources while satisfying the wants of their citizens -- and improving public health -- on a sustainable basis.

The United States is often exhibited as one of the world's worst polluters.

But every day, the wealth of the United States is invested in new avenues and means to utilize natural resources more efficiently, lessen pollution, and improve lifestyles.

That's because the United States' market economy generates the capital needed to reduce air pollutants such as NOx, ozone, and particulate matter, ease water pollution, and better utilize its abundant energy reserves. American enterprises develop these technologies, test them, and make the financial investments needed to make them work in the market place. And it's not just in the U.S.; It's a cycle seen throughout the developed world.
 

How nations develop

The cycle of economic growth is repeated throughout the developing
world. Regional and world populations, resource utilization and economic development flourish as human needs and desires put natural resources to work.

Natural resources usually are the first fruits a developing society has to offer in exchange for the capital needed for its market economy to grow. Then, as the seeds of growth are sown, capital and prosperity are generated for most residents as value grows in a region's market economy.

Life generally becomes more comfortable and expectations rise.
Adequate transportation infrastructure, reliable and inexpensive energy supplies, and public health improvements are sought and generally attained. These multipliers accelerate a nation's economic growth both internally and externally.

Existing social structures are strained, altered and sometimes shattered as centuries-old cultures adapt to a healthy, modern and prosperous way of living. Venerable traditions, historical memory and national patrimonies shape how the new ways are assimilated.

In the meantime, stakeholders and public policy makers grapple with new problems of development, and undefined futures. Yet as intractable as they appear, they are the problems and futures which a society is glad to have. That's because the new prosperity makes a society master of its present, with the resources to preserve patrimony and sustain the future.
 

Pattern for past and future

Without exception, this is the pattern for development of nation states in the post-Second World War era, and will remain so well into the next millennium.

But from a world policy point of view, the question is how can the
economic growth of all nations be sustained at a pace that can improve public health and satisfy human needs, while conserving natural resources and improving the environment?

A very common point of view says vigorous economic growth, low-cost energy and sustainable development are mutually exclusive. But not only are economic growth, low-cost energy and sustainable development not mutually exclusive, they are so closely intertwined that they cannot exist without the other.

That's because only the market economy -- in which wealth is generated by letting human needs and wants fix demand and production -- can provide the kind of development "achieved through meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

That quoted definition of sustainable development comes from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development -- the Brundtland Commission -- which in 1987 set the stage for discussion of sustainable development.

Why can only a market economy guarantee sustainable development and a protected environment? Because when driven by free market choice and abundant, inexpensive energy, only market economies generate the wealth that can be used to plan and implement sustainable development strategies.

That's why the most prosperous nations on Earth -- with the highest gross domestic product -- have the highest standards of public health, abundant, low-cost energy, and the best-protected environments.

That's why the strongest market economies are developing and exporting sustainable energy, architecture, construction, transportation and resource utilization technologies of the future.

And that's also why developing countries can't endure -- and should not have to undergo -- the energy consumption-related economic constraints that the Kyoto Protocols would inflict on developed countries. For developing nations driven by the need to grow their low-cost energy sectors, Kyoto would strangle their economies and condemn them to needless stagnation.
 

Command-and-control solutions

Expanding economies, wise resource utilization and low-cost energy
comprise the foundation for the Earth's progressive, sustainable future.

But a static, backward-looking philosophy held in very high circles of the public policy-making establishment seeks to sustain the future by preserving present-day levels of development in the developing world, or rolling back developed nations to an idealized past that never existed.

They would do this by stifling human activity and suppressing economic growth through government mandates in a command-and-control economy that is the antithesis of the free market.

In a word, they would solve the problems of social and economic growth by restricting that growth.

These theories and strategies -- which range from the dangerously
plausible to the wildly anarchistic -- attempt to influence and control human behavior from the high-rise office suite to the straw mattress on the dirt floor.

For example, the 1994 Cairo agreement on population and development calls for freezing total world population at 9.8 billion residents by the year 2050 (in 1999 world population would reach approximately 6 billion, according to the United Nations Population Division).

This would be attained in part, according to guidelines adopted by a
review body in mid-1999, by suggested radical changes in local abortion access, sex education for children, and contraception advice for adolescents. In many countries, such externally imposed changes could shatter social conventions and foment disorder and family breakdowns.

But command-and-control population measures like these are based on scenarios which usually never happen. For example, based on unanticipated developing trends, in October 1998 U.N. demographers reduced their population growth estimates by about 2 million persons a year.

In particular, presumed future environmental disasters are posited as the basis for public policy decisions that will impact the lives of billions of the Earth's residents who have no say in the matter.

As recently as early 1999, unease in the formerly booming Asian financial markets was seen as precipitating economic and ecological disasters in that region. "It is probably the rapid rundown of natural capital and the massive environmental destabilization that will serve as an enduring legacy of the [Asian] miracle that has vanished," wrote Walden Bello in 1998 in the journal Multinational Monitor.

But by mid-1999 -- due to the vitality of market forces -- Asian financial markets and economies had rebounded to the point that the new problem was whether the turnaround was taking place too suddenly. But a too-vigorous economy is the kind of problem that developing nations and markets like to have. The growing prosperity of Asian nations will give them the wherewithal to control their destinies and protect their resources and environments.
 

Low-cost energy lifts all boats

Nowhere in the world stage is the disconnect between reality and
hyperbole more striking than in the world attack on low-cost energy. Low-cost electricity from low-cost fuels powers the economic transformation of developing nations, but instead is assaulted as promoting an unsustainable way of life for the nations fortunate enough to have it.

Only fossil fuels can provide this energy in the volume and at the low-cost required to leverage economic growth in developing nations, and to maintain growth in developed nations. And far from being in limited supply, fossil fuels like coal and petroleum now appear limitless in their availability and utility. That's a big change from conventional wisdom.

In the 1979 treatise, Running on Empty: The Future of the Automobile in an Oil Short World, the Worldwatch Institute's Lester R. Brown wrote that the oil shortages and gasoline lines of the late 1970s augured fundamental changes in the world energy outlook, and demanded public policy changes to reflect this oil-short world.

In 1999, with oil prices at all-time lows, the setting of public policy based on such heated prognostication appeared ill-advised at best.

But even with higher oil prices in 2000 and 2001 -- the result of supply problems, not resource scarcity --  analysts were
having to grapple with a new paradigm that suggests the hitherto unsuspected abundance of fossil fuel reserves such as coal, petroleum and natural gas -- combined with advanced recovery technologies and more efficient utilization and combustion techniques -- may augur a new age of sustainable, conventional fossil-fuel energy virtually without limits.

"Fossil fuel reserves are becoming more abundant, not scarcer," writes Robert L. Bradley Jr. in The Increasing Sustainability of Conventional Energy.

"[Fossil fuels] promise to continue expanding as technology improves, world markets liberalize, and investment capital expands. The conversion of fossil fuels to energy is becoming increasingly efficient and environmentally sustainable in market settings around the world." He adds fossil fuels will increase their share if environmentalists succeed in politically constraining hydropower and nuclear power.

Despite what is written, there is no alternate to fossil fuel energy.
Non-fossil fuel power-generating alternatives such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass -- as suggested to replace fossil fuel, hydro and nuclear generation -- are technologically undeveloped everywhere in the world, and even at their existing small scale of utilization pose negative environmental impacts of their own.

While market- and command-and-control-based research and
development of these alternative sources will continue, in no way can they meet the electricity growth needs of the developing world at any time soon.

And if the electricity demands of the industrial and consumer sectors were not enough, new research sponsored by The Greening Earth Society indicates the new world institution of the Internet will ratchet up world demand for electricity in ways undreamed only a year or two ago.

Essential for commerce and communication, the Internet has the potential to link every computer in the world. Microchip producer Intel Corp. suggests there will be one billion personal computers on the World Wide Web alone (a part of the Internet) in the very near future. This indicates a future, new global kilowatt-hour demand equal to the entire output of the U.S. electric grid.

Early calculations show that in the United States alone, electricity use by the Internet had grown from zero in 1989 to 8 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption in 1999. It may be responsible for one-half to two-thirds of all the growth in U.S. electricity demand in the decade of the 90s.

At a worldwide level, the magnitude of the appetite of the Internet and our Information Age for electricity will have to be dealt with by industry, the financial markets, and policy makers.

There is no way on Earth that this additional demand can be met without a tremendous increase in coal utilization. Instead, world political entities are attempting to curtail coal use by restricting carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gas" emissions in an attempt to forestall presumed climate change.

Groups like the Greening Earth Society have worked hard to publicize the growing body of research which indicates without doubt that enriched atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide stimulate faster growth in trees and plants, improve water-use efficiency in plants, and has the potential to increase global yields of almost every important food crop. It is clear that a CO2-rich atmosphere will yield a richer world society.

Mathematical modeling has been the method used to predict climate
change, yet every effort to predict average increases in global temperatures by modeling has failed to perform. Yet these same models are the basis for policy decisions that can impact human society in both imaginable and unimaginable ways.

More attention must be paid to the benefits of higher atmospheric CO2 levels on public health and the world food supply, and less on computer models that are growing less accurate as their forecast dates approach.

That would "clear the air" about the benefits of fossil fuels, principally coal, in providing the low-cost electricity that will power the economic growth, improve the public health, protect the environment, and provide sustainable development of all countries around the world.