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PH: Well, Malthus basically made the assumption that the core resource out there for humanity is acres, and that when we run out of acres we either starve or have a war. He was simply mistaken. The core human resource is not our acres but our intellects, as has become vividly clear in this century, where we've actually, in the industrialized world, begun shrinking the number of acres we use. But you asked a more general question about mathematical models, and I have two things to say about them. One is that some of them are surely correct, and the second is that it is so easy to distort these models, and they get distorted in such quantity, that we know as an empirical fact that most of them are wrong.

MOTHER: So the mathematical population models of Paul Ehrlich and Malthus eliminated the brain inside the heads of the people they were counting... and human innovation is left out of their equations.

PH: Well, Malthus and Ehrlich are a stretch apart, and I'm certainly not the first to make this observation. But take the original Malthusian equation, which was basically that our human fecundity would outstrip human capacity to raise food on land. Well, we know as an empirical fact the reverse happened. We got much more efficient at growing food. Ehrlich made essentially the same mistake. Then, the interesting question becomes "How did we double and then double again, and then double yet again, our agricultural output?" And some of the mechanisms, the most important ones, are the least obvious. I mean, our transportation system, probably more than anything else, accounts for the reforesting of the Adirondacks and the first doubling of agricultural productivity in this country. Add to that selective crop breeding, fertilizers and pesticides, and so on, and we have quintupled the per acre productivity...far outpacing the increases in population during the same period. And this just made nonsense of predictions that our fecundity would outstrip our ability to grow food.

MOTHER: Can you give me an example of another model that went astray?

PH: A great example of the meandering of environmental point-making is the history of natural gas. People with any kind of memory of policy will clearly recall the day when we outlawed the burning of natural gas to produce electricity, on the theory that we were going to run out of it so soon that it was just unconscionable to burn natural gas to generate electricity. Now we're trying to mandate it. There is only one industrialized nation on the planet in the last quarter-century that has actually reduced its net carbon output into the atmosphere from energy sources, and that is France - because they've gone heavily nuclear.

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