Bradley is a sceptic; a sceptic of global warming alarmism – the belief that a potential catastrophe lies ahead and that major government measures are necessary in the short term to prepare for it. In this book he summarises the case against the panic measures currently advocated by Al Gore and many west European politicians. He begins with a joyous refutation of the three previous energy scares of the last hundred years, depletion, local pollution, and global cooling, before turning to the biggest and baddest of all, anthropogenic global warming. Using Julian Simon’s technique of measuring scarcity by price, and recording the alterations in identified reserves, he shows that, for as long as such things have been measured, the average person has discovered more energy than he has used. Far from borrowing from the future, present day consumers are subsidising it. Similarly, nearly all measures of air and water quality have improved in the United States, and can be expected to improve elsewhere with economic development. Although he repeats Julian Simon’s assertion that the rate limiting resource for improving man’s condition is not fossil fuels, minerals, land for food, or even clean air and water, but the "Ultimate Resource" human ingenuity, he omits Simon’s evidence, the rising wages we need to pay for human brainpower. Apart from wages and salaries the price of almost everything is on a downward trend. With the freakish exceptions of those countries which have isolated themselves from capitalism, the wages and salaries of everyone whether peasant farmers in India or brain surgeons in the US, has been on a long-term upward trend for the last hundred years. However, I particularly liked his suggestion that in the energy market the so called "renewables", wind, wave and solar power are the ones for which we are running out of space. In the USA our desire for unspoilt wild places is already limiting wind farm development.

The second half of the book deals with global warming. I am not qualified to judge the detailed merits of the science but there is enough here to convince me that draconian controls of the type envisaged at Kyoto are not yet justified. Bradley accepts that climate change is real and some of it is probably caused by man’s activities. However, there is still considerable uncertainty about the accuracy of climate models predictions, it is at least as likely that warming will be good not bad, and taxing energy will certainly make us poorer and less able to cope with climate change when it comes. Perhaps because he argues that controls are presently unnecessary, Bradley omits any hypothetical discussion of what the best controls would be. I would have liked to see his arguments for carbon-trading permits, which allowed carbon emission reductions to be achieved as cheaply as possible, against the command and control regimes envisaged at Kyoto. However, my disappointment at this is more than compensated by the exuberant final attack on Paul Ehrlich’s changing statements on energy over the last 30 years. Few pairs of reputations are more likely to reverse so rapidly and permanently as those of Ehrlich and Simon in the next century.

I caught Bradley at a seminar in London last week with a number of senior Government advisers in the audience. Let’s hope his message reaches the very top.

Jim Thornton 25 June 2001