What would it take for us to mine the entire volume of rock from the prominence of Mt. Whitney (the amount the peak rises from the base, which could be well above sea level), the tallest mountain in the lower 48? (why did I pick Whitney? Maybe I am bitter, I finally had a chance to hike it early last summer, and the snowpack was simply too deep to make non-mountaineers want to do it in a single day, so instead we made a 180 and headed to Death Valley to bask in the 113 degree heat). Well, let us assume that we have access to the largest dump trucks in the world – the Liebherr T 282B:

If you assume that every cubic foot of the truck could be used to haul away rubble then its dimensions of 48 feet in length, 29 feet in width and 24 feet in height mean it can, with one load, carry away 33,408 cubic feet of stuff. That’s awesome. Let’s also make the assumption that each of these trucks will show up at the base of Mt. Whitney, and costlessly be filled in no time at all, and will not smash into other trucks on the road. In a year, this would mean that 105,120 such dump trucks could haul away material from Mt. Whitney. These trucks would be able, in total, to haul away 3.51 billion cubic feet of Mt. Whitney.

How long would it take to eliminate the mountain? A heckuva lot longer than you think! Assume that the mountain is a perfect cone, and that the base of Mt. Whitney is a conservative 10 miles in length (or 52,800 feet). The elevation of Whitney is nearly 15,000 feet, but its prominence (how high it rises from its base) is only 10,080 feet. The formula for the volume of a cone is pi * r^2 * h /3 (my equation editor is not working), so the volume of the exposed part of Mt. Whitney is pi x 26,400 x 26,400 x 10,080 /3 = 7.36 trillion cubic feet of stone and dirt.

Putting the above figures together, costlessly loading the world’s most powerful and largest dumptrucks at a rate of one truck per 5 minutes would take us 2,095 years to completely extract the viewable part of Mt. Whitney. This one single mountain peak in the middle of one single mountain range in one small part of the world. The implications are many. Obviously, the physical size of the Earth is enormous almost beyond comprehension. I think looking at too many satellite photos of the planet make us believe it is far smaller than it really is. Second, once one recognizes that the earth, from the middle of its core to the upper reaches of its atmosphere is nothing more than a mass of chemical elements, the magnitude of material that is potentially extractable is beyond the scale of any meaningful human time period. Mount Whitney is only the 81st largest mountain by prominence in the world. Thus, even if we started mining the 100 largest peaks at the same rate as the Whitney example above, it would take us at least 200,000 years to extract the mountain prominences alone. That would leave the entire remainder of the planet untouched, including every other mountain peak. Not that I think there is likely to be an infinite supply of every “resource” we would ever need, but I offer this for a bit of perspective.

Or consider this: the total volume of municipal solid waste generated annually on the entire planet is likely to be around (caution: I am working on computing a much more accurate figure) 54 billion cubic feet (the U.S. produces roughly 13.5 billion cubic feet, and since they are about 1/4 of the world’s GDP, I estimate that they generate 1/4 of the world’s garbage, though this is likely an overestimate). We could take all of the garbage produced by the entire planet for the next 545 years and fit it all into the space left behind by the former Mt. Whitney.  Or put it this way, if instead of trying to bury our trash in a hole we simply used it to build a mountain, we could continue generating trash at the same rate we are today for the next millenium and still only have produced two mountains the size of Mt. Whitney. Again, we could put those in the middle of North Dakota and scarcely a person on Earth would know they existed.

Of course, for those who worship at the altar of Gaia, making these monuments to garbage would be a little like the problem we have in Omelas. And please do not send me a thousand e-mails telling me about all of the groundwater seepage, pollution, etc. involved with the MSW issue. That is not my point, I am simply making a point about the physical volumes we deal with as human beings on this planet.

If the folks from Dubai can build islands from nothing in the middle of the Gulf, then I am starting to think that some entrepreneur may find it a good idea to start building trash mountains for real.

Now let’s do a rough calculation of the costs of DeSoto Solar versus conventional power sources. According to the Electric Power Research Insitute, a modern 1,000 megawatt coal plant without carbon capture technology would cost about $2.8 billion to build. Adding carbon capture would boost the cost to as much as $4.7 billion.

The 25 megawatt DeSoto facility cost $150 million. Scaling it up to 1,000 megawatts would cost $6 billion. But coal power plants operate 90 percent of the time snd solar only 30 percent, so in order to get the equivalent amount of electricity out of solar plant would mean tripling the capital cost for a total of about $18 billion. In other words, building a solar power plant costs between 4- and 6-times more than conventional, or even carbon capture, power. Even worse, a scaled up DeSoto-style plant costs 18-times more than a natural gas plant.

Of course, no one is proposing to turn the entire energy supply solar. But it should also be recognized that turning hundreds of acres into solar fields that require millions of gallons of water to keep panels clean, is not exactly what I have in mind when I think of open-space, untrammeled land, and all of those things I like about being in the wilderness. And to put up a coal plant you do not use much more than a few acres of space – and it doesn’t really matter where you put it. But who worries about spending 3 times more than you need to for equivalent (or better) technology? I’m sure that kind of stuff, just, well, pays for itself.

Even if my time were not valuable, this is seeming to me to become more and more of an insane activity. Why? If doing this were so valuable, and so important, how come I am not getting paid to do it? It seems to be a neat racket … someone has figured out a way to tap the reserve army of workers to their advantage, and it doesn’t seem like it is the greedy capitalist caricature either.

The garbage problem is that one of the primary reasons people are urged and sometimes coerced into recycling is this notion that we are drowning beneath mountains of trash – soon all that will remain of our planet are vast National Parks of Garbage. This is flat out ridiculous. I don’t think many of the recycaholics ever sat down to do some math.

• Americans produce about 250 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. Though we have been producing less and less waste for each unit of output we produce, let’s make the assumption that we will produce double this amount, per year, for the rest of eternity (unlikely, since waste is costly, and greedy producers can increase their profits by reducing how much waste is produced along with their products).
• Each ton of waste consists roughly of two cubic yards by volume (this is a mid-point, if trash were compacted first, it would be far, far smaller than this amount – but let’s be generous).
• So, the 500 million tons of waste we hypothetically produce each year in the future are the equivalent of one billion cubic yards of waste. That’s a heckuva lot of garbage! … or is it?
• This is the equivalent of a volume of waste that is 20 million square yards in area and 150 feet deep (the larger landfills are much deeper than this, over 200 feet in some places).
• Doing a little conversion, each year then, we produce enough trash to fill a 4132 acre hole to a depth of 150 feet.
• This means, that if we produce this much every year for the next 1,000 years (an entire millennium), then we will produce enough garbage to fill a 4.1 million acre hole to a depth of 150 feet! That’s enormous … but just how enormous is it?
• Doing a little algebra, we can see that over the course of the next 1,000 years, if we produce TWICE as much trash as we are producing today, in total, we would be able to fill a hole with garbage that is 150 feet deep and 80 miles on each side (if it is a square).

That might sound like a big hole, but there are vast tracts of land in the Midwest and Western US, and in particular in Alaska, where a piece of land that size is thought to be quaint. Alaska has 656,425 square miles of land, most of it completely barren. The amount of trash we would produce would make up less than 1% of the land there. Yes, that is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware, but they are small places. It is also larger than Rochester or whatever neighborhood you happen to live in.

There might be fantastic reasons to recycle (greenhouse gas worries, chemical worries, etc.) but one of those reasons most certainly cannot be because there is no place to put our trash.  That is just some ridiculous trash talking.

People are not cancer (most of them at least). Resources do not magically drop out of the sky like manna from heaven. For resources to be consumed, they must first be produced. Couple that with the fact that by any metric living standards (incomes, etc.) have been skyrocketing for almost two centuries and the simple conclusion is reached that each generation of human beings has access to more resources than the generations preceding them. To see why, consider how each of us consumes resources in our lifetimes. We must either be self-sufficient, which means we produce everything we need for ourselves. We can trade for resources. Or resources can be transferred to you. Transfers are most often accomplished through government actions, those that come from other mechanisms can still be characterized as I will characterize government transfers below, except for the fact that government actions are coercively applied.

In the self-sufficient case it is clear that there can be no depletion of resources and certainly no loss to others. In order for me to survive, I must produce resources for myself, and that production does not inflict losses on others (particularly when private property is respected and well defined). In the case of trading, the people surrendering resources to me are receiving something in exchange. So once again there is no net loss of resources (rather a gain). In the case of government redistribution, when resources are transferred to me, they must be taken from another individual. So my gain comes at the expense of others. Practiced on a large scale this transfer of resources will result in massive “over-consumption” of resources because those that are net recipients of resource transfers do not produce as many resources as they consume. And if opponents of this notion want to suggest that the coercion of productive individuals is only at the expense of the extra resources that those individuals have created, then they have contradicted the very premise behind their opposition to larger population and increased standards of living.

The overwhelming misunderstanding of those who think that our population is growing too large and that the high standards of living in the US are impoverishing the rest of the world is the false notion that if we reduced how much we consumed, or if we had never been born before, then suddenly more resources would be available for everyone else in the world. At best, everyone else would not be affected if you were not born, but the more likely outcome will be less for everyone, not more.

On this Earth Day, I reproduce in its entirety a letter by the late Julian Simon:

EARTH DAY:  SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED

April 22 marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.

During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic. The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy. The doomsaying environmentalists – of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich – raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying; impending great famines would be seen on television starting in 1975; the death rate would quickly increase due to pollution; and rising prices of increasingly-scarce raw materials would lead to a reversal in the past centuries’ progress in the standard of living.  

The media trumpeted the bad news in headlines and front-page stories. Professor Ehrlich was on the Johnny Carson show for an unprecedented full hour – twice. Classes were given by television to tens of thousands of university students.  

It is hard for those who did not experience it to imagine the national excitement then. Even those who never read a news- paper joined in efforts to clean up streams, and the most unre- pentant slobs refrained from littering for a few weeks.  

Population growth was the great bugaboo. Every ill was the result of too many people in the U. S. and abroad. The remedy doomsayers urged was government-coerced birth control, abroad and even at home.  

On the evening before Earth Day I spoke on a panel at the jam-packed auditorium at the University of Illinois. The organizers had invited me for “balance,” to show that all points of view would be heard. I spoke then exactly the same ideas that I write today; some of the very words are the same.  

Of the 2000 persons in attendance, probably fewer than a dozen concluded that anything I said made sense. A panelist denounced me as a religious nut, attributing to me weird beliefs such as that murder was the equivalent of celibacy. My ten- minute talk so enraged people that it led to a physical brawl with another professor.  Every statement I made in 1970 about the trends in resource scarcity and environmental cleanliness turned out to be correct.

Every prediction has been validated by events. Yet the environmental organizations and the Clinton administration – especially Vice President Al Gore, the State Department, and the CIA – still take as doctrine exactly the same ideas expressed by the doomsayers in 1970, despite their being discredited by recent history. And the press overwhelmingly endorses that viewpoint.  

Here are the facts: On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before. Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries. The real prices of food and of every other raw material are lower now than in earlier decades and centuries, indicating a trend of increased natural-resource availability rather than increased scarcity. The major air and water pollutions in the advanced countries have been lessening rather than worsening.

In short, every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole. All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.  

There have been, and always will be, temporary and local exceptions to these broad trends. But astonishing as it may seem, there are no data showing that conditions are deteriorat- ing. Rather, all indicators show that the quality of human life has been getting better.  

As a result of this evidence of improvement rather than degradation, in the past few years there has been a major shift in scientific opinion away from the views the doomsayers espouse. There now are dozens of books in print and hundreds of articles in the technical and popular literature reporting these facts.  

Responding to the accumulating literature that shows no negative correlation between population growth and economic development, in 1986 the National Academy of Sciences published a report on population growth and economic development prepared by a prestigious scholarly group. It reversed almost completely the frightening conclusions of the previous 1971 NAS report. The group found no quantitative statistical evidence of population growth hindering economic progress, though they hedged their qualitative judgment a bit. The report found benefits of additional people as well as costs. Even the World Bank, the greatest institutional worrier about population growth, reported in 1984 that the world’s natural resource situation provides no reason to limit population growth.  

A bet between Paul Ehrlich and me epitomizes the matter. In 1980, the year after the tenth Earth Day, Ehrlich and two associ- ates wagered with me about future prices of raw materials. We would assess the trend in $1000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten for ten years. I would win if resources grew more abundant, and they would win if resources became scarcer. At settling time in 1990, the year after the twentieth Earth Week, they sent me a check for $576.07.  

A single bet proves little, of course. Hence I have offered to repeat the wager, and I have broadened it as follows: I’ll bet a week’s or a month’s pay that just about any trend pertaining to material human welfare will improve rather than get worse. You pick the trend – perhaps life expectancy, a price of a natural resource, some measure of air or water pollution, or the number of telephones per person – and you choose the area of the world and the future year the comparison is to be made. If I win, my winnings go to non-profit research.  

I have not been able to close another deal with a prominent academic doomsayer. They all continue to warn of impending deterioration, but they refuse to follow Professor Ehrlich in putting their money where their mouths are. Therefore, let’s try the chief “official” doomsayer, Vice President Al Gore. He wrote a best-selling book, Earth in the Balance, that warns about the supposed environmental and resource “crisis.” In my judgment, the book is as ignorant and wrongheaded a collection of cliches as anything ever published on the subject.  

So how about it, Al? Will you accept the offer? And how about your boss Bill Clinton, who supports your environmental initiatives? Can you bring him in for a piece of the action?  

It is not pleasant to talk rudely like this. But a challenge wager is the last refuge of the frustrated. And it is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater.  

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is every scientific reason to be joyful about the trends in the condition of the Earth, and hopeful for humanity’s future, even if we are falsely told the outlook is grim. So Happy Earth Day.