Clearing the air.

YOU may have seen the recent news reports announcing that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, air pollution in major cities had fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Cities like Houston, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh all achieved the lowest number of days with unsafe smog levels in decades. What do you know: Capitalism and a clean environment really can coexist.

This encouraging news flies in the face of what green groups have been saying about the Bush environmental record. Indeed, the greens have some explaining to do, given that just a few months before these statistics were released, they were running around panicking voters about President Bush's supposedly horrid record on the environment. He received an F grade on some environmental report cards; no retraction has yet been issued.

The public is often duped by the greens and their perpetual migraine about the environment. Indeed, there is almost certainly no issue of modern times on which Americans' general beliefs are more contrary to objective reality. Most Americans believe that because of industrialization, population growth, and mass consumption, the air and water are deteriorating and our natural resources are being depleted. A CNN/ USA Today poll asked what would be some of the greatest problems mankind will confront over the next 50 years. More than four out of five said they feared "severe water pollution" and "severe air pollution."

Required reading for all Americans who want to be educated on the true state of the planet should be Steve Hayward's annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators (American Enterprise Institute). Environmentalists hate this booklet because it is, generally, chock--full of good news. Remember the arsenic-in-the-drinking-water scare a few years back? Environmental groups hyperventilated that Bush was allowing industry slowly to poison us. But it was all a big lie: Hayward shows that the water we drink today is substantially more healthful than that of 50 years ago. U.S. lakes and streams that were once threatened by pollution have been dramatically cleaned up over the past 30 years, and are now usable for fishing and recreation. And consider this fact about the "good ol' days": About one of every five deaths prior to 1900 was attributable to contaminants in the drinking water.

On air pollution, the data indicate a long-term trend of improvement. For example, the accompanying table shows that, since 1976, sulfur dioxide has decreased by more than 65 percent, carbon monoxide by almost 70 percent, and lead by more than 90 percent.

Another huge success story is the decline in pollution per unit of output. Over the past 50 years, air-pollution emissions fell by 3 percent annually relative to output--suggesting that America has become far more environmentally efficient. In fact, we now produce about six times more output per ton of emission of air pollution than we did before 1940.

Free-market capitalism is not the enemy of the environment, but its savior. Freer and wealthier societies can afford to devote more resources to combating pollution--and they do. Conversely, the greatest environmental catastrophes of the 20th century were caused by socialist nations. The Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were perhaps the greatest environmental villains in history. Prudent government regulation, such as basic public-health measures, clean-water laws, and air-pollution-abatement laws, are certainly necessary to protect the environment. But more important is a free-market economy-one that protects property rights, produces wealth, and encourages innovation.

CLEANER AND CLEARNER:
AIR QUALITY INDICATORS

AMBIENT AIR POLLUTION LEVELS
IN THE U.S.

Ozone                   -31%
Sulfur Dioxides         -70%
Nitrogen Dioxide        -41%
Carbon Monoxide         -75%
Particulates (PM10) *   -28%
Lead                    -98%

* 1998-2002. SOURCE: EPA AND INDEX OF LEADING
ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS, AEI, 2004.