The Age of Global Warming: A History (10 page)

For all Schumacher’s popularity among the impressionable and the credulous in the First World – in 1977, he visited the White House, where he gave a delighted Jimmy Carter a copy of
Small is Beautiful
– the reaction to ideas in the Third World was distinctly cool, perhaps reciprocating his own. ‘India is a sewer,’ he remarked in 1973.
[28]
His  doctrine of ‘intermediate technology’ would have locked the Third World into permanent inferiority to the West and was patronising to boot:

All development, like all learning, is a process of stretching. If you attempt to stretch too much, you get a rupture instead of a stretch, or you will lose contact and nothing happens at all.
[29]

He was an ardent supporter of the Soil Association, bequeathing them the royalties from
Small is Beautiful
. ‘Their methods bear the mark of non-violence and humility towards the infinitely subtle system of natural harmony,’ absolving it of the Nazi sympathies of its founders, and was strongly opposed to the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers to increase crop yields.
[30]

Application of Schumacher’s ideas to the Third World would have been disastrous. It was Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, not Schumacher’s intermediate technology or the Soil Association’s organic farming, which fed the Third World and avoided the mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Indians confidently predicted by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 bestseller
The Population Bomb
. As Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, pointed out in a 1972 newspaper article, wheat yields in India and Pakistan doubled in the six years from 1965, with similar progress in rice yields.
[31]
When Borlaug died in 2009, the Indian agriculture minister paid tribute. India and many other nations owed a debt of gratitude to ‘this outstanding personality’ for helping to forge world peace and saving the lives of two hundred and forty-five million people worldwide.
[32]

Gratitude in the Third World, but what about in the West? For American radicals, the implications of the Green Revolution were quite different. Borlaug’s achievement wasn’t about feeding the hungry and saving lives; the Green Revolution had damaged the prospects of a Red Revolution and had extended capitalist agriculture to the tropics.
[33]

From his perch at Berkeley in California, the leading ideologist of the New Left Herbert Marcuse re-formulated classical Marxism – a belief system entirely indifferent to nature – to capitalise on the surge in environmentalism. ‘Violation of the Earth is a vital aspect of the counter-revolution,’ Marcuse told a 1972 conference on ecology and revolution.
[34]
Monopoly capitalism is waging war against nature, ‘the more capitalist productivity increases, the more destructive it becomes. This is one sign of the internal contradictions of capitalism.’
[35]
Marcuse yoked together the two issues bringing young people out onto the streets: ‘The genocidal war against people is also “ecoside”.’
[36]

The passengers and crew of Spaceship Earth were nothing if not disputatious.

7

Limits To Growth

The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

Executive Committee of the Club of Rome, 1972
[1]

22
nd
April 1970 – Americans celebrated the first Earth Day. A quarter of a million people gathered in Washington, DC. Altogether twenty million people took part in peaceful demonstrations across America.
[2]
President Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’, who sided with him over the Vietnam War against the anti-war protestors, was marching with them on the environment.

In preparing his first State of the Union Message in January 1970, Nixon noted that public concern on environmental issues had risen from twenty-five per cent in 1965 to seventy-five per cent at the end of 1969.
[3]
Nixon decided to pre-empt the Democrats on the environment and prevent them using it against him in the 1972 presidential election. His decision made, Nixon went the full distance: ‘The time has come for a new quest – a quest not for a greater quantity of what we have, but for a new quality of life in America.’ The question America would answer in the 1970s was whether it would make peace with nature. Using the language of environmentalism, Nixon spoke of making reparations to nature. ‘Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.’ He would propose the ‘most comprehensive and costly’ environmental programme in America’s history.
[4]
  

In private, Nixon told one of his aides, ‘In a flat choice between smoke and jobs, we’re for jobs … But just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.’
[5]

Cynical? The
New York Times
gave him the headline he wanted:

NIXON, STRESSING QUALITY OF LIFE, ASKS IN THE STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE FOR BATTLE TO SAVE ENVIRONMENT; OFFERS ‘NEW ROAD’
[6]

Congress passed laws to regulate air and water pollution and in July, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency by carving out functions from existing federal departments. One of the Cabinet secretaries losing staff in the reorganisation asked Nixon whether it was all right for a Cabinet member to say, ‘No comment.’ Nixon shot back, ‘Yes. And it’s about time.’
[7]
He appointed William Ruckelshaus, a lawyer, to be the EPA’s first administrator. Ruckelshaus then led a seven-month hearing into DDT. Despite the thinness of scientific evidence of DDT’s threat to human health, in 1972 the EPA banned its use – ten years after publication of
Silent Spring
– in a highly political reaction to the over-use of the pesticide by American farmers.

America’s second most important elected Republican approached environmental politics differently. In his campaign for governor in 1966, Ronald Reagan had caused consternation with his remark about California’s redwoods: ‘A tree is a tree – how many more do you need to look at?’
[8]
Environmental sensitivities in California had been raised by the blowout of an oil platform six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara in January 1969, leading to a drilling ban in federally controlled waters off the central Californian coast.

Once elected, Reagan’s environmental policies turned out to be a lineal descendant of Teddy Roosevelt. He created a fifty-eight-thousand-acre Redwood National Park. He reached agreement with Nevada to restrict development of Lake Tahoe. Reagan also supported legislation to ban the registration and sale of automobiles that did not meet Californian auto emission standards. In what his long time biographer Lou Cannon called his finest environmental achievement, Reagan stopped the Dos Rios Dam construction project. ‘Ike, I hate to see a beautiful valley destroyed,’ he told Ike Livermore, the state’s secretary for resources.
[9]
In 1973, Reagan saddled up and, followed by one hundred packhorses, rode to a meadow underneath Minaret Summit in the eastern Sierra. Waving a white hat, Reagan dismounted and made a speech opposing the Trans-Sierra highway project. It would have been the only road cutting the two-hundred-and-eleven-mile John Muir Trail between Yosemite and Mount Witney. The highway was never built.

Unlike the localised surges in environmental politics earlier in the twentieth century, environmentalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s was synchronised across the Western world. It was powered by a common concern that man’s activities – the pollution of air and water – were poisoning the biosphere (Carson had called
Silent Spring
her poison book).
[10]
Governments across the Western world responded in similar ways. A 1976 UN survey found that seventy countries had created agencies or departments at national level with environmental protection as a core function.
[11]

The wave would crest in 1972. Then, even more swiftly than it rose, it broke. Fifteen years would pass before the second wave began to roll, propelled by global warming.

Both drew their energy from fear that industrialised societies were destroying the balance of nature on which humans depended. The first wave was more extreme in its claims, the second more consequential in its effects. Both started during a long period of prosperity. The first began towards the end of what economic historian Angus Maddison called the Golden Age and the second during the growth phase of what Maddison dubbed the Neoliberal Order. 

They had similar cheerleaders – NGOs and a cast of experts comprising scientists, mostly physicists and biologists, acting as Jeremiahs warning that time was running out to avert catastrophe. These experts, possessing the gift of seeing the future, were blind to the past – ignorant of the recurring pattern of alarmist forecasts from Malthus and Jevons onwards and incurious as to why similar prophecies in the past had all been wrong. Compared to those earlier efforts, in the sixties and early seventies, forecasts of collapse and doom were high decibel, Technicolor productions for worldwide release. 

Might they share the misconceptions that pre-determined the predictive failure of earlier ones? A persistent feature of the environmentalist position is to ignore economic history and fail to ask how or why industrial societies had escaped the Malthusian trap in the past.
*

More often, the boot was on the other foot, as if questioning forecasts of imminent collapse was irresponsible. Responding to the charge of being Micawbers for believing that society would continue to find solutions to problems of pollution, would increase food supplies and find sufficient raw materials for future growth, the economist Wilfred Beckerman wrote in 1974:

Our predictions are firmly based on a study of the way these problems have been overcome in the past. And it is only the past that gives us any insight into the laws of motion of human society and hence enables us to predict the future.
[12]

At the same time, environmentalists called for alternatives to modern industrial society – the only economic structure known to have kept widening the gap between subsistence and people’s living standards. ‘We can free our imagination from bondage to the existing system and realise that twentieth-century civilisation is only one, and not necessarily the best, of the many possibilities among which mankind is free to choose.’ Not the words of a dope-smoking drop-out, but the view an official report to the British government in 1972.
[13]

The first environmental wave is close enough to enable ageing baby boomers to look in the mirror and see a 1960s’ student. It is sufficiently distant for its predictions of eco-doom – a term coined at the time – to be verified. These forecasts assumed economic growth would be ultimately destructive and cause man’s collision with nature. It should therefore be deliberately halted though government action.

In addition to its alleged harm on the environment, it was argued that growth didn’t make people happy; that the way GDP numbers were put together meant that the costs of growth were not fully accounted for; that growth led to private affluence and public squalor. The president of the European Commission, Dr Sicco Mansholt, called on European governments to change their economic policies. ‘We should no longer orientate our economic system towards the pursuit of maximum economic growth,’ he wrote in a 1972 newspaper article.
[14]

The most famous anti-growth tract was produced by the Club of Rome. Founded in 1968, the Club described itself as an ‘invisible college’ of some seventy experts. They were united in the belief that ‘the major problems facing mankind are of such complexity and are so interrelated that traditional institutions and policies are no longer able to cope with them’.
[15]
The Club commissioned a study based on a computer model developed by Jay Forrester, a computer scientist and management professor, that purportedly demonstrated how the world economy would develop over the two hundred years to 2170.

The results were summarised in
The Limits to Growth
, which appeared in 1972. Its headline finding generated global publicity, helping the book sell four million copies. On an unchanged trend, the limits to growth would be reached in one hundred years. ‘The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity,’ the authors claimed.
[16]
Similarly to Jevons’ call in 1865 that Britain should shrink its economy before it was forced to, the Club of Rome authors argued that precipitate decline could be avoided if immediate steps were taken to stop further growth and thereby establish a condition of ‘ecological and economic stability’ which they asserted would be sustainable far into the future.
[17]

Their doom-laden advice rested on a simple misconception which in turn led the authors to mis-specify the problem they were analysing as ‘growth in a finite system’.
[18]
Resources are used up, not by growth, but by production and consumption. Given its premise of finite resources, the desired state of ‘ecological and economic stability’ would also run out of resources and collapse.
*
The only difference was timing; it would just happen a bit later. The two-hundred-year model runs illustrated in the book conveniently ended before they would have showed this happening. Catastrophe avoided, not postponed, by limiting growth.

Like Jevons, the Club of Rome authors expressed a particular animus towards those who reasonably thought technological progress could overcome the limits to growth. It was, they wrote ‘the most dangerous reaction to our findings.’
[19]
Technology, they argued, had adverse side-effects. For sure, the Green Revolution had increased food production and the number of agricultural jobs. It had also widened inequality because larger farms adopted the better methods first.
[20]
Therefore an extreme version of the precautionary principle was required to deal with the threat posed by technology. Any mass-produced new technology should be forbidden unless all physical and social side effects could be demonstrated beforehand. If a new technology lifted one limit to growth, then it would have to be shown that the next check was more desirable than the one being lifted.
[21]

It was Malthusianism for a technocratic age; its vision of a post-industrial society, where change would proceed at a pace the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt would have been comfortable with. Reduced to its essentials, the logic of
The Limits to Growth
implied that human beings were the fundamental problem because humans consume resources.

The conclusions of
The Limits to Growth
were by no means extreme for the time, but fairly representative of intellectual opinion. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) set up a study group chaired by Harvey Brooks, a Harvard engineering professor. In a 1971 report, the group argued that developed societies were fast approaching a condition of near saturation. Even in higher education, people were suffering from information overload which risked stifling the production of new knowledge.
[22]

The January 1972 edition of the
Ecologist
was devoted to ‘A Blueprint for Survival’. It was endorsed by thirty-seven eminent experts, including five Fellows of the Royal Society and sixteen holders of science chairs at British universities, two Nobel laureates and Sir Julian Huxley, who was a subscriber to virtually every environmental cause, from the Kibbo Kift in the 1920s, eugenics and population control in the 1930s, the first director-general of UNESCO in 1946, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1961, and writer of the preface to the British edition of
A Silent Spring
.

Environmental problems were not accidental malfunctions of modern society, the ‘Blueprint’ stated. They were ‘warning signs of a profound incompatibility between deeply rooted beliefs in continuous growth and the dawning recognition of earth as a space ship.’
[23]
Industrial society, with its ethos of expansion, was unsustainable. Then came an unambiguous, cast iron prediction: ‘Its termination within the lifetime of someone today is inevitable.’
[24]
A choice therefore had to be made between famine, epidemic and war (those three again) or initiating ‘a succession of thoughtful, humane and measured changes’ to spare our children the hardship and cruelty of the first option.
[25]
Even the most fervent proponents of global warming might be nervous of tying themselves to such a tight timetable for civilisation’s rendezvous with catastrophe.

As with global warming, scientists weren’t speaking from the fringes of the policy debate but given the role of defining what the problem was. In Britain, the Conservative government asked Sir Eric Ashby, a distinguished botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society, to chair a study ahead of the UN conference on the human environment in Stockholm. Its report,
Pollution: Nuisance or Nemesis?
, contains some of the most alarmist language presented to a British government in peacetime. Acknowledging that some members of the group considered that having less pollution and a better environment was a matter of political choice, like providing more hospitals, ‘others among us felt such an attitude is dangerously complacent, and are convinced that a fundamental and painful restructuring of our industrial society is necessary if mankind is to survive’.
[26]
Growth had to be halted in ‘a deliberate and controlled manner’. The sooner this happened, the better – ‘the longer the change is delayed, the more the productivity of the biosphere will be damaged, and the lower will be the eventual sustainable level for our descendants’.
[27]
There was no analysis or evidence to support this dire conclusion. 

Most alarming to the alarmist was the lack of alarm in the general population. ‘The danger of entrusting the environment to the mandate of public opinion is that most people ascribe a higher priority to the present than the future,’ the report said. ‘Only in time of war do people willingly make such sacrifices.’
[28]
While some members of the working party believed that ‘the normal pace of politics’ was adequate to solve environmental problems, ‘others of us feel that there is no hope of action capable of grappling with the complex environmental crisis unless the issues are presented to the public in the same stark terms of national and even racial survival as maintained in war’.
[29]

Wilfred Beckerman’s experience of serving on Ashby’s working group sharpened his criticisms of natural scientists’ approach to economic and social matters. Two years later, he wrote that scientists who might be world authorities on phenomena pertaining in the physical world ‘do not have a minimal understanding of the way that the world of human beings operates in general, or, in particular, the way that society reacts to problems such as pollution and demands for raw materials’.
[30]
Understanding those problems required knowledge of human beings in a social context. Some scientists might have decided to become scientists, Beckerman suggested, ‘precisely to shield themselves from these phenomena and to escape into a world where problems are not on a human scale, but microscopic or astronomic’.
[31]

Beckerman argued against governments intervening to ensure the long-run supply of raw materials, as it would rest on the assumption that governments were better at forecasting future trends and developing new technology than private industry. ‘There is no reason to make such an assumption,’ Beckerman said. ‘This does not mean private industry always gets it right; it doesn’t, but it usually pays for its mistakes.’
[32]