The Age of Global Warming: A History (3 page)

None of these trends is consistent with Malthus’s prediction of population growth triggering reversions to subsistence. Instead, high population growth was associated with a sustained move from subsistence to becoming a society which Malthus claimed could not possibly exist. 

How could the economy support a larger population that nearly quadrupled in one hundred years? Industrial production increased twelve-fold and the output from Britain’s coalmines rose tenfold between 1815 and 1901.
[31]
 

In the preface to the
Essay
, Malthus wrote that, even if in theory he could be shown to have been wrong, he would ‘gladly retract his present opinions and rejoice in the conviction of his error’.
[32]

Although he was to live thirty-four years into the new century, the economic evidence did not lead him to retract and rejoice. Neither did it lead to his views being quietly forgotten. The power of the Malthusian substructure of sin, punishment and redemption overwhelmed the contrary evidence to become a recurring feature of the consequences of man’s relationship with the Earth and with nature. Modern man’s escape from the Malthusian trap is either illusory or temporary.

Take for example Maurice Strong, the Canadian environmentalist who was secretary of first United Nations (UN) conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the Rio Earth Summit twenty years later. The first chapter of Strong’s 1999 autobiography
Where on Earth are We Going?
is set in 2031. It foretells humanity’s fate unless, that is, we are ‘very, very lucky’ or ‘very, very wise’.
[33]
Nation-states have imploded; the international order completely broken down; there are food shortages, energy shortages, more people perishing from severe weather than in the two world wars of the previous century; a Great Earthquake strikes in 2026; Americans are dying like flies from excessive heat (there was not enough electricity for air conditioners). 

A mystic figure by the name of Tadi emerges to synthesise all the main world religions into one. ‘In this Time of Troubles God must call all to a new and transcendent unity,’ Tadi concluded.
[34]
There was, however, a presentiment of a New Dawn. The human population was falling to what it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘a consequence, yes, of death and destruction – but in the end a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration’.
[35]
  

Sin, punishment, redemption. 

Malthus’s population theory’s most lasting impact was not in economics but in biology. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote about how it helped catalyse his theory of evolution:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on
Population
, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.
[36]

In contrast to the struggle-for-existence models of Malthus and evolutionary biologists, modern economics has incorporated the greatest finding of his friend and rival, David Ricardo.
*
‘Though an awareness of the benefits of specialisation must go back to the dim mists of antiquity in all civilisations,’ according to the
New Palgrave
Dictionary of Economics
, ‘it was not until Ricardo that this deepest and most beautiful result in all economics was obtained.’
[37]
Specialisation and the increasing division of labour distinguish advanced societies from primitive ones. It was trade that enabled Britain to specialise in manufacturing and coal mining, importing food from the Americas and other parts of the world which had a comparative advantage in agriculture.

In debates on the environment and global warming from the late 1960s to our own day, biologists and other natural scientists tend to see economic processes through Malthusian spectacles. Most economists follow Ricardo. Because the Malthusian narrative is about man’s relationship with nature, the voices of natural scientists are generally given more weight in these debates. 

Nature misleads when transposed to human society. It offers food chains, at the top of which are carnivores where the winner takes all and the loser forfeits their life. Nature also provides examples of symbiotic relationships (the closest to us physically being the flora lining our gut). But these latter relationships hardly compare to the conscious intent inherent in economic bargaining and to the specialisation of activities within a single species which exchange both enables and rewards.

There is nothing comparable in nature to Ricardo’s elucidation of comparative advantage. Trade depends on arguably man’s greatest invention – money.  Trade is voluntary; the parties to an exchange only undertake it if each of them believes it will make them better off. Thus trade generates positive sum outcomes.  

Natural scientists’ thinking about economic issues is also conditioned by the first law of thermodynamics. This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. How can mankind’s numbers grow and consumption increase, like an economic perpetual motion machine, without incurring some equivalent loss somewhere else? Economic activity must therefore have a limit because it consumes what it depends upon, so the argument goes. This leads scientists and environmentalists (often they’re the same people) to worry about resource depletion and the planet’s carrying capacity.

The analogy with physics does not hold because the driver pushing outwards the boundary of economic potential is the expansion of human knowledge. In this respect, the market economy has always been the ‘knowledge economy’. Knowledge is not like one of Paul Ehrlich’s rotting bananas. As Bacon put it, knowledge is power.

*  Not all economists elevated Ricardo above Malthus. Keynes wrote in the 1930s, ‘if only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be today’ – not that Keynes subscribed to fears about running out of resources.

3

Antecedents

Most of the population-theory teachers are Protestant pastors.

Karl Marx
[1]

So far then as our wealth and progress depend upon the superior command of coal we must not only stop – we must go back.

William Stanley Jevons
[2]

By the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, Malthus’s prediction – that it was impossible for any human society to escape subsistence without some form of population control – was no longer tenable. His theory had to be reformulated or discarded.

The critical responses of leading economists of the day prefigure those that accompanied the emergence of environmentalism at the end of the 1960s and the debates on global warming two decades later.

The first response is an ancestor of the global warming party. William Stanley Jevons was born in 1835, the year after Malthus died. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, a tough assessor of reputation – he thought Adam Smith much overrated – lauded Jevons for his ‘brilliant conceptions and profound insights’. Jevons was ‘without any doubt one of the most genuinely original economists who ever lived’, Schumpeter wrote.
[3]
Praise in economics does not come higher.

‘His definitive breakthrough came with the publication of
The Coal Question
in 1865, which predicted a decline in Britain’s prosperity due to the future exhaustion of cheaply extractable coal,’ Jevons’ biographer Harro Maas wrote.
[4]

The Coal Question
begins by rehearsing Malthus’s key argument: although human numbers tended to increase in a uniform ratio, the supply of food cannot be expected to keep up. ‘We cannot double the produce of the soil, time after time,
ad infinitum
.’
[5]
Conceding that innovation would ‘from time to time’ allow a considerable increase, this would only buy time. ‘Exterior nature presents a certain absolute and inexorable limit,’ Jevons maintained.
[6]
Although Malthus’s fundamental insight still held, Jevons argued that the growth of manufacturing and free trade ‘take us out of the scope of Malthus’s doctrine’.
[7]
But this would not free mankind from resource constraints. The inability to grow enough food was no longer the check on human progress.  Now it was coal – ‘the Mainspring of Modern Material Civilization’, as he called the carbonaceous rock.
[8]
‘With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times,’ Jevons claimed.
[9]
How Britain should respond to this challenge was not merely an economic issue; it was a question of ‘almost religious importance’.
[10]

The transfer of the check on civilisation’s progress from farm to coal mine had actually worsened humanity’s material predicament. ‘A farm,’ Jevons argued, ‘however far pushed, will under proper cultivation continue to yield for ever a constant crop. But in a mine there is no reproduction, and the produce once pushed to the utmost will soon begin to fail and sink to zero.’
[11]
Jevons thus anticipated both the idea of ‘sustainability’ that was to emerge in the 1970s and the rationale for renewable energy.

Whereas exporting farm products – ‘the surplus yearly interest of the soil,’ as Jevons put it – could be unalloyed gain, Jevons argued that to export coal was to be ‘spendthrifts of our mineral wealth.’
[12]
‘Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?’ Jevons asked.
[13]

His answer was unequivocal. Britain should understand that any increase in its prosperity and its power in the world was temporary.

If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation and distribution of our riches, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present.
But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity.
[14]

The second response provided the most vigorous counter-attack to Malthus. If Malthus was right, Marx and Engels had to be wrong. So they deployed some of their most cutting invective against him. In 1865, the same year as
The Coal Question
, Marx called Malthus’s essay a ‘libel against the human race’.
[15]
  Twenty years earlier, Engels described Malthus’s law of population as ‘the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat’.
[16]
His
Essay
was ‘nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary’, Marx said, ridiculing Malthus’s vow of celibacy.
[17]

‘Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in arithmetical progression?’ Engels asked in his 1844 essay
The Myth of Overpopulation
. True, the area of land was limited. Even if it was assumed that additional labour did not always yield a proportionate increase in output, there was, Engels argued a third element, which ‘the economists, however, never consider as important’ – science. ‘What is impossible for science?’ Engels asked.
[18]

Jevons was emphatic. Science could not free mankind from resource constraints. ‘A notion is very prevalent,’ Jevons wrote, ‘that, in the continuous progress of science some substitute for coal will be found, some source of motive power, as much surpassing steam as steam surpasses animal labour.’
[19]
He attacked a popular scientific writer of the time for spreading such notions as ‘inexcusable.’
[20]
The potential of electricity was based on ‘fallacious notions’, comparable to belief in perpetual motion machines.
[21]

What about petroleum? While superior in some respects to coal, it was nothing but the essence of coal. Besides, there wasn’t very much of it. ‘Its natural supply is far more limited and uncertain than that of coal,’ its high price already reflected its scarcity.
[22]
According to Jevons, ‘an artificial supply can only be had by the distillation of some kind of coal at considerable cost.’
[23]
The future, Jevons asserted, lay in the development of the steam engine and the possibility of multiplying by at least threefold its fuel efficiency. ‘If there is anything certain in the progress of the arts and sciences it is that this gain will be achieved, and that all competition with the power of coal will then be out of the question,’ Jevons wrote.
[24]

Perhaps it needed someone with the imagination of H.G. Wells to envisage a world transformed by the internal combustion engine (which was being developed in the 1860s) and the gas turbine (1930s). However, by the 1860s, the dynamo, discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831, was being commercialised. During the 1870s, dynamos were generating electricity cheaply enough to power factories and begin to replace steam on railways and tramways.
[25]

Marx and Engels displayed a much deeper grasp of the dynamic power of capitalism than Jevons. In the same year Jevons was making his assertions about the future’s dependence on coal and steam, Engels received a letter commenting on the similarity between Darwin’s account of plant and animal life and Malthusian theory. 

‘Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond the economic forms of the animal world,’ Engels replied:

We start from the premise that the same forces which have created modern bourgeois society – the steam engine, modern machinery, mass colonisation, railways, steamships, world trade – these same means of production and exchange will also suffice … to raise the productive powers of each individual so much that he can produce enough for the consumption of two, three, four, five or six individuals.
[26]

The third antecedent is Frédéric Bastiat. In Schumpeter’s unkind estimation, Bastiat was like the swimmer who enjoys himself in the shallows but drowns when he swims out of his depth. ‘I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist,’ Schumpeter commented, ‘I hold that he was no theorist.’
[27]

Theorist or not, when it came to enquiring why Malthus was mistaken, Bastiat asked the right question: Why did Europe no longer suffer from periodic famine? The answer, Bastiat thought, had been provided by another French economist, Jean Baptiste Say. As civilisation advances, the means of existence – the living standards people at any given time think are the minimum needed to maintain themselves and their families – diverge from the means of subsistence, the bare minimum needed to keep body and soul together.

The means of existence, by reason of social progress, have risen far above the means of subsistence. When years of scarcity come, we are thus enabled to give up many enjoyments before encroaching on the first necessities of life. Not so in such countries as China or Ireland, where men have nothing in the world but a little rice or a few potatoes. When the rice or potato crops fail, they have absolutely no means of purchasing other food.
[28]

Malthus’s population principle should therefore be amended so that population growth is no longer linked with the means of subsistence, Bastiat argued, but with the means of existence; ‘the point where the [population] laws of
multiplication
and
limitation
meet, is removed, and elevated.’
[29]
People will have as many children as they can afford and maintain a certain standard of living, one that tends to rise over time.

Bastiat’s insight is relevant to the debate on global warming a century and a half later. The greater the gap between the means of existence and the means of subsistence, the greater a society’s resilience to climatic disaster, however caused. Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. In the early 1980s, it suffered an intense drought, causing an estimated A$3 billion in losses.
[30]
If a similar drought hit sub-Saharan Africa, the issue wouldn’t have been the scale of economic losses but the extent of the humanitarian disaster. The difference is a function of economic development. In rich countries, people don’t die from drought and crop failure.

Bastiat’s ameliorist position reflects a different cast of mind from the pessimistic outlook of Malthus and Jevons. Malthus, he thought, had ‘fixed his regards too exclusively on the sombre side. In my own economical studies and inquiries, I have been so frequently led to the conclusion that
whatever is the work of Providence is good
, that when logic has seemed to force me to a different conclusion, I have been inclined to distrust my logic’.
[31]

Bastiat’s view of the harmony of class interests was in complete contradiction to Marxism’s class warfare analysis of history. Marx and Engels viewed Bastiat, a liberal, bourgeois economist, with even greater disdain than Schumpeter did. But in responding to Malthusian views on environmental limits to population growth and economic activity, they were on the same side of the argument. Writing in 1895, towards the end of his life and of a century that had witnessed the greatest increase in production up to that point in history, Engels remarked:

I do not understand how anyone can speak today of a completion of the Malthusian theory that
the population presses against the means of subsistence
at a time when corn in London cost twenty shillings a quarter, or half the average price of 1848–70, and when it is generally recognised that
the means of subsistence are pressing against the population
which is not large enough to consume them!
[32]

Capitalism would collapse because it produced too much too cheaply, Marxists used to argue.

That couldn’t be said of the collapse of communism in 1989. For sure, the environmental degradation of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe revealed that communism had been faithful to its founders’ Promethean ideology of man’s subjugation of nature, just as it required the subjugation of mankind. However, communism did not fail because it had poisoned the Earth, polluted the skies or drained inland seas. Neither did it fail because it had run out of natural resources. As an economic system, it failed because it could not produce.

The functional extinction of Marxism as a living ideology was to have a profound impact on the success of the idea of global warming and its ascendancy in the early 1990s. The decline of Marxism removed one of the two economic antecedents from the nineteenth century that would have opposed environmentalism and alarmism about global warming. From the 1960s onwards, the growth of the environmental movement would expand to occupy the space on the political spectrum vacated by classical Marxism. It left the ameliorists, Bastiat’s successors, to fight the battle alone against the depletionists, the descendants of Malthus and Jevons.

Jevons’ forecasts, or prophecies as Keynes called them, also tell a story relevant to our day. We cannot definitively verify economic forecasts to justify calls to tackle global warming. Unlike Jevons’ contemporaries, we can see whether the fame
The Coal Question
earned him was justified by events.

Jevons simply took a three and a half per cent annual growth rate and extended it for a century.
[33]
For the first decade, the forecast wasn’t too bad with a 3.1 per cent average rate of growth a year.
[34]
But by 1881, the divergence was unmistakable, with actual output of coal nearly twelve per cent less than Jevons had reckoned. The divergence kept growing and coal output peaked and started to decline in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Overall, Jevons calculated that Britain would need to produce one hundred and two billion tonnes of coal in the period 1861–1970 with annual production in 1961 projected to be 2.2 billion tonnes. It was this colossal number, which Jevons argued was beyond Britain’s physical resources, that led him to conclude that Britain’s ‘present happy progressive condition’ was of limited duration.
[35]
In reality, total coal production in the hundred years to 1965 was a shade under two billion tonnes, less than the
annual
amount Jevons had forecast for 1965. The forecast by one of the most brilliant economists of his or any age was out by a factor greater than fifty. By 2007, British coal consumption had fallen to around sixty-three million tonnes, of which some twenty million was produced domestically – less than one per cent of what Jevons had projected for the last year of his series.

Even more spectacular than Jevons’ over-estimation of the importance of coal was his dismissal of petroleum. Here is the Jevons coal curve again, this time with the rising curve of petroleum imports.

Keynes said that Jevons wrote
The Coal Question
to shock and establish his public reputation. The book was a bestseller. It led to Jevons meeting Gladstone who told Jevons that his book was masterly. John Stuart Mill argued that because Britain’s prosperity was limited, the National Debt should be paid down – a proposition that Keynes argued should have been dismissed with only ‘a little reflection’. If demand for coal was to increase indefinitely at a geometric rate, future national income would be so much greater than present national income that the dead-weight represented by the National Debt would become of little account.
[36]

How did Jevons get it so wrong? 

One of his economist contemporaries said that not only was Jevons simply a genius, he was also a brilliant logician. Jevons believed that forecasting the future was a matter of logic. He once wrote in his journal of waking one sunny morning with the sure sensation that logic had disclosed the future to him, only for it to slip his grasp – epistemological optimism taken to a delusory extreme. Then there’s the role of character, as explained by Keynes: ‘There is not much in Jevons’ scare which can survive cool criticism. His conclusions were influenced, I suspect, by a psychological trait, unusually strong in him, which many other people share, a certain hoarding instinct, a readiness to be alarmed by the idea of the exhaustion of resources.’
[37]