The End of Doom (2 page)

As this present volume will make clear, I have changed my mind since 1992 about how big a problem man-made global warming might become. On the other hand, more than twenty years of reporting on United Nations climate change negotiations has convinced me that the ongoing attempt to hammer out a global treaty imposing hard, legally binding limits on the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to man-made warming is doomed to failure. Instead, I show how human ingenuity will likely solve this problem just as it did those that provoked earlier (and incorrect) predictions of environmental apocalypse. In this case, promising research suggests that it will be possible to lower the price of clean energy below that of fossil fuels in the next four decades and thus to lessen concerns about future disruptive climate change.

When I presented my book proposal to my editor, Thomas Dunne, at St. Martin's Press back in 1992, he actually told me: “Ron, we'll publish your book and we'll both make some money. But I want to tell you that if you'd brought me a book predicting the end of the world, I could have made you a rich man.” Human beings do have a psychological bias toward believing bad news and discounting good news. But besides that, the sciences surrounding environmental issues have been politicized from top to bottom.

As the researchers at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project have shown time and again, what people believe about scientific issues is chiefly determined by their cultural values. They use a theory of cultural commitments devised by University of California at Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky that “holds that individuals can be expected to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce values that they share with others.”

Based on Wildavsky's typology, the Yale researchers divvy up Americans into four cultural groups: Individualists, Communitarians, Hierarchicalists, and Egalitarians. In general, Hierarchical folks prefer a social order where people have clearly defined roles and lines of authority. Egalitarians want to reduce racial, gender, and income inequalities. Individualists expect people to succeed or fail on their own, while Communitarians believe that society is obligated to take care of everyone.

The Yale researchers report that people whose values are located in Individualist/Hierarchy space “can be expected to be skeptical of claims of environmental and technological risks. Such people, according to the theory, intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such claims would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that Hierarchical/Individualists value.” On the other hand, Egalitarian/Communitarians “tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as the source of unjust disparities in wealth and power. They therefore find it congenial, the theory posits, to see those forms of behavior as dangerous and thus worthy of restriction.” According to this view, then, Egalitarian/Communitarians would be more worried about all sorts of alleged environmental risks than would be Hierarchical/Individualists.

As the Yale Cultural Cognition Project researchers depressingly show in their numerous studies, people are adept at seeking out information that confirms their values while determinedly ignoring data that challenges them. While I have tried hard to avoid succumbing to confirmation bias in what I report, I suspect that it will be apparent when you read this book that I am, culturally speaking, an Individualist. So be skeptical on that account, but also be wary of your own susceptibility to confirmation bias.

In my introduction to my 1992 book, I concluded:

This book demonstrates the reality of human progress, and I hope it will thereby help restore the next generation's belief in its future. I do not counsel mindless boosterism or Panglossian optimism. The world faces some real problems, but those problems do not portend the end of the world. And yes, there are sometimes unintended consequences to human actions. However, history shows that our energy and creativity will surmount whatever difficulties we encounter. Life and progress will always be a struggle and humanity will never lack for new challenges, but as the last fifty years of solid achievement show, there is nothing out there that we can't handle.

Add twenty-two years to that.

I aim in this new book to again remind the public, the media, and policymakers that the foretellers of ruin have consistently been wrong, whereas the advocates of human resourcefulness have nearly always been right. So instead of ecological collapse, I predict that humanity can look hopefully forward in the twenty-first century to an age of environmental renewal.

 

1

Peak Population?

“A MAN YOUR AGE WITH NO CHILDREN?”
blurted out my flabbergasted Johannesburg taxi driver. I was then forty-eight years old and taking a long cab ride from Sandton, where the UN's 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development had convened, to a Soweto township venue in South Africa. As is my usual practice, I had gotten into the front seat to make conversation.

After we'd gone through the preliminaries about what had brought me to Johannesburg, my very hospitable driver, who looked to be in his fifties, asked me if I was married. “Yes,” I replied. “How many children do you have?” he amiably asked. “None,” I replied. My driver nearly veered off the road in shock. “Are there problems?” he carefully inquired. “No,” I replied, “my wife and I decided not to have children.” “Who is going to support you in your old age?” he wondered. I elected not to try to explain to him about retirement funds and Social Security and instead turned the questions around, asking him, “Well, how many children do you have?”

“Six,” he replied with evident satisfaction. “Why so many?” I asked. “Because two of them are going to be rotters and just leave you,” he genially explained. “Two others will support you when you get old. And you need two younger ones at home to fetch you beers from the fridge after work.”

“How many children did your father have?” I asked. “I am one of twelve,” my driver replied, adding that he had grown up on a farm in the northern part of the country. Then I asked, “How many children do your kids have now? “None,” he replied with a hint of a frown. “City life is so expensive, a couple are still finishing up school, and good jobs are hard to find,” he explained.

That's the demographic transition right there,
I thought to myself.

Population researchers define the demographic transition as the change in the human condition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility. Initially, both birthrates and death rates are high and natural population growth is low. With the advent of modern medicine and sanitation, mortality rates fall and fertility remains high, producing a rapidly growing population. Eventually fertility rates also fall, leading to a reduction in the rate of population growth. “Population increases not because people start breeding like rabbits, but because they stop dying like flies,” explains American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt.

In premodern societies, average life expectancy was under forty years, nearly a third of children died before reaching age five, child labor was vital to mostly rural families, and few women had access to education or contraception. Global average life expectancy is now over seventy years, only one in twenty children die before their fifth birthdays, urbanized child-rearing is costly, and many more women are educated and have access to contraception.

As a result of these trends, women in 1970 globally averaged 4.7 children over the courses of their lives, and that has fallen to 2.45 children in 2013. A population becomes stable when as many people are born as die. This occurs when the total fertility rate is approximately 2.1 children per woman; the extra tenth of a child takes into account pre-reproduction deaths, infertility, and people like my wife and me who choose not to have children.

Leading demographers expect that as the twenty-first century unfolds, women across the globe will be giving birth to fewer and fewer children. The upshot will be slowing population growth and eventually a reversal of trend in which world population begins to shrink. According to a long line of environmentalist doomsayers, this was not supposed to happen.

The Population Bomb

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” predicted Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 bestseller,
The Population Bomb
. Ehrlich was not a lone voice proclaiming the advent of imminent massive famines. A year earlier in their bestselling book,
Famine 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive?,
William and Paul Paddock warned, “By 1975 a disaster of unprecedented magnitude will face the world. Famines, greater than any in history, will ravage the undeveloped nations. A swelling population is blotting up the earth's food.” They confidently added, “Our technology will be unable to increase food production in time to avert the deaths of tens of millions people by starvation.”

In his famous 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in the journal
Science,
ecologist Garrett Hardin flatly declared, “The freedom to breed is intolerable.” To illustrate the harms of the freedom to breed, he conjures up the arresting example of a pasture open to all people in a village. Each herdsman, seeking to maximize his individual gain, puts as many cattle on the pasture as possible, leading eventually to its destruction from overgrazing. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons,” wrote Hardin. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all.” According to Hardin, ceaselessly breeding human beings treat the Earth like a village commons and would soon “overgraze” the planet. Hardin thus concluded that “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

Another prominent prognosticator of population doom is Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute. Back in 1963, when Brown was a young bureaucrat in the US Department of Agriculture, he declared, “The food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades.” In 1967, Brown explained, “As the non-recurring sources of [agricultural] productivity are exhausted … the rate of increase in yield per acre begins to slow.” In 1974, Brown maintained that farmers “can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.” In 1989, Brown stated that “global food insecurity is increasing,” and further claimed that “the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing.” Brown contended that “population growth is exceeding the farmer's ability to keep up,” concluding that “our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.” In 1995, Brown starkly warned, “Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.” In 1996, Brown again proclaimed, “Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding.” In a 2012
Scientific American
article, Brown asked, “Could food shortages bring down civilization?” Not surprisingly, Brown's answer was an emphatic yes. Given his past record, he astonishingly claimed that for years he has “resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.” Now, however, Brown said, “I can no longer ignore that risk.” Also in 2013, Brown once again declared, “The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity.”

The population doomsters offered stark plans to handle the impending global famines. The Paddock brothers advised a form of triage, in which the United States would pick countries worthy of food aid and leave tens of millions of people in India, Haiti, and Egypt to starve to death. In
The Population Bomb
Ehrlich compared humanity to a growing cancer on the Earth. “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people,” wrote Ehrlich. What must be done? “We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” What sorts of heartless decisions? The November 25, 1969,
The
New York Times
reported, “Dr. Paul Ehrlich says the U.S. might have to resort to addition of temporary sterility drugs to food shipped to foreign countries or their water supply with limited distribution of antidote chemicals, perhaps by lottery.”

That was then, but what about now?

Though it is tragically true that over the decades tens of millions have died of the effects of malnutrition, the world-spanning massive famines predicted by Ehrlich and the Paddocks did not come to pass. Instead, world population since 1968 has essentially doubled from 3.6 billion to 7.2 billion today. While the overpopulation dirge has become somewhat muted as a result of their massive predictive failure, many of the more radical environmentalist ideologues still sing the same old Malthusian song.

Malthusianism Forever?

Modern promoters of imminent population doom are the intellectual disciples of the eighteenth-century economist Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In the notorious first edition of his
An Essay on the Principle of Population,
Malthus claimed that human numbers would always outrun the amount of food available to feed people. Malthus advanced two propositions that he regarded as completely self-evident. First, that “food is necessary for the existence of man,” and second, that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” Based on these propositions, Malthus concluded that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.” In other words, Malthus was arguing that population doubled at an exponential rate of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so forth, whereas food production increased additively, rising one unit at a time, like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and so forth. Malthus additionally asserted that “population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence.” Malthus therefore dismally concluded that some portion of humanity must forever be starving to death.