NINE
MALTHUS & CO.
The enormous amount of coal required to run our great ocean steamships, our leviathans of the deep, and the innumerable factories of our cities is making such inroads upon the available store that nature cannot forever supply the demand. When all the coal of the earth is used, what then?
Lord Kelvin, mathematical physicist and engineer, 1902
So you now you know it’s a neo-Marxist plot to take over the world, and it’s all rooted in the deepest of misanthropy. You know that many of the proposed solutions to what may well be an imaginary problem are quite stupidly, self-destructively wrong. Yet still you have your doubts.
You’re thinking: ‘Well all right, maybe the science supporting AGW is a bit dodgy. And maybe the motives of all the different vested interests pushing it aren’t as kosher as they might be. But that doesn’t mean the green movement is wrong about everything. I mean, overpopulation is a serious problem. And resources are finite. And we do need to take care of the planet for future generations. And we can’t go on consuming the way we do because it just leads to so much waste. And all that pollution we pump into the air, you can’t tell me it’s having no effect whatsoever. And what about GM? And surely you must agree that organic agriculture is better? And…’
Yep. I hear this a lot. Well, obviously I do. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
We all know that the world is made of stuff (‘scarce resources’, as an economist might call it).
We all know that from our personal life experience using a range of materials such as beer, light bulbs, condoms, tyres, trainers and so on, that once we’ve used up stuff we can’t really use it again, unless maybe it’s a glass bottle or some other recyclable item.
We’ve all stood in a crowded lift or train carriage and felt how unpleasantly claustrophobic it is.
We’ve all been to our favourite stretch of coastline and gone: ‘Oh no! Last time I was here there was just a couple of beach shacks and a tiny guest house and a few turtles laying their eggs. And now look at it: ruined! Totally ruined!’
We’ve all been stuck in a traffic jam (a lot more often than we used to).
We all know that the population is growing, especially in the Third World.
And of course, we all think we know what happened at Easter Island because we’ve read a book by Jared Diamond. Or we heard it at dinner from someone else who read a book by Jared Diamond. And we know that Jared Diamond wouldn’t have got his facts wrong because, well, he’s an economist or something and his book was a bestseller, so he’d be bound to know, wouldn’t he?
This hodge-podge of personal life experience, half-digested factoids, urban myths, hearsay and vague recollections of something we read on the net the other day exerts a powerful distorting influence on the way we look at the world. I call it the ‘I reckon’ fallacy. That’s ‘I reckon’ as in the words that you normally use to introduce your heartfelt – but entirely unsupported – opinion when you offer an argument in a pub. And ‘fallacy’ because, well, that’s exactly what it is.
Let’s consider a few examples beginning with the case of eighteenth-century doom-monger Thomas Malthus. In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus observed ‘the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it’ and feared that human populations would be subject to the same problem, resulting in a life of perpetual famine, disease, pestilence and vice. Yet Malthus failed to see the Agricultural Revolution happening around him in Britain, which saw rapid advances in agricultural production. He failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution which had just begun.
As history subsequently proved, Malthus was talking out of his tricorn hat. Between 1780 and 1914, Britain’s population swelled more than four-fold – while between 1780 and 1914, her economy grew thirteen times larger. Standards of living rose accordingly, with almost everyone better fed, better clothed and better housed than at any time in British history. Malthus, understandably, fell somewhat out of fashion.
By the mid-twentieth-century, however, the discredited doom-monger was creeping back into fashion. Among the first to take up his noble cause of cussed pessimism against all objective evidence was one Harrison Brown, aforementioned author of the 1954 book The Challenge of Man’s Future. In it he wrote:
…we are now living in a phase of history which is destined never to be repeated. For the fifth of the world population that lives in regions of machine culture it is a period of unprecedented abundance. And most of us who are a part of that fortunate one-fifth are so enamored with the achievements of the last century and with the abundance which has been created that we believe the pace of achievement will continue uninterrupted in the future. However, only a cursory investigation of the present position of machine civilization is needed to uncover the fact that it is indeed in a precarious position. A cosmic gambler, looking at us from afar, would, in all likelihood give substantial odds in favor of the probability that it will soon disappear, never again to come into existence.
Maybe it’s just as well that Brown’s cosmic gambler was imaginary. Otherwise he might have lost a great deal of money, possibly being forced to sell the weekend getaway by the fire lakes of Quegglqx, his cherished Blurtwangglle, and perhaps even the anterior fuel-sacs attached to the under-spines of at least 239 of his 842 children. That’s the incredible thing about made-up speculation about an imaginary future based on nothing more than your passionate strength of feeling as to what ought to be true. (Yes, that means you, computer modelling.) Absolutely anything is possible!
So what has really happened to our doomed race in the disastrous fifty-odd years since Brown wrote his book? Well, says author Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist, the average human being now earns nearly three times as much money, eats one-third more calories of food, buries one-third fewer of her children and can expect to live one-third longer. She is less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She is more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She is more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a period in which the world population has more than doubled.
This doesn’t mean that Brown is definitely wrong, particularly if he was using ‘soon’ in the cosmic sense of, ‘any time in the next three or four million years’. What we can say, with confidence, is that he has been wrong so far. As wrong as all those other doom-mongers who have made similar predictions throughout our history, such as the fellow who made this one:
Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. Our wants grow more and more keen and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while nature fails in affording us our usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence and famine and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.
No, not Paul Ehrlich, 1968. Nor the Prince of Wales, 2010. This was the utterance of Carthaginian priest Tertullian in his ‘Treatise of the Soul’ in 210AD, when the world’s population was a mere 250 million. Since then it has grown to over seven billion. Frankly, which planet would you rather inhabit? Tertullian’s blissfully uncrowded car-free zone? Or our current congested hell of long life-expectancies, modern dental care, paid holidays, iPods, contraception, literacy and penicillin?
These are the kind of historical comparisons we don’t make nearly often enough. If we did, we might be more grateful and more realistic. Ridley offers a delicious example in The Rational Optimist, with an idyllic portrait of a family in Western Europe or eastern North America ca. 1800: gathering around the hearth in their timber-framed house, father reading from the Bible while mother prepares to dish up a healthy stew, daughter is feeding the horse, son pours water from a pitcher into earthenware mugs, and outside there is no noise of
traffic, and there are no dioxins or radioactive fallout – only tranquillity and birdsong.
Then Ridley puts this fantasy into its correct historical context. Paraphrasing Ridley: Father will be dead at fifty-three (and he’s lucky: life expectancy in England in 1800 is less than forty); baby will die of smallpox, the water tastes of cow manure, mother is tortured by toothache, the stew is grey and gristly. There is no fruit or salad in this season, candles cost too much so the only light comes from the fire, the children sleep two to a straw mattress on the floor.
Is this what eco-lobbyists yearn for when they argue that we must reduce our CO2 output to ‘pre-industrial levels’ – the bracing pleasures of cold, hunger and grinding poverty?
Well, no, obviously not. They believe that massive lifestyle changes are the least worst solution to the Armageddon that awaits us if we don’t stop consuming scarce resources soon. And let’s be honest here: we cannot be sure that they are not correct. The future is a mystery to us all. Anything could happen: asteroid strike, outbreak of World War III, Elvis coming back to Earth to rule over us all with peace, harmony and gentle crooning…
So yes, within that multitude of infinite possibilities it is entirely conceivable that our planet’s future will pan out along the same disastrous lines envisaged by green doom-mongers: pullulating masses of humans consuming the planet’s resources like locusts, melting ice caps, flooding cities, three ark-like ships being prepared in China in order to preserve a select group of humans from the disaster that the Mayans prophesied… etc.
What we can say, however, with absolute certainty is this: if they are right it will be a historical first. From Tertullian to Thomas Malthus, from Harrison Brown to Paul Ehrlich, from the Club of Rome to James Hansen – every one of the catastrophists who has predicted doom, gloom and disaster for our planet as a result of expanding populations and burgeoning economic growth so far has been proven entirely wrong. Those few brave ‘Cornucopians’ who have dared to venture the opposite view – that the more people there are on Earth the better things get – have so far been proven spectacularly right.
Greatest and most influential of these optimists was a brilliant US economics professor called Julian Simon, a.k.a. ‘The Doomslayer’. In 1980, he put the two competing theories to the test in a famous wager with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any five commodities he liked. Ehrlich bought $200 of each, for a total of $1,000.
Simon’s view was that by the end of the decade, the inflation-adjusted prices would fall for each of the five commodities. Ehrlich, of course, could scarcely believe his luck. As any fool knew, when population increases and scarce resources approach their depletion point, naturally the price of commodities will increase. The bet was that exactly ten years after the index date (29 September 1980), either Ehrlich or Simon would write the winner a cheque for the inflation-adjusted difference.
With the help of two like-minded friends (John Holdren – yes, that John Holdren – and John Harte), Ehrlich picked five metals most likely to skyrocket: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. Then they waited for the inevitable clean-up – which, humiliatingly, never came. Though the world’s population grew by more than 800 million between 1980 and 1990, the prices of all the chosen metals were lower at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Simon won the bet, and Ehrlich wrote him a cheque for $576.07 in October 1990. More importantly, Simon had won a moral victory for the forces of rationalism over the forces of hysterical doom.
Simon died in 1998 and never got the credit he truly deserved. While Ehrlich continued to be fêted as an environmental seer (in 1990, the same year he lost the bet, he won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius award’), Simon was invariably dismissed during his lifetime as a right-wing crank. As a profile of Simon in Wired put it:
There seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days ‘experts’ spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.
The reward for being right, on the other hand, seems to be mainly derision, hatred and custard pies in the face. This certainly was the experience of one of Simon’s acolytes – a young Danish statistics professor called Bjørn Lomborg – when he published an influential bestseller called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Lomborg started out as a member of Greenpeace, fully sympathetic to the cause of the eco-doom-mongers. One day, as a class project, he gave his students the task of analysing the nonsensical theories of right-wing economist Julian Simon. The intention was to expose them as bunk. Instead, much to Lomborg’s surprise, Simon’s theories turned out to be scrupulously researched, solidly grounded and entirely plausible.
This gave Lomborg the idea for his book. He would put his academic specialty to use by analysing all the statistics used by campaigning organisations such as Greenpeace and the WWF, and see how they measured up. What Lomborg found, in almost every case, was that the hard scientific facts had been twisted, distorted and exaggerated by green activists to trump up what he called a ‘litany’ of man-made eco-disaster scenarios, from acid rain to melting ice caps to the effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tragedy in Prince William Sound.
Like all oil spills, Exxon Valdez was manna from heaven for green campaigners: shocking, moving photos of seabirds – and better still in this case, oh-so-cute and special sea otters – distraught fishermen protesting about ruined livelihoods; angry political cartoons in newspapers ironically captioned ‘The Price of Oil?’, and nasty, evil, heartless capitalists in the fossil-fuel industry, ripe for scapegoating.
Lomborg’s analysis put all of this in its proper context. The number of seabirds killed in the spill – 250,000 – was no greater than the number of birds that die every day in the US as a result of flying into plate-glass windows, nor the number of birds that are killed in Britain every two days by domestic cats. As for the $2bn clean-up operation, well, that was probably a waste of money too. Subsequent research had shown that while beaches that were expensively and elaborately cleaned of oil took four years to recover, the beaches that were left alone took just eighteen months.
All of which went down with the greenies like a plate of steak tartare at a vegan birthday party. What upset them even more, though, was Lomborg’s truly unforgiveable attack on their favourite cause du jour – the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. As Lomborg pointed out, even in the unlikely event that the Protocol’s signatories were to implement its proposals, the effect would merely be to reduce the world’s surface temperature by just 0.07°C over fifty years – at a cost to the global economy of $150bn per annum. Yet for just a single year’s worth of that pointless expenditure, Lomborg calculated, it would be possible to ensure that every person on Earth had access to clean drinking water and sanitation.
To all this, the green movement responded in its predictable way: not with factual counterarguments but with a good old-fashioned smear campaign. An ad hoc, quasi-official pressure group calling itself the ‘Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty’ declared his book ‘unscientific’. Lomborg was vilified in numerous science journals – one of which called him the ‘anti-Christ’ – and at an Oxford book signing he had a custard pie splattered in his face by an activist.
Unfortunately, these smear tactics worked. Ask any green about The Skeptical Environmentalist, and you’ll be assured that it was entirely discredited by an official Danish government inquiry. What they conveniently forget – if they ever knew in the first place – is that the criticisms of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty were subsequently found to be invalid by an official government inquiry carried out by less partisan officials.
You can see something similar happening today with the latest book to adopt a Cornucopian line – Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Though praised by many reviewers, it mightily peeved green campaigners such as George
Monbiot, who managed two angry articles on it in the space of a fortnight. After the statutory outburst of petulant ad hominem arguments (dwelling on Ridley’s allegedly ‘disastrous’ performance as the chairman of failed bank Northern Rock), Monbiot dismissed Ridley’s arguments as a case of ‘telling the rich what they want to hear’.
There’s something about Cornucopianism that really seems to get under the skin of greenies. It makes them writhe and shriek and protest like vampires suddenly exposed to light. Just what is it that they find so offensive?
I’d suggest that there are a number of factors at play here, from the green movement’s natural, chunky-knit, ingrained husks-and-all pessimism to its puritanical abhorrence of any grand universal theory that celebrates personal liberty, to sheer purblind ignorance. But in essence, I think, it’s just another manifestation of that eternal political divide which separates conservatives from left-liberals: head versus heart.
We’ve touched on the ‘heart’ part already. It’s that ‘I reckon’ fallacy that misleads many of us into thinking that just because we feel in our bones that something is true we’ve no need to support our theory with any real-world evidence.
Take ‘overpopulation’. We all know the world is running out of space. How do we know? Well, because people are always telling us it is – environmentalists, politicians, newsreaders, the guy we sat next to at a dinner party, everyone. It’s just so obvious that it must be true. The current world population is seven billion – which is a lot! – and by the middle of this century it will have risen to maybe nine billion, which is a whole heap more. Where are we going to fit all those people? Isn’t our planet pretty much filled to bursting, already? Quick, quick, something must be done before the whole world ends up like a Japanese subway train in rush hour!
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 20