Or so you might think, until you look at the hard data. You could, for example, fit everyone in the world into the state of Texas, and with plenty of room for each person. Texas is 268,581 square miles, so with a world population of seven billion, you’d have a density of about 26,000 people per square mile. That is about the same as New York City and is considerably less than Union City, New Jersey (about 53,000 per square mile). Many other cities around the world have even higher population densities, from Delhi, India (about 75,000 per square mile) to Manila, Philippines (over 110,000 per square mile). Since the world’s landmass is 732 times the size of Texas, this would leave enough room for population expansion, farmland and pristine wilderness – you’d hope – to allay the fears of even the most fanatical Malthusian doom-monger.
And how about ‘food miles’? Until quite recently I believed – as I’m sure many of you do – that the further food products travelled the worse it was for ‘the environment’; that therefore it made sense to eat fresh, healthy, local produce grown just down the road than, say, green beans flown in from Kenya or raspberries from Chile.
But the facts simply don’t bear this out, as blogger Stephen Budiansky (aka ‘Liberal Curmudgeon’) noted in a controversial New York Times article called ‘Math Lessons For Locavores’.
…It is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.
The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.
It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.
This is the same rigorous technique Lomborg employed in his analysis of the Exxon Valdez spill – and you can quite see why greens find it so nerve-grating: its cool rationalism sounds so despicably heartless. How dare Lomborg make light of the deaths of those 250,000 beautiful, feathered creatures – many of them rare and endangered (probably)! Every one of those birds had a mother and father! Every one was a beaked child of Gaia! By introducing those unhelpful niggling analogies about plate glass and pussy cats, Lomborg was draining the tragedy of its underlying emotional truth: that man is evil, that oil companies are even more evil, that something must be done – and soon! – to save the planet from our vile depredations.
No doubt this green tendency towards ‘emotionalising the issue’ comes in terribly handy when trying to persuade idealistic young souls to make campaign donations or venture out on boats only to be hosed down by Japanese whale fishermen. But in the field of government policy-making, you might reasonably hope that the decision-making process was based on something a little more concrete. Like, say, hard factual evidence and rational analysis.
This, certainly, was always the view of the great Julian Simon. Starting in his early childhood in Newark, New Jersey, Simon became well versed in the habit of researching facts, thanks to a father who had an annoying habit of intentionally making outlandish statements which young Julian was then expected to rebut. Interviewed by Ed Regis in Wired magazine, Simon recalled how his father might insist that the price of butter was 8 cents a pound, even though Julian knew full well it was more like 80 cents. But his father would stubbornly insist otherwise until Julian did his research and came back with reams of incontrovertible proof.
Simon admitted that he himself had begun life as a ‘card-carrying anti-growth, anti-population zealot’ but had changed his mind on realising that the ‘data did not support that original belief’. The problem with Neo-Malthusian doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, Simon used to complain, was that their arguments lacked scientific rigour. Rather than sift through historical data and go to the trouble of making complex calculations (such as adjusting for inflation), they preferred to rely on their nebulous computer models, which could predict anything they wanted to predict but which bore little correlation with observed reality.
Another trick the doomsayers would use – still do, especially with regard to global temperature records – was to extrapolate from ‘conjectural trends’. This is where, in order to get the desired result, you pick a short-term trend on a graph (a ten-year period showing apparently dramatic and unprecedented warming, say) and deliberately ignore the long-term trend that puts it into its proper context.
Simon neatly illustrated this point in a 1996 public debate with Hazel Henderson, an environmental activist who was trying to make the case for government regulation. It was London’s 1956 Clean Air Act, she argued, which we had to thank for a remarkable decline in pollution levels. And to prove it, Henderson produced a graph showing a clear, downward sloping line. Simon, no fan of big government, responded with a graph of his own – this one stretching right back to the 1800s and with a line from the 1920s showing a constant and uniform downward slope. ‘If you look at all the data,’ he said, ‘You can’t tell that there was a Clean Air Act at any point.’
But what was it about hard factual evidence that Neo-Malthusians found so threatening? According to Simon, it was that the environmental movement had taken on the qualities of a secular religion to which any form of dissent, however grounded in fact, was viewed as a heresy. Conventionally in religious tradition, nature had been seen as something that God had created for man. In the new green religion, said Simon, man was no longer at the centre of things: ‘Ecology teaches us that humankind is not the centre of life on the planet. Ecology has taught us that the whole earth is part of our “body” and that we must learn to respect it as we respect life – the whales, the seals, the forests, the seas.’
Simon traced this dramatic shift in attitude by comparing old and new scientific textbooks. In the past, he noted, ‘the descriptions of many birds included evaluations of their effects on humanity in general and on farmers in particular; a bird that helped agriculture was more highly valued than a bird which harmed it’. By contrast, the current textbooks ‘often evaluate humankind for its effect upon the birds rather than vice versa’. In the old religion, the human species was enjoined to be ‘fruitful and multiply’; under the terms of the new one it was little more than a ‘cancer for nature’. But the old one, Simon argued, had it right. Counterintuitive it might be, but it also happened to be true: population growth wasn’t the problem – population growth was the solution.
You wouldn’t have won a popularity contest by making this point to the Indian government in the mid-1960s, though. With a population that had swollen to over 400 million the country was on the brink of starvation – and relied for its survival on the five million tonnes of food aid it received annually from the US.
But all this was about to change thanks to the genius of a man called Norman Borlaug, ‘the father of the Green Revolution’ – surely the most deserving recipient (indeed quite possibly the only deserving recipient in a field which has included Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama) of the Nobel Peace Prize.
‘Father of the Green Revolution’ is quite an ironic title, really, given that Borlaug was responsible for at least two of the very worst crimes in the green penal code:
1. Feeding the world’s starving masses so that they could go on breeding even more.
Through selective breeding of mutant seeds in Mexico in the 1950s, Borlaug had created a short-stemmed strain of wheat that grew less tall but yielded far more than conventional wheat varieties when fertilised. After some initial opposition, Borlaug prevailed on both the Indian and Pakistani governments to try his new wheat strain. Production trebled and by 1974, the food crisis was over. India had become a net exporter of wheat, not necessarily to the advantage of Paul Ehrlich. In The Population Bomb he had airily declared:
I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.
And:
India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.
Now there are two further points worth making about the Green Revolution. The first is the absurd fact that Borlaug, the man who saved more lives – perhaps a billion – than anyone who ever lived, is now a virtual unknown. (He died in 2009.) He’s considerably less renowned, say, than the green movement’s mass-murdering poster girl Rachel Carson. This speaks volumes for the warped priorities of our era. Because Borlaug’s methods involved large quantities of fertiliser, he has become the bête-noire of all those environmentalists who believe our future lies in the more traditional, eco-friendly ‘trust-to-nature-and-starve’ agricultural model.
And the second point is that Borlaug’s Green Revolution was not the first. In 1909, similar transformations were yielded by the discovery of the Haber–Bosch process, which enabled industrial quantities of inorganic nitrogen fertiliser to be made from steam, methane and air. Once again, in the 1920s, plant breeders developed a vigorous and hardy new strain of wheat (‘Marquis’) which could survive at higher northern latitudes, and could be grown in places such as Canada. It’s almost as if God – or Gaia, if you prefer – has been trying to tell us something: that built into our species is a survival mechanism so strong and a capacity for adaptation so powerful, that no matter what crisis nature throws our way, we shall always emerge smelling of violets.
This, essentially, was what Simon believed. It lay at the root of his optimism about the human race. He never much liked the term ‘Cornucopian’, saying, ‘I do not believe that nature is limitlessly bountiful’. He did believe, however, that the world’s possibilities were sufficiently great that, when combined with ‘human imagination and human enterprise’, we and our descendants would always have more than enough for our needs.
Were Simon alive today, he would have found himself vindicated yet again by the advent of shale gas – an energy revolution as vital and exciting and game-changing as coal was during the Industrial Revolution, as oil was in the early twentieth century.
If shale gas didn’t exist, it might sound like it originated in the overactive imagination of a deranged, liberty-loving fantasist. At a stroke, it resolves so many of the world’s perceived energy problems: it’s abundant, it’s cheap, it’s environmentally benign and it’s widespread. (The latter being a particular source of relief to those of us who don’t want to be held to ransom by domineering natural gas suppliers like Russia or scary oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia and Iran.)
Shale gas is not a new discovery, of course: it has existed since time immemorial under the ground, trapped within fine-grained sedimentary rock. What has changed, though, is technology. Previously shale gas was thought unviable. But in 1999, a mining engineer named George Mitchell combined the techniques of horizontal drilling with hydraulic ‘fracking’ (creating hairline fractures in the rock) and suddenly, this miracle energy source was rendered commercially extractable.
Its potential benefits are enormous, not least to Britain, where recent exploratory drilling by Cuadrilla Resources has discovered perhaps the largest reserves anywhere in Europe. In Lancashire’s Bowland Shale alone, there are estimated to be 200 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of the stuff. And the reserves beneath the North Sea, according to the British Geological Survey, may be many times larger still. Britain, in other words, is sitting on a gold mine of cheap, abundant, comparatively clean energy, enough to create thousands of jobs and industry worth billions, while supplying Britain’s energy needs for a century or more.
Why didn’t we know about such things before? Well, we did. At least as far back as the 1980s, maverick free-market economists and energy specialists were telling anyone who would listen that all the talk about ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak energy’ was overdone. There were more than enough ‘unconventional’ energy resources under the land and sea just waiting to be extracted, they explained. All that was missing was the technology to make them viable.
But no one was much interested in this tedious message of hope. What people wanted, as people invariably do, is the tantalising prospect of imminent eco-doom. And this perverse yearning for evidence of approaching Armageddon is by no means a new thing. You only have to look at the history of peak oil theory to appreciate that.
Peak oil is hugely fashionable at the moment among environmentalists. Well, obviously it is because if it’s true – i.e. if world oil supplies are on the verge of collapse, leading to massive price hikes and economic chaos – then all their talk of the urgent need for the ‘transition’ to renewable energy and for managed de-industrialisation looks less like loopy green dogma and more like basic commonsense. Indeed, ‘peak oil’ is one of the two main bases, the other being, inevitably, ‘climate change’, for the Transition Towns movement in which ‘communities are encouraged to seek out methods for reducing energy usage as well as reducing their reliance on long supply chains that are totally dependent on fossil fuels for essential items’.
The theory is most closely associated with M. King Hubbert, a strange, cantankerous but brilliant earth scientist who was a leading light of a 1930s US cult called Technocracy. According to energy historian Daniel Yergin in his book The Quest:
Holding politicians and economists responsible for the debacle of the Great Depression, Technocracy promoted the idea that democracy was a sham and that scientists and engineers should take over the reins of government and impose rationality on the economy.
(Post-normal science, anyone?). It may come as little surprise that Hubbert was also a great believer in the threat of ‘overpopulation.’ Interviewing a female job applicant once, he asked whether she intended to have children: then he tried to convince her not to by telling her ‘to go to the blackboard to calculate at exactly what point the world would reach one person per square meter’.
Still, his whacko views don’t necessarily preclude his science being right. And when US oil production hit its peak in 1970, followed by the shock of the 1973 oil crisis, Hubbert was hailed as a visionary seer. That’s because, back in 1956, he had predicted that global oil reserves were far more limited than was generally recognised and that in the US – what became known as Hubbert’s Peak – production would peak somewhere between 1965 and 1970.
What peak-oil theorists don’t often appreciate is that Hubbert was just the latest in a long line of ‘the oil’s running out’ alarmists and that in every case they have been proved quite wrong. As early as 1885 the State Geologist of Pennsylvania was warning that ‘the amazing exhibition of oil’ was only a ‘temporary and vanishing phenomenon one which young men will live to see come to its natural end’. In fact, before Hubbert, there were four peak-oil crises, each one taken very seriously by the eminent men and ‘experts’ of the day, just as the current one is now.
But are these peak-oil true believers right? All the current evidence suggests not. Yergin gives this example: ‘At the end of 2009, after a year’s worth of production, the world’s proved oil reserves were 1.5 trillion barrels, slightly more than were at the beginning of that year.’ In other words, despite a whole year’s worth of drilling at a rate of about 93 million barrels per day, the world’s total available known oil reserves actually grew, not shrank.
Nor is this plenitude likely to end any time soon. According to Yergin,
‘The world has produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least 5 trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible to count as proved plus probably reserves.’ Is the oil going to run out? Not in our life time. Not in our grandchildren’s, either.
Just what is it about ‘conventional wisdom’ that gets it so wrong about ‘peak energy’? For it’s not just ‘peak oil’ people are wrong about, but ‘peak gas’ too. Here, for example, is Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan as recently as 2003, confidently stating that the US is on the verge of running out of natural gas: ‘We are not apt to return to earlier periods of relative abundance and low prices any time soon.’
Just seven years later, however, thanks to shale, the US was producing more natural gas than Russia, and is currently sitting on nearly two Saudi Arabias’ worth of natural gas reserves. But Greenspan was hardly the first great man to fall into this trap. As Matt Ridley has noted, throughout history the ‘experts’ have been warning us that the key energy source of their day was on the verge of running out. In the 1970s, it was Jimmy Carter, channelling E. F. Schumacher, who warned of ‘peak oil’. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone who made dire prognostications about the coming coal crisis. And in 1922, President Warren Harding’s US Coal Commission – after consulting 500 experts over eleven months – declared:
Already the output of [natural] gas has begun to wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 21