Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  The IEA presumes that demand for oil will rise indefinitely, so the price of oil only gets higher after peak oil, but in technology nothing is forever. Set into the front doorstep of my house (and most other nineteenth-century houses in London) is an iron contrivance called a boot scraper. It is a device for removing the horseshit from your boots before coming into the house, and the iron blade is worn into a shallow curve by a halfcentury of use.

  Nineteenth-century cities depended on horses to move people and goods around. London in the 1890s had eleven thousand horse-drawn taxis and several thousand buses, each of which required twelve horses a day. Add all the private carriages and the tens of thousands of horse-drawn carts, wagons and drays delivering goods, and there were at least one hundred thousand horses on the streets of London every day—each producing an average of twenty pounds of manure.

  Two thousand tons of manure a day. There were flies everywhere, and if you didn’t shovel the manure up quickly, it dried up and blew into your eyes, hair, nose and clothes. As the cities grew, even more horses were needed and the problem grew steadily worse. In 1894 a Times writer estimated that in fifty years the streets of London would be buried under ten feet of manure.

  In fact, within thirty-five years, the streets of London were almost completely free of horses, and filled with automobiles instead. They created a different kind of pollution, but at least you didn’t step in it. The same fate is likely to overtake oil-fuelled vehicles in the next thirty-five years.

  The shift will be driven by concerns about foreign-exchange costs and energy independence, and, increasingly, by the need to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. It is starting with ever-tightening standards for fuel efficiency, which will be followed by the first mass-market generation of electric vehicles, due in the next two or three years. The coup de grâce will be delivered by third-generation biofuels, probably produced from algae that do not use valuable agricultural land and that are fully competitive with oil in price and energy content.

  We will never get back the eight wasted years of the Bush administration, and it may now be too late to avoid drastic climate change, but Barack Obama is clearly going to try. You do not appoint Steve Chu as your energy secretary, Carol Browner as your “climate tsarina,” and John Holdren as your chief scientific adviser if you intend to evade the issue. So American oil consumption is going to start falling quite fast, quite soon.

  The same is true elsewhere. Indeed, it is a safe bet that the demand for oil is going to fall faster than the supply over the next ten or fifteen years, even if we are already at or near peak oil. And if demand falls faster than supply, the price will collapse.

  Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets …

  Well, no, it is not a “safe bet.” It is a “known unknown,” one of Don Rumsfeld’s much-derided but very useful categories.

  The process of cutting oil demand begins with simple improvements in fuel efficiency. The Obama administration, for example, has issued regulations requiring an average of thirty-five miles per gallon across the new-car fleets of all the major US-based car producers by 2016, up from 21.5 miles per gallon at present. Since the total number of American vehicles is no longer expanding, this implies an ultimate drop of about 40 percent in the oil burned by U.S. cars. That will mean major cuts in U.S. oil imports and greenhouse-gas emissions—and this is before the electric vehicles and the “renewable fuel” vehicles hit the market. The game is afoot, and the outcome is not yet clear.

  14.

  CHINA

  There is a poem by G. K. Chesterton called “The Secret People” that begins (and ends) this way:

  Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;

  For we are the people of England that never have spoken yet.

  The people of China have not spoken yet, either. But if the “Old Hundred Names” finally did speak one day, I wonder what they would say to their leaders.

  August 24, 2006

  THE REVOLUTIONARY MYTH

  Arriving in Beijing on August 23 for his third visit to China in five years, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised the country’s Communist leaders to the skies for having rescued China from a “practically feudal” situation and for making it one of the world’s largest economies in less than half a century. It was an entirely predictable remark by the firebrand Venezuelan leader. It was also entirely wrong.

  According to Chavez, China’s emergence as a leading economic power is “an example for Western leaders and governments that claim capitalism is the only alternative. We’ve been manipulated to believe that the first man on the Moon was the most important event of the twentieth century. But no, much more important things happened, and one of the greatest events of the twentieth century was the Chinese revolution.”

  Back in the late 1980s, when mocking the few remaining Communist believers had become popular sport in the former Soviet Union, one of my favourite gambits was to point out that Russia would have done far better economically if the Communist revolution of 1917 had never happened. No matter how pessimistic your assumptions about the way that a non-Communist Russia would have developed, it simply couldn’t have done as badly as the Communists did.

  To prove your point, all you had to do was pick some other country that had been at about the same stage of industrial development as Russia just before the First World War—Italy was the most obvious candidate—and compare the outcomes since.

  Italy went through the Great Depression in the 1930s (which the Soviet Union escaped), and was on the losing side in the Second World War. Nobody would claim that post-1945 Italian administrations (all fifty-odd of them) have been models of good governance, and Italy is far poorer in natural resources than Russia. And yet by the late twentieth century Italians were four or five times richer than Russians, purely because they had avoided Communist rule. They were a lot freer, too.

  The Soviet Communists always compared the circumstances before the revolution (which were pretty dreadful) with the situation seventy years later, and gave “the Revolution” full credit for all the changes for the better—as if other Russians, using less violent and oppressive means, could never have changed the country for the better. Even in the late 1980s, they effectively claimed that it would still be like 1917 in Russia if the Communist revolution had not happened.

  So, here we are again, with the Chinese Communist regime taking credit for all the improvements in China since they won the civil war in 1949, and foreign leftists like Hugo Chavez holding out China as an example of what wonderful things can be accomplished under “socialism.” But what would China be like now if the Communists had not won power in 1949? Much richer, much freer and not much less equal, either.

  The right comparison is not between China in 1949 and China now. It is between China’s economic progress since 1949 and that achieved by its neighbours that were in a roughly similar state of development at that time. The two closest parallels are South Korea and the “other China,” Taiwan. Both had been Japanese colonies for decades before 1945, so they were a bit ahead of the mainland—but then Taiwan’s population grew overnight by almost 40 percent in 1949, as nationalist refugees who had fought the Communist takeover of China flooded in, and Korea was devastated by the war of 1950–53.

  Both Taiwan and South Korea were ruled for the next three decades by oppressive and ruthless military regimes. Neither country adopted raw free-market capitalism—the state protected infant industries and nourished them with low-interest capital—but at least they weren’t tied to Marxist economics. By the 1980s, both countries had achieved economic takeoff, and democracy came soon afterwards.

  Meanwhile China had the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and various other man-made disasters, which meant that the per capita income did not even double between 1949 and 1979 (although misery was redistributed on a more equal basis). Then under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, China finally abandoned “socialist” economics and adopted the same style of state-assisted capitalism that its neigh
bours had been practicing for the past thirty years—at which point, finally, its economy began to grow significantly.

  Today, the average Chinese income is about one-fifth of that in South Korea or Taiwan: slowly, they are starting to catch up. There is more freedom in China now, too, though the state is still above the law. There is still no democracy, of course. The Party constantly exhorts the people to be grateful for all that it has accomplished on their behalf, but they would probably have been much better off if it had never existed.

  Chavez must know all this, and presumably thinks that it just doesn’t matter: his socialist project is fuelled by oil revenues, so he doesn’t have to observe the rules of normal economics. But he does need allies against the wrath of the United States, so he says the right things to his hosts, the Communist rulers of China. They may be closet capitalists these days, but if they don’t have the myth that the revolution was beneficial, how can they justify their own monopoly of power?

  Well, they can’t, actually.

  When it comes to ultra-ambitious projects of social engineering, the Chinese People’s Republic has no equal. Mao’s attempt to erase an entire culture during the Cultural Revolution left the Nazi dream of an Aryan master race and the Russian Communists’ dream of New Soviet man in the shade. Only the Khmer Rouge even came close to Mao’s ambitions, and they were acting on a very small stage. But the biggest social engineering project ever has left few visible bloodstains. It is the one-child policy that Deng Xiaoping imposed on China in 1979.

  October 19, 2007

  HOW MANY CHINESE ARE ENOUGH?

  Even before the seventeenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party began last week in Beijing it was clear that at least one policy was not going to change: the proscription against more than one child per family. “Because China has worked hard over the last thirty years, we have four hundred million fewer people,” said Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, earlier this year.

  In the eyes of the policy’s supporters, the fact that China has only 1.3 billion people now justifies all the abuses of human rights that were committed to enforce it. True, a few women (or a few million women) were dragged off to have forced abortions in the bad old days, but now it’s much more civilized. Besides, the end justifies the means, doesn’t it?

  Not having 1.7 billion people now (and not having over 2 billion in twenty years) is clearly a desirable outcome for China. Even with decades of high-speed economic growth there is a limit to how many people China can feed and clothe and house. But did the regime really have to impose such a draconian birth-control policy in order to stay within that limit?

  The doubters point out that the Chinese government’s “soft” birth-control policy in the 1970s—encouraging later marriage, fewer births and longer birth intervals—brought the total fertility rate (that is, lifetime babies per woman) down from 5.7 in 1970 to 2.9 by 1979. That is one of the fastest drops in the birth rate seen anywhere at any time—and it happened before the “hard” one-child policy was introduced in 1980.

  Critics also point to the Indian experience, where an early experiment with enforced birth-control measures in the 1970s created such a backlash that nobody has dared to suggest it since—and yet, they argue, India’s birth rate plummeted over the subsequent generation. From a total fertility rate of 6.3 in 1960, it has fallen to only 2.8 this year. The “demographic transition” from high birth-rate, high death-rate societies to longer-lived communities with lower birth rates still works its magic eventually. But it does take its time.

  Compulsion does make a difference. India and China both started the 1960s with very similar fertility rates, and at that time China’s population (648 million) was much bigger than India’s (433 million). By 1980, China’s fertility rate was already down (without compulsion) to the rate that prevails in India today; with compulsion, it has fallen even further, to little more than half the current Indian fertility rate. So China’s population will level off at around 1.4 billion by 2020, while India’s will go on growing to at least 1.7 billion.

  How much difference does that make in practice? A lot. If China had taken India’s approach, its population would probably reach two billion before it stopped growing. For every two Chinese in the country there would have been three. That could easily be the margin between success and disaster.

  China’s economic miracle (10 percent growth for the past two decades) skates permanently along the edge of environmental calamity. Just breathing the air in Beijing is the equivalent of smoking twenty cigarettes every day. The country has lost almost 7 percent of its farmland to development in the past ten years, and dozens of cities are experiencing severe water shortages. It’s bad enough with the present population of 1.3 billion. What would it have been like without the one-child policy?

  In many parts of the world it is politically unacceptable to suggest that the sheer number of people can be a problem. Population control is startlingly absent, for example, from discussions about how to minimize climate change. This is partly due to concerns about the religious sensibilities of some people, and partly because of the human-rights issues that it raises.

  In addition to the human-rights abuses implicit in the one-child policy, there are grave demographic implications. One is the shrinking number of people in the working-age population who have to provide for a relatively large aged and retired population. Another, specific to societies where sons are seen as far more desirable than daughters, is a wave of selective abortions and female infanticide.

  There have been relaxations in the one-child policy over the years—ethnic minorities are largely exempt from the rules, and rural families whose first child is female are allowed a second try—but almost two-thirds of Chinese families really do have only one child. And the fact that the government is determined to retain the policy suggests that it intends to bring the population down in the longer run, whatever the collateral social damage.

  Most ecologists would say that China is well beyond its long-term “carrying capacity,” even with its present population. Maybe the government is actually listening to them. Maybe it also knows that climate change will not be kind to China. There are things worse than a one-child policy. Famine, social disintegration and civil war, for example.

  It’s not entirely true that the price of this achievement was paid only by girls who were never born. There were also a great many boys who were not born. I don’t belong to the “every sperm is sacred” brigade, so I don’t know how to calculate what kind of loss this is. Should we mourn the five or ten million Canadian babies who were not born in the past fifty years because the birth rate fell precipitously after the 1950s? Just the same, there was a particular burden borne by the girls, especially in rural areas in the early years of the one-child policy, when the female babies were often born and then killed. And now there is another kind of price to be paid.

  December 1, 2006

  CHINA’S SURPLUS BOYS

  We all know about the problem of China’s missing girls: the tens of millions of female babies who were selectively aborted after their sex was determined by ultrasound, or were born and then just allowed to die, as families seeking sons took drastic measures to cope with the one-child-per-family rule. We pay less attention to the problem of the surplus boys, but it is very real.

  By 2020, China will have about forty million more men of marriageable age than it has women for them to marry, and this is not just a social problem. It is a potentially catastrophic political problem as well. No sane government would want to rule over a country where there are forty million unattached males between the ages of twenty and forty rattling around with nobody to go home to in the evenings. This is a recipe for riots, even revolution. The solution? If China has not made enough girls, it will have to import them.

  China is not a country that welcomes immigration for obvious demographic reasons but also for deeply rooted cultural reasons. There is great pride in the long history
and the cultural and even racial homogeneity of the Han Chinese population, which often verges on a polite form of racism. Foreign brides often have a hard time fitting into Chinese families who are less than delighted by their son’s choice. But China as a whole no longer has a choice in the matter.

  There are already tens of millions of Chinese men condemned to lives of loneliness and celibacy, or at best furtive visits to prostitutes. They live in an economy that is rapidly growing richer, and out there, in the poorer countries of Asia, are millions of young women who would be happy to ease their loneliness and share their prosperity. The solution is obvious, and no government could stop it. No sane government would want to.

  The implications of this impending huge influx of foreign brides are very large. China has never seen immigration on this scale before, and it is bound to resist the big cultural changes that come with it. Tens of millions of the next generation of children born in China will have foreign mothers and relatives abroad who expect to be visited or to come and visit once in a while. There will be some personal tragedies and a great deal of happiness, and, at the end of it all, China will be a changed place.

  Changed for the better, for the most part. It’s just a pity about all those Chinese girls, aborted, killed as infants or allowed to die of neglect, who won’t be around to see it.

  Here’s an encouraging note, though. After eight years of really worrisome confrontation, relations between the People’s Republic and Taiwan are on the mend.

  November 4, 2008

  TAIWAN AND CHINA: PORCUPINES ON A FIRST DATE

  Mating is a notoriously tricky business for porcupines, but the first date is an especially awkward transaction. Likewise for prickly customers like China and Taiwan: when a high-level Chinese delegation arrived in Taiwan on Monday for landmark talks on closer relations, the Taiwan police prevented people on the roads into Taipei from waving Taiwan flags in order not to hurt the visitors’ feelings.