Despite my lengthy absence from these august pages, I have not forgotten the challenge I laid at my own feet. My task was to examine the various problems we face (or don't, as the case may be) with the environment, and to outline a course of action to deal with them.
I was able to do some reading on the matter last month, and the problems boil down to several claims from the environmentalists:
- Pollution
- Resource Depletion
- Loss of Biodiversity/Species Extinction
- Overpopulation/Famine
- Global Warming
Here, I will deal with two of them, and the rest will follow shortly.
Resource Depletion and Overpopulation/Famine have declined in importance, even amongst environmentalists over the last couple decades in large part because they have proven to be untrue. Back in the early seventies the Club of Rome and people like Paul Ehrlich famously predicted famine, running out of natural resources and generally the end of the world. They predicted that it would have happened by now. That this has not come to pass (though I forgot to check Drudge this morning, it might have happened. Nope, I checked and the world hasn't ended) should have chastened them. But Ehrlich among others is still selling his heady brand of doom.
The most recent demographics indicate that the world population will peak somewhere around mid century at about 8 billion people, and thereafter begin to decline. The low end UN projection in fact predicts a peak at less than 8 billion before 2040, and then decline. Since this is only about a 25% percent increase, it seems unlikely that this will cause great chaos in the coming decades. Even without GM foods, recent advances in agriculture (at least in the wealthier nations, though slowly spreading) seem adequate to handle this increase.
Given that there is likely going to be enough food, and that in the last couple centuries most if not all famines have had political causes (Ukraine, China, Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia) rather than purely environmental ones, I think it is safe to say that this is really not an issue we need to worry about, at least on the big scale.
For the other, resource depletion, we face a similar non-crisis. Most of the projections that led to the Club of Rome and others to declare that we would run out of x resource in y years were based on known reserves of x and current consumption rates. The fundamental problem with these projections is that they are based on known reserves, or worse on proven reserves. This is akin to being hungry and in a large warehouse with a flashlight. You shine the beam around, and see food. You feverishly calculate that you will run out of the food you see in front of you in three days. Certain starvation! Of course, as you eat the food in front of you, you can shine the flashlight around to look for more food. Of course, you might have to walk further to get it, or climb up the shelves, but it is there.
So it goes with minerals and petroleum and other things we dig out of the ground. Despite increasing consumption, proven reserves of every commodity metal are larger than they were when the Club of Rome first published its predictions. Also, prices for most of these are lower - indicating that they are trending less rather than more scarce. The Earth is a very, very big place, and we inhabit only the surface. There is little likelihood that we will ever "exhaust" the Earth of resources. (And if it ever seemed likely that we were about to, there are always asteroids...)
There are a couple things that we can learn here. One, always take doomsday scenarios with a grain of salt. Don't ignore them, but certainly don't begin screaming that the sky is falling. Two, to the extent that these problems ever were problems, technology was the solution. Better agricultural technology has vastly increased our ability to grow food. The Green revolution was happening at the same time that Ehrlich was prophesying doom. The new revolution in GM foods promises to similarly increase our ability to produce sustenance for the teeming hordes. A side benefit of these new techniques is that the land needed for farming is actually reduced - which means that where the new style farming is adopted, there is less pressure on marginally arable land, which means less desertification or encroachment on rainforests. In the United States, there is more forestland east of the Mississippi than at any time since the early 1800s.
A primary reason that population is expected to begin falling is that generally speaking, the wealthier a nation it is, the less children its citizens will have. Europe and Japan are facing a demographic crisis already as their birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. And large areas of east Asia have apparently crossed the line into lowered fertility rates. Of course, the draconian policies of the Chinese communist government have played a role here as well. If we continue to get wealthier, the population will eventually decline. Though this may cause other problems
The same is true of mining. New technology means that we can affordably (profitably) get at resources that would have been completely unfeasible twenty years ago. So, reserves are larger. And the new methods are almost universally less damaging to the environment. The oil drilling that was proposed in the Alaskan ANWR reserve would have tapped the oil of a region the size of South Carolina from a facility no larger than Dulles Airport outside Washington. Strip mining is becoming a thing of the past, and in general things are getting better. And it is wealth and technology that is making them so.
So, for these two issues, I hereby declare them to be non-issues, and needing no corrective action of any kind.
In the next few days, I will tackle the other issues. Stay tuned.
on
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