Michael Schesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, among other things, wrote,

“Perhaps humanity and the Earth can survive with 9 billion people in 2050, but what type of world will that be?”

I answer:

It’s a misanthropic question framed as one of great concern for the lives of the yet unborn, animal and plant.

By all indications the world of 2050 will be wealthier, happier, better fed (using less acreage than is used to grow food today), less violent, more interconnected, and more urban than today. Because it will be more urban and therefore denser, it will use less land.

I know, I know, I’m naive. Edward Abbey wrote, “[W]e can see that the religion of endless growth–like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason–is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease…Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

People are less than worthless, in Abbey’s curmudgeonly view, they are an invading virus.

Schesinger’s pessimistic assessment of the world of 2050 apparently mirrors Abbey’s, Lester Brown’s, Tertullian’s, Thomas Malthus’s, Paul Ehrlich’s and others. The world careens toward a Tertullian/Malthusian catastrophe. Brothers and sisters the end is near and we stand upon banana peels between vipers and the abyss. We stand on the brink of droughts and mass starvation; forests reduced to stumps, no oil, foul air, frozen earth [scratch that frozen bit, put in scorched due to global warming instead] and polluted water. The high prophet of 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich summed it up for us: “The battle to feed all 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.” Why? Ehrlich sprinkled scientific dust on his Malthusian catastrophe with what is now called the IPAT formula: I = P × A × T (where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology). There you have with mathematical clarity, we’re the seven hundred pound gorilla playing with china plates.

Yet, that’s the wrong way to look at it; it’s not a zero-sum game.

You may have noticed Ehrlich miscalculated by 40 years and counting. Humans are still here. The world’s population has almost doubled since his prediction, yet things are better. Instead of cleaning off every whit of resource and the world being poorer, sicker, and hungrier, we find that since 1970: we are three times richer (in real terms), the percentage of people in abject poverty has dropped by over two-thirds, a greater percentage of people are better fed, the average person in a developing country eats more, the world’s forests cover 98% of what they did in 1970, and the known oil reserves have nearly doubled.

Why? Because, IPAT is Malthus dressed up as mathematical empiricism and empirical evidence points otherwise. For instance, the development of agriculture reduced the acreage needed to support one person thereby freeing up land for wildlife. The development of oil meant kerosene lighting which meant that whales were preserved and not hunted to extinction. The use of petroleum products to power plows and conveyances freed up 1/3 of agricultural acreage needed to feed the animals so that it could be available for wildlife. Technological advances have generally meant lowered impact on land not more.

IPAT’s pseudo-formula leaves out a resource that weighs heavily in earth’s favor and ours: the ingenuity of humans to solve problems is inexhaustible.

I suspect I won’t change anyone’s mind here. As the late Julian Simon said, “First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.”

Malthusian die-hards, cheer up. I don’t want to completely pee on your parade. Things may yet grow worse. As Bullwinkle J. Moose used to say, “This time for sure.”

Oh I think so. In fact,our species have faced such occurrences.  Notable warm periods occurred from 230 B.C.E. to C.E. 140 and C.E. 640 to 760 (Report: “Two millennia of North Atlantic seasonality and implications for Norse colonies”). During the middle Holocene, “the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0°C warmer than modern. Yes, “2.5° to 7.0°” CENTIGRADE warmer than today (source: “Holocene Treeline History and Climate Change Across Northern Eurasia”). Overall, mankind has fared much better when the earth has been warmer and wetter than it has when it was colder and drier. Besides, we’re now just departing the “Little Ice Age.”

So, I’m with Matt Ridley who asks you to “Ask yourself this: if the heat of 7,000 years ago, so widespread around the globe and so pronounced in the far north, did not cause planetary catastrophe, why should the lesser warmth of this century?”

I didn’t see President Obama’s live televised remarks to the nation on the BP oil spill but watched it online. He apparently chose not to use the speech I drafted, “Our Energy Future,” for his text. More’s the pity. He chose another path and the punditocracy are weighing in on how he said it and what he said or, more likely, didn’t say. It was a sober speech, part elegy and part jeremiad. I agreed with much of what he said: stanch the spill, help the Gulf Coast clean up and get back on its feet, investigate the blowout’s cause, tighten the regulatory oversight, and hold BP accountable.

Then our President went on set out his vision, “Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil… Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own (energy) destiny.”

It’s a nice vision, full of gumdrop trees and candy kisses where the air will be so pure from our clean energy that we would have to smoke six packs of cigarettes each day to remember what the air used to be like. In the oil-free America the air will be so clean that the sun will seem like it’s gotten a new lease on life, it will be so bright. That is, if we can see the sun for all of the photovoltaic panels that we will need to power our electric cars, electric SUVs, and electric pickup trucks; electric eighteen-wheeler trucks, electric trains, electric motorcycles and scooters, electric boats and ships, and electric planes and jets. You see, our transportation industry runs on oil and if we want to replace the high-density energy of petroleum with wind or solar we’re going to need a LOT of space.

So, instead of gumdrop trees where birds flit about, imagine 32,150 square miles of wind turbines that kill eagles and interrupt bird migrations. That is what is needed to meet California’s present electricity needs, which are in the neighborhood of 97,000 megawatts. Or, instead of candy-cane cactus, imagine 5,770 square miles of solar photovoltaic panels in the Mojave Desert (about 20% of the Mojave) disrupting habitats of endangered plants and animals. Imagine the new power transmission lines to deliver the electricity. Granted, to some extent, this is “inside-the-box thinking;” some PV panels can be put on rooftops so that not all the displacement would be on undeveloped land (One source I checked had put 27 PV panels on his average sized house in sun-rich Austin, TX. The panels produced about one-third of a typical family’s electricity use.).

Now imagine where those “guilt-free” “clean-energy” machines will be manufactured. If you said, “the United States of America,” thanks for playing; you may sit down. You’re wrong. Try China. So instead of getting our fossil fuel from countries such as Canada and Mexico (only 11% of our domestic oil supply comes from OPEC), we will get our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines from China instead. Wind turbines, photovoltaics, and electric car batteries need rare-earth metals (such as lanthanum and neodymium) and China has a near monopoly on rare-earth mining. America’s one rare-earth mine closed in 2002. It’s not that rare-earth metals are terribly rare, it’s that mining for them leaves radioactive waste. China’s state-run economy won’t care about such concerns. It will ignore the short-term environmental consequences to lock up the market and get the (low-paying) jobs for growing its middle class.

So-called clean and green energy carries considerable downsides, just as fossil fuel does. Since all actions have consequences, costs and benefits have to be assayed. As that great Roman philosopher, Anonymous, once observed, “Res ea non est quae prandium gratuitum aquet.”

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are. We’re going away. Pack your sh*t folks…The planet will be here and we’ll be long gone, just another failed mutation.” – George Carlin

Happy 40th Earth Day Everyone!

As I’ve written before, on April 22, 1970, I attended one of the first Earth Day celebrations (as did 20 million others that day). The one I went to was held at Santa Monica City College.

In those days, most of us in the environmental movement worried about the population bomb exhausting our resources and causing global famine; and we feared air pollution causing another ice age through global cooling. Obviously, we hadn’t considered the population bomb causing global warming through our exhalations and farts. Little did we know.

I had a copy of The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich in my back pocket back then, before the world wide web and cell phones. Many doomsayers proclaimed Malthus—an eighteenth century economist who argued that human population growing exponentially would quickly outstrip crop yields which grew arithmetically—was a Pollyanna. Like Malthus, Ehrlich was convinced that the world’s exponential population growth would outstrip the earth’s ability to cope and we’d devour everything on earth like locusts. We needed to curb out population NOW or humankind would implode like the locust. We’d be standing on banana peels over our graves if there were any bananas to be found, the skyrocketing population had already eaten them.

Indeed the world’s population has almost doubled, yet instead of cleaning off every whit of resource and the world being poorer, sicker, and hungrier, we find that since 1970: we are three times richer (in real terms), the percentage of people in abject poverty has dropped by over two-thirds, a greater percentage of people are better fed, the average person in a developing country eats more, the world’s forests cover 99 98% of what they did in 1970, and the known oil reserves have nearly doubled.

Here’s a comparison of where we were in 1970 and where we are today:

The world did not change the way Ehrlich, Malthus, and others thought it would. So the environmental raison d’être has changed. Population still gets flung about but now it’s global warming that’s being shouted by knowledgeable experts. We need to curb our pollution population greenhouse gases NOW or humankind will freeze to death starve to death, well I’m not sure but trust me, the Malthusian prophets of doom will continue to bang their pots and rend their clothing. Things may yet grow worse, as Bullwinkle J. Moose used to say, “This time for sure.”

The world will change over the next 40 years, tell me are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the state of the world’s environment for those years?

For more on Earth Day, I recommend an article in the New York Times by John Tierney,  For Earth Day, 7 New Rules to Live By and  “Earth Day Turns 40″ on Reason.com by Ronald Bailey