Should there be a new way of living for the top one billion? – The iPat edition

Malthus cautioned law makers on the effects of...
T. Robert Malthus. Image via Wikipedia

Andrew Revkin asks on his blog, Dot Earth, ‘Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the “top billion”?’

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.”

Should there be a new way of living for the top one billion?

Andrew Revkin asks on his blog, Dot Earth:

“Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the ‘top billion’?”

He notes:

There’s a set of Millennium Development Goals for the poorest of the poor — a cohort of humanity sometimes described as the “ bottom billion.”

But, as yet, there’s no set of such goals for those who are already living lives that many analysts say are consuming resources at a pace well beyond the planet’s carrying capacity…

There are plenty who contend that unrestrained pursuit of prosperity is a prerequisite for a mix of environmental care and technological advancement that will continue to improve the state of the planet. But there’s self interest in an examination of how much is enough. Some analysts have found, for example, that diseases accompanying affluence exact a toll in lost years of human lives that is not far behind the losses from diseases of poverty. And then there’s the issue of what’s being pursued — the good life as defined in Vegas or by Plato.

My answer:

There’s a cute saying, “Live simply so that others can simply live.” It’s complete hokum. It’s not that simple because it’s not a zero-sum equation. (To paraphrase P. J. O’Rourke) Life is not a pizza, if I eat two pieces you don’t have to eat the Dominos’ box.

Wealth is not a pizza. If I eat too many slices, you don't have to eat the Dominos' box. (Creative Commons License photo credit: Adam Kuban)

According to Charles Kenny at Foreign Policy magazine, “[I]n 1990, roughly half the global population lived on less than $1 a day; by 2007, the proportion had shrunk to 28 percent — and it will be lower still by the close of 2010.” This is not despite the way the top billion live but because of the way the top one billion live. Without the consumption of goods and services by the T1B there would not be demand for the goods the bottom one billion produce.

To the point about disease, (again according to Charles Kenny) “The overwhelming global picture is of better health: From 2000 to 2008, child mortality dropped more than 17 percent, and the average person added another two years to his or her life expectancy, now just one shy of the biblical standard of three score and 10.”

“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” – Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830

In other words, for the bottom one billion to continue to be better off, the top one billion need to continue living as they have.

P. J. again:

We have to kill ideas like the wealth gap. The world doesn’t need to be thinking about the wealth gap; the world needs to be thinking about wealth. Wealth is good. Everybody knows that about his own wealth. Wealth improves your life; it improves your family’s life. You invest in wise and worthwhile things, and you help your friends and neighbors. Your life would get better if you got rich, and the lives of all the people around you would get better if you got rich. Your wealth is good. So why isn’t everybody else’s wealth good, too? I don’t get it. Wealth is good when a lot of people have it, and wealth is good when just a few people have it. And that is because money is a tool, nothing more. I mean, you can’t eat money, you can’t sleep with it, you can’t wear it as underwear very comfortably. And wealth, accumulation of money, is a bunch of tools. Now when one person, a carpenter for instance, has a bunch of tools, we don’t say to him, “You have too many tools. You should give some of your saws and drills and chisels to the guy who is cooking the omelets.” We don’t try to close the tool gap. – P. J. O’Rourke

Your thoughts, am I off base?

Gapminder

If you’ve not discovered Gapminder, try it. It’s amazing. It shows demographic trends. Graphically.


Click here and see how life expectancy at birth and number of children born per woman changes.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Here, Hans Rosling explains his reasons for developing Gapminder and how it helps to debunk myths about the developed and developing world. From TED Talks 2006.

Book Review: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

Let me recommend a startling book to you, because whether you read a book a week or you haven’t picked one up since you discovered the wonders of the internet, this one deserves your attention. The book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (438 pages) written by Matt Ridley and published by HarperCollins ($26.99). Ridley, a Brit, used to write for the Economist magazine and knows how to make abstract concepts accessible.

In this book Ridley challenges the precepts of most environmentalists. He argues that the less independent and less self-sufficient we become and the more we rely on others (people, companies, nations) for our needs, the better off we (humans, plants, animals, land, ecosystems) all are, and will be, forever. He says we are living better, living longer, and the planet is healthier because of our interdependence.

Arguing that life is improving, for us and earth’s biomes, is a tough sell. I know this from experience. Last April, I wrote a post (Happy 40th Anniversary Earth Day) about what has happened in the forty years since the first Earth Day; how we now have less pollution, more food, and fewer people in abject poverty. The post has a poll about whether the reader was now more optimistic, more pessimistic, or ambivalent about the future. Overwhelmingly, people were (and apparently are) pessimistic about the future of the earth. Mind you, this is a tiny sample and completely non-scientific, still I suspect it is pretty close to representative of the population. In fact, a 2010 CBS News poll reveals 57% of Americans believe the world’s environment will deteriorate further in a generation.

The reason circumstances have improved for us and our world is that we’ve moved from being hunter-gatherers needing lots of land, to being specialists needing much less land. And the big reason for this specialization was the invention of exchanging one thing for a different thing. No other animal on earth trades one thing for something else with an unrelated animal. Trade is quite different from reciprocity, which is “you scratch my back, then I’ll scratch your back.” Trade involves exchanging things that are different at the same time. And trade has allowed all who do it to specialize and be better off. You can now trade things you know how to make for things that you don’t know how to make or cannot make.

Trading meant that we no longer had to be good at a lot of skills; we only needed to do one thing. Of course, by doing only one thing we need to rely on others to do those other things. Ridley argues that self sufficiency is poverty and that interdependence is a good thing. “In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is…suppose your local wheat farmer tells you that last year’s rains means he will have to cut his flour delivery in half. You will have to go hungry.” Instead, you benefit from a global marketplace, “in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations.”

Because he is a libertarian, Ridley is predisposed to look favorably on commerce. He believes in small government and free markets of goods and services with few rules. Critics pounce on this and point out when he was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, his bank’s policies of high-risk lending and high risk borrowing contributed to the economic bubble that caused the major recession that much of the world is still dealing with. It’s a fair point: How can he be a rational optimist if he participated in, what in hindsight was, irrational exuberance?

I found Ridley’s ideas and arguments compelling. Trade and commerce make everyone richer, as long as someone is willing to pay for a service there is no such thing as unproductive work, and that in a generation we will be richer still and the earth in better shape. “The rational optimist invites you to stand back and look at your species differently,” writes Ridley in his book, “to see the grand enterprise of humanity that has progressed–with frequent setbacks–for 100,000 years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether the enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run.”

I dare you to be rationally optimistic.

Postcards from 1938-1939

In 1938, Walter C. Lowdermilk, Vice-Director of the Soil Conservation Service, was dispatched by then Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, on a world tour to learn of soil conservation successes and failures. Lowdermilk called the enterprise, “agricultural archaeology.” Lowdermilk packed the family Buick with provisions and his wife, son and daughter, niece, and his own Passepartout.

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Walter C. Lowdermilk taking movie of a market scene in North Africa, possibly Tunisia.
103-33 Holland
Farmer in pre-WW II Holland unloading what look to be cantaloupes.
128-15 Iraq
Wife and niece smile for the camera. The Lowdermilks brought rain to some normally parched areas. This is in Iraq.
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WC Lowdermilk with a shepherd in Iraq.

‘Environmentalism’ doesn’t need to address climate change

Dave Roberts wonders on Grist.org (motto: “A beacon in the smog”), “Can we survive in conditions [caused by global warming] that humanity has literally never faced?”

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?”


Letter to UC Berkeley’s “Daily Californian”

Here’s a letter I sent off to the Daily Californian:

On the Daily Californian’s opinion page on July 26, 2010 (Berkeley-BP Deal Only Looks Worse Post-Spill), Miguel Altieri writes, “This Berkeley-BP deal was signed without wide consultation with the faculty and despite warnings from a great number of faculty…”

At the nub of it, his fundamental complaint appears to be the administration’s exclusion of staff from the decision process. Of course he raises a number of other distracting arguments such as excess nitrogen in the gulf caused by fertilizing crops, BP’s poor safety and environmental record, the downside of biofuels, and the fact that the administration accepted lucre from an energy company for research to “find new, more sustainable energy technologies.”

Whether faculty input provides more politically correct donors is arguable and of no concern to me. Rather, my interest is in the subtext of the op-ed: that funding sources affect the research process. Funders can and do try to inflict their biases into studies. Whether the funder is BP or an environmental group, there is always a possibility that the funder will try to influence the findings. I personally know a forester contracted by the Sierra Club to do research regarding the (then) proposed Sequoia National Monument. When preliminary findings did not support the Sierra Club’s preferred results, the project was discontinued. I know another researcher contracted by the National Audubon Society; when his preliminary findings did not support their bias, they confiscated his camera and halted the study.

The faculty, student body, and the university’s administration recognize that the state’s funding of the university’s research needs will only continue to decrease, at least in the near term. Focusing on flaws in funding sources does not solve that problem. Rather, focusing on firewalling research from biases in design, implementation, and results, is a discussion worth having.

Norm Benson
Lower Lake, CA

UPDATE (3 August 2010):

I have been contacted by the Daily Californian. They will “strongly consider publishing” my response. Stay tuned…