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There are
plenty of potential sources of concern when it comes to the
environment. We are polluting the air we breathe and the water
we drink; we are depleting the oceans of fish; we are punching
holes in the ozone layer; we are warming the climate to
dangerous levels—and all of these problems, we are given to
believe, are only getting worse.
Taken together, these
worries, along with the ones discussed in more detail above,
make up what Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg referred to as
The Litany in his controversial(1)
2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg
plumbs the available data and the environmentalists’ arguments
on each of these issues and discovers, to his surprise, that
things are not as bad as they are made out to be. Like forest
cover, air and water quality are generally improving in the
developed world, and have been for decades. The ozone problem
had a fairly simple and affordable solution which has been
implemented. As for the climate issue, even setting aside the
serious uncertainties contained in computer models, it will be
much easier for us to adapt to future warming than to try,
largely in vain, to prevent it. Our trillions of dollars,
Lomborg emphasizes, would be far better spent dealing with more
pressing problems like poverty in the developing world—and, he
adds, helping the world’s poor climb out of poverty would have
the additional benefit of allowing them the relative luxury of
caring about and improving the state of their forests and the
quality of their air.
We need not choose
between improving the environment and alleviating world poverty,
for the two categories of problems stem from the same kinds of
causes. It is inadequately secure property rights and
protectionist trade policies that keep the world’s poor from
improving their lot; it is the absence of adequate property
rights that threatens the ocean’s fisheries; it is irrational
government policies that give polluters the right to pollute and
forbid those whose property is polluted from seeking damages; it
is government subsidies that lead to the wasteful use of water
and other resources. We don’t often hear it in the media, but
the solution to global poverty and to the environmental problems
that do exist is one and the same: greater economic freedom.
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1. Readers who are curious
about this controversy are invited to visit
www.greenspirit.com to see the debate
between Lomborg and Scientific American,
and decide for themselves which party is trying
to clarify the issues and which is trying to
muddy the waters. |
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BELIEF # 10: Resources are limited |
January 28, 2007 |
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Are we in
imminent danger of running out of precious resources? We all
know of places where clean drinking water is in short supply and
others where forests are being cleared to make way for cattle.
Hitting closer to home, the surge in oil prices in recent years
seems to signal that our supply of black gold is no longer
sufficient to meet demand. Should we be worried?
Of these three resources—water,
trees, and oil—that often top the lists of concerned
conservationists, running out of water would be the most
disastrous for humanity. Fortunately, we will never even come
close to doing so. Not only is water a renewable resource, we
have way more of it than we could ever use. Now, most of it is
in the world’s oceans, and this water is not drinkable, but we
have the technology to make it so: it’s called desalination. The
main reason we do not desalinate more of the ocean’s water is
because we don’t need to; by and large, supplies of fresh water
are sufficient. It’s true that some people do not have enough
clean drinking water, but this is either due to wasteful water
use (subsidized by irrational government policies) or to the
fact that they are too poor to desalinate or import water.
Poverty itself also being largely a direct effect of irrational
government policies, the solution to any local water woes is
better government—and as a wise man once observed, “that
government is best which governs least.”(1)
Trees
are also a renewable resource, and contrary to popular belief,
we are not running out of forest cover. It is decreasing in some
developing countries, which may be cause for some concern, but
it is also increasing in the developed world. Overall, if we
were starting to run out of trees, the market (to the extent
that it is allowed to function freely) would signal us to start
planting more by making wood more expensive, and therefore more
profitable to grow.
Much the same is true for
oil, even though this resource is not renewable—at least not in
a human time frame. Price signals nonetheless have the effect of
encouraging (or not) the further exploration and development of
oil fields. We still have decades of proven resources, and
whenever our supplies tighten, for whatever reason, we go out
and find more. There is obviously a limit to how long we can do
this, but will we hit that limit in 30 years or 30 decades? We
won’t know until we do, but even if we begin to approach that
limit sooner rather than later, or if current political
instability in oil-producing countries persists for too long,
the sustained rise in prices will make other forms of energy
relatively more affordable, and will also spur technological
development that will make them more affordable still. We have
more energy than we could ever possibly use, in the form of
other fossil fuels like coal and ultimately in the form of
sunlight. As with sea water, the main reason we don’t use more
of it is because we don’t yet need to.
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1. Versions of this quotation are variously
attributed to Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Paine,
and Thomas Jefferson. |
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BELIEF # 09: It’s a small world |
January 28, 2007 |
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We have only one planet, it’s true, and there are ever more of
us crowding onto its surface. With six billion humans and
counting, surely we must be running out of land—if not on
which to live, then on which to grow the enormous amounts of
food required to feed us all. As evidence, we are reminded of
the large swaths of the planet mired in poverty, a tragedy that
is used to justify any number of illiberal policies, from Maoist
one-child population control laws to Stalinist food rationing
meant to stretch out our meagre and dwindling resources.
Thankfully, these fears
are unjustified. The advent and improvement of air travel and
modern communications technologies have certainly made the
planet seem smaller—we can zip to the Far East in a matter of
hours, or send electronic documents anywhere in the world in a
matter of seconds—but it’s still the same gigantic ball of
rock it has always been. The Earth is really staggeringly large;
too large, in fact, to grasp intuitively. Of course, six billion
is also too large a number to grasp intuitively. Only
mathematics can help us understand if we are truly running out
of space.
Our planet has a surface
area of approximately 510 million square kilometres, of which
just under 30% (149 million sq. km) is land area. How many
people can the Earth support? According to
Scientific American, “With current farming techniques, a
little less than half an acre can grow enough food to feed one
person.” One square kilometre contains roughly 247 acres, and so
can feed approximately 500 people. If all of the land on Earth
were suitable for food production, our planet could therefore
support a population of some 73.5 billion people (149 million
times 500). Of course, not all land is suitable for agriculture,
but thankfully we don’t need it to be. Our current population of
six billion could be fed on just 12 million square kilometres of
agricultural land, an area slightly larger than the United
States. Even at nine billion people (the downwardly-revised
population peak we are set to hit by 2050)(1),
we would only need 18 million square kilometres, representing
just 12% of the land on Earth, or an area about the size of
Russia. Furthermore, this figure assumes unrealistically that no
further improvements in farming techniques will be invented over
the next five decades.
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1. Although it is true that
there are more of us than ever,
the 2004 UN projections show that population
growth is slowing and total population is on
course to top out at around nine billion by mid-century,
far fewer than previously thought. |
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