By Tsvi Bisk.
Prophets of doom are everywhere. We are headed for global catastrophe: climate change,population growth, shortages of water, deforestation,food shortages, and the end of oil are all converging to destroy the planet and modern human civilization as we have known it! We must stop economic growth in order to “save the planet” and survive as a species!
There are even calls to “de-develop.” James Lovelock (of Gaia fame) has said, “The whole idea of sustainable development is wrongheaded. We should be thinking about sustainable retreat.
”Environmental activist George Monbiot says that the campaign against climate change “is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity; not for more freedom but for less… It is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
”We must forgo our growth fetish and addiction to unfettered consumerism and embrace the halcyon simplicity of years gone by, in his view. Monbiot says this policy must be achieved by “political restraint”—i.e., enforced by the police power of the state; in effect criminalizing innovation and creativity.
American consumer capitalism is claimed to be a luxury that the Earth’s ecosystem cannot sustain. We are already at one-and-a-half times the carrying capacity of the planet, and the rate of environmental degradation is increasing. We must change the habits of the developed world and disabuse billions in the undeveloped world of their ambition to emulate the West.
Such calls for simplicity are often made by celebrities with seven-figure incomes, or by tenured academics and NGO groupies with six-figure incomes who supplement their earnings with
books and speaking tours. However, the “wretched of the Earth” in the developing world already living in “halcyon simplicity,” and the working and middle classes of the developed world struggling not to slide back into such “simplicity” are less enchanted by this eco-romanticism.
The middle class will not give up its lifestyle and the non-middle class will not cease striving to become middle class. Having lived and traveled widely in pre-consumerist societies, I can attest to how culturally barren and harsh the life of the vast majority of people in these societies is. The collapse of Communism, as well as the “Arab Spring,” reflects the collective scream for escape from such a barren environment.
History matters! It teaches us that prophets of doom from Malthus to Ehrlich to the Club of Rome have been proven wrong time after time by that “infinite resource”: the human mind. This essay will challenge the assumptions of the “catastrophe industry.” It will show that growth in value (of GDP) is not synonymous with growth in the volume of raw materials—that we can grow value while using less of our natural resources; and that the wealth of nations can increase as the human burden on the carrying capacity of the planet decreases energy.
It has been estimated that close to 30% of world GDP is moved by air transport, but that this constitutes only 1% of the volume of goods and services transported around the globe.
By this reckoning, air transport per unit of GDP is the least environmentally damaging form of transport, even when energy use is figured in. A 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office report states the following:
According to IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [of the UN]), aviation currently accounts for about 2 percent of human-generated global carbon dioxide emissions, the most significant greenhouse gas—and about 3 percent of the potential warming effect of global emissions that can affect the earth’s climate, including carbon dioxide.
If 95% of greenhouse gases are produced by nature and 5% by human activity, then air travel produces 0.0015% of total greenhouse gas. Compare this to greenhouse gases per unit of GDP produced globally by conventional field agriculture, and one discovers that air freight is greener per unit of value than agriculture. Globally, agriculture is responsible for 20% of manmade greenhouse gas emissions.
(or 0.01% of total greenhouse gases).When one factors in the growth of the proportion of GDP of services, the picture becomes even less foreboding. Services have become the major drivers of global economic growth.
They constitute over 63% of global GDP and well over 70% of GDP in the developed world, and the proportion is increasing. While services such as translation, consulting, planning, accounting, massage therapy, legal advice, etc., also consume some natural resources, the quantity is infinitesimal in relation to the economic value produced.
If I manufacture a car for $10,000 I have consumer But if I translate a 100,000-word book for $10,000 I have consumed merely the electricity necessary to run my computer, and the electricity used to send the translation as an email attachment, and little else that is even measurable.
Consumers and the consumer society are not the problem. The problem lies in the production methods presently used by manufacturing, mining, and agriculture. And the solution lies in the revolutions that are also presently taking place in material science, water engineering, energy harvesting, and food production. We might speculate that the world economy can continue to grow indefinitely at 4%-5% a year while our negative footprint on the planet simultaneously declines.
By the end of this century the planet will be able to carry a population of 12 billion people with an American standard of living and one-tenth the present negative environmental impact.
My Environmental Due Diligence
The energy/environment conundrum is the central issue of human civilization in the twenty first century, but how are we to evaluate the facts while steering clear of fashionable catastrophism?
After all, if it is already too late, and the earth is doomed, why even bother? Anxieties about global warming are so severe that there are reports of children requiring psychological treatment, and a sub-specialty of psychology that treats “Global Warming Anxiety Disorder’” has arisen.
Every rational human being is essentially an environmentalist. Who wants to breathe, eat, or drink pollution? But by what standards do we relate to the issue? Rational humanism is my personal standard—rational in that our judgments are based on rigorous scientific standards; humanist in that we place human welfare at the center of our concerns.
This standard has been the foundation of Western civilization from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment.
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