Matt Ridley:
How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.
“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).
But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.
Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called “markets” or “prices” to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.
I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.
This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.
Yeah.
Silicon is SO rare!
@Nanny G:
Not in California. Especially if you go to the beach.
@Ditto:
I forgot my sarcasm tag ……. /
I remember when chemistry classes used to teach that a human body only contained about $6 worth of contents.
But then came bio-chemistry and transplants so that now a human body’s various components are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Worth is a tricky concept.
It’s slippery.
It changes.
Sand is now pivotal in out solid state economy.
Tar sands, too.
Much of what the author writes is true enough, like the expectation that human ingenuity will compensate for declining reserves of raw materials.
What he fails to adequately point out is that the raw materials the we have been using up more and more quickly are the ones that are essentially free – the very lowest-hanging fruits on the ecological tree. Oil and coal used to be found in pools or surface deposits, and now must be pursued more and more deeply and with more associated pollution. Remember that Pennsylvania was once the leading oil-producing region in the world. Reserves do run out.
The author’s contention that a cheap alternative to fossil fuels will miraculously be discovered underestimates the complexity of petroleum and the enormous cost of synthesizing the hundreds of chemical components of petroleum that are separated from it by simple distillation. It underestimates the enormous financial advantage of obtaining such an infinitely useful soup of complex organic molecules by literally spooning it from the Earth. It vastly underestimates the cost of recovering anything economically rewarding from our bountiful mountains of solid wastes or from our polluted waterways.
The challenge moving forward will be more a question of how much additional financial burden can the consumer shoulder before his back is broken trying to afford goods that are no longer cheap to make. The future: A plastic bag for your Walmart purchases: $5. A gallon of paint: $300. That’s what it will cost to synthesize organics instead of pumping them from the ground. Nuclear energy might keep your lights on and your home heated in the winter, but it can’t bag your groceries or paint your kitchen.