This was such a relief to see a sane and balanced discussion of the issues. I hadn't realised the extent to which fertility declines were already occurring in China and India before the major Government interventions. But as you say, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity are still pressing problems that have not disappeared just because we haven't had mass human starvation. I also wonder whether the social and political consequences of where rapid population growth is still occurring can be accommodated in a world where migration is such a contentious issue. As Brad DeLong shows there's plenty to go round but we're not a very sharing species.
Even if we never got more productive at farming, one thing that was never clear to me is why Erlich predicted a population combustion and mass famine, versus a situation where population asymptotically leveled off at the level of agricultural productivity. Moreover, the price mechanism and other economic forces would probably lead to a smoother and potentially higher asymptote than a situation where nothing changed but population level. For instance, increases in the relative price of arable land and food could make it such that before people would starved outright, market forces would push rural folks into denser settlements, making more room for food growth.. Meat would become relatively more expensive to grow, and shifts to cereals would increase calorie yield per hectare . Other accommodations too numerous to think of would probably occur and lead to a smoother and maybe much higher asymptote, even in the absence of the revolution in crop yields per hectare.
The historical record shows how civilizations progress through boom and bust, primarily related to loss of topsoil or soil quality. Examples are salification of irrigated farmland in Babylon and erosion of the North Africa farmlands which supplied Rome with wheat. Market forces are not going to create more farmland which is subject to processes of glaciation and weathering, and substitution is not practical considering that substitutes are substantially inferior in energy content or transportability. I would refer you the work of geomorphologist David Montgomery in the book "Dirt". The modern analogy would be fossil fuels where declining yields, energy return on energy invested, means that the marginal cost for energy return increases at the same time that increased energy is required for fertilizer and food production.
Thanks for the perspective. I wonder, though, wouldn’t the historical record show that there were long periods of population stasis. I never read Paul Erlich’s book, only secondary accounts, but he seemed to be predicting a near-certain global population collapse within a few decades, rather than the historical arc of boom and bust.
A great book. Also, “The Dawn of Everything,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unlike the authors of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Sapiens,” Graeber and Wengrow read/surveyed the archaeological record before making empirical arguments, not assumptions based on scant and outdated evidence.
In technical terms, a famine is a situation where one in five households experience “an extreme lack of food and other basic needs where starvation, death, and destitution are evident.” More than 30 percent of people are “acutely malnourished” and two out of every 10,000 people die from starvation.
Degrowthers are just one element of an approach to the environment which treats the environment as a moral (see below) rather than practical issue. And they pose a massive political barrier to actually getting something done about the environment.
I mean why is the right so anti-enviornmental? It's because they've learned over long decades that most environmental messages they hear can't be trusted as they try to slip in value propositions they disagree with.
I myself used to be a relative skeptic of global warming simply because so much stuff I'd seen about environmentalism was ultimately crap driven by feelings about wastefulness or growth. I had the ability to actually understand the science and figure out what was serious scientific concern and what were value judgements posing as concern.
Until there is a backlash from those of us who care about the environment (because we want to keep it around for ppl to enjoy and avoid flooding cities) against the constant stream of anti-growth ideas masquerading as environmentalism (just a few weeks ago the NYT was running a story about the environmental harm of throwing away cheap furniture despite the fact that there is scarcity of places we could put garbage) I fear it's going to be very hard to get a large chunk of the western world onboard with things like a serious carbon tax.
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Of course practical concerns have moral impact but here I mean moral in something like the Haidt purity foundation sense. For them it's not about weighing costs and benefits but about reducing our wasteful western lifestyle that they in some sense see as an afront to the natural order.
Well, tackling waste is also helping the environment. Something like 1/3 of all energy production is wasted. The power lines are too long or whatever. So if we could somehow recover that 1/3 or produce power closer to those who consumed it we'd be some way providing better and possibly more resilient power to those who need it while simultaneously keeping the status quo as far as environmental impacts.
Similarly millions of tons of ugly, blemished plants are just buried in landfill every year because they can't be sold to grocery stores. What if we could turn ugly plants into food for the homeless or like soup for the general public?
I'm certainly not against tackling waste as a way to improve the fruits of production.
No one is in favor of waste for the sake of waste. And certainly if there is a costless way to avoid waste we should do it.
But I could also write an article saying that if we take less breaths then we'd produce less CO2. That would be true but the implication that this is a useful place to expend limited attention and effort would be totally false.
The problem I have with these articles is that they focus on things that *feel* wasteful at a human level rather than seriously balancing the benefits from that activity versus the environmental gains.
More generally, I feel this attitude is fundamentally in tension with the best policy solutions (carbon taxes etc) exactly because those policies don't end up changing how consumption feels to us but incentivize small changes in industrial process that can result in substantial environmental wins but don't change the experience the consumer has. As long as we focus on the experience of consumption rather than the technocratic problem I fear we won't make enough progress.
That sounds fair, generally. But in the two examples I provided, energy and food, the waste is both so egregious and so easy to remediate with tweaks to how the system works generally it seems stupid not to. Until you realize that several large corporations (even, sometimes, multi-nationals) will get burned with less profit.
One of the valid questions de-growthers pose is, "can we limit, curtail or redirect human greed?" I know the general answer is "no," it's part of human (even animal) DNA, it can be a survival strategy. However, it's still worth asking. There do need to be some structural changes if we're ever going to really focus longer term on human viability. In the same sense that changes happen when you grow from a teenager focused on yourself and what your friends are doing into a man focused on a family, a house, kids and even retirement. I feel our society is still, even after about 10,000 years of what is generally known as "civilization", a nascent experiment. There's plenty of "growing up" to do. So far it's been mostly our limited view and lack of planning on something closer to geologic timescales that have been our species biggest downfall.
Regarding throwing away plants is that really so bad? I mean that's how you lock away CO2 from the atmosphere. Bury it in an anerobic environment.
But sure, I agree that in an ideal world we could probably be more efficient in how those plants are used. But is that sense of waste actually a good guide to where we can make the most impact? I'm skeptical. Indeed, making use of those plants seems like a harder problem than at first glance. You need to figure out a way to distribute them to those who want them that doesn't result in more harm (fuel burning etc) than benefit. And sure part of the reason we throw away plants is that we like the luxury of buying bruise free perfect looking fruits and vegetables.
But I don't think that luxury is any morally worse than the luxury of driving more or buying aluminum (high use of energy to refine). And the beauty of things like carbon taxes is avoiding those judgements so we don't treat the luxury of buying pretty fruit differently from other luxuries with similar environmental impact which don't trigger our emotions.
Also I don't like think the 'greed' framing is really that helpful. The issue isn't people being too greedy. People want a better life for them and their children. The problem isn't that people are too unwilling to make sacrifices for their children but coordination. It's like fishing quotas. Without coordination you get overfishing and everyone suffers. Coordinate limits and you can increase the size of the pie and make people better off but not because people in the later scenario are any less greedy. They just have better coordination technology to help them be greedy more efficiently.
I 100% agree a big part of the problem is insufficient ability to make plans on a long enough time scale but that seems very different than greed to me.
Sure, you could lock away carbon, but is that the end-all-be-all of our efforts? Is carbon sequestration really more important than feeding people who are literally starving to death? I'm not sure, either morally or even economically that math works. For instance, transportation routes are already there. They already pick up produce from farms and truck it to warehouses where it goes to both factories (for finished goods like, say, canned stew) and to supermarkets (where you buy ingredients for your own stew). The main issue is that the cost of transport does not equal the value of raw vegetables that aren't pristine. But the cost of growing those non-pristine vegetables has already been paid.
Carrots, for instance (in case you haven't farmed yourself, I have) only sometimes grow long and straight. No matter the variety or amount of weeding and fertilizer, etc. you often get "twisty" or corkscrew shaped carrots in any average bunch. Now, baring other factors, a lot of these carrots manage to get "used" and end up in bags of "baby peeled carrots" at your local supermarket or in canned stew where you have no idea if they were straight carrots or twisty carrots because they're cut up in pieces too small to tell. But some amount of those "twisty" carrots just go into landfill which only sometimes fully captures the carbon. There's plenty of it that rots, producing, one would presume, a non-zero volume of carbon. There are ways to construct farms though that produce finished products and thus use far far more of "unwanted" produce. It tends to be more expensive because the economic incentives we've made are deliberately geared towards monoculture and specifically towards large multinationals like Bayer and Monsanto getting more value for genetically modified seed (which, up till not have NOT solved the twisty carrot issue, despite some work and money going into it), farm equipment dealers (beginning to sell robotic tractors, good at doing single crops, not yet designed to switch from different types of crops) and banks and shipping companies. I mean sure, let's concentrate more wealth and less choice (and thus less resilience) into the basics. Is that greed? Could be, could also just be shortsighted and possibly focused on the wrong type of asset. The asset you can't replace is land. The assets hard to replace are knowledge bases and experienced farmers. Tractors and trucks are relatively easy to replace. Companies come and go all the time. Company directors can be changed out in a day. So which asset is really the more valuable one?
Regarding luxuries:
Sure, luxury has been part and parcel of human existence since at least the artwork in the caves at Lascaux. It's probably not going anywhere. But luxuries do change price. Some artwork increases in value and some goes down, often in cycles. I think this can generally be applied to nearly all luxuries as well. But is the value of blemish-less plants really greater than the value of the planet as a whole and carbon generally? Part of that value is supported not by logic but by marketing (which is often the opposite of logic). People only 60-70 years ago had no issue with twisty carrots, having often grown them themselves in their own or their parents/grandparents gardens. It's the power of marketing that made us all revile the humble twisty carrot. But is the humble little twisty carrot really so bad? Will it lead to moral turpitude? Will anyone die from eating one? Surely we can rule it out as the cause of gun violence and partisan politics, right? How, really, are we harmed by the twisty carrot? Can we not rehabilitate it and make it cool again? Maybe the twisty carrot is a rebel. Maybe it's giving its twisty little orange finger to the man. Maybe we should really be rooting for the twisty carrot! Why not elect it Speaker of the House! Okay, that might be a step too far. Or maybe, just maybe this time the twisty carrot is just a twisty carrot (as in, "the cigar is just a cigar") and we could easily put as much effort into acceptance as rejection. ;-)
I am hopeful that the christian/catholic framing of environmentalism will catch on and make this issue a little less toxic. God gave us dominion over the earth and it’s our job to look after all of its creatures, etc. I personally believe in a more secular version of the “land ethic,” but I think it’s something that people could agree on across party lines, and leads to better solutions than trying to repent for the sins of capitalism.
I am very unclear on how turning "capitalism" into a "sin" is LESS toxic. I'm also not sure how coming to believe that we are both responsible for and entitled to dominion over the earth leads to any sort of better choices. Haven't we already been behaving as if this were fact for centuries, first in Europe and then all over? Isn't there some proof that an Indigenous view of land "ownership" (collectively - never individual, in harmony - never exploitative, etc.) is clearly the less environmentally detrimental (although unable to sustain current levels of consumption and possibly unable to sustain current numbers of people generally)?
Another example of moralism getting in the way of practical solutions is hydrogen. There's a strain of vocal thought that hydrogen is bad because fossil fuel companies are trying to use it to stay relevant, and therefore no use of hydrogen should be considered. Never mind that hydrogen is necessary for ammonia production for fertilizer, but it also could be extremely useful for getting to a 100% renewable grid (and demolishing the nuclear fan argument that this isn't possible) by providing long term/rare event storage via green hydrogen burned in combustion turbines.
I misinterpreted you initially. Though, ironically, I believe it's significantly more efficient to produce hydrogen from nuclear (well really any process with a ton of heat) than renewable sources. More generally, I don't think hydrogen is cost competitive with other grid scale storage solutions currently on the market.
But what's wrong with nuclear. The NRC needs to get it's shit together and simplify the regs for mass produced reactors and if we can ever get a carbon tax going we can just see if nuclear or renewable plus grid storage works out cheaper.
Personally I think nuclear deserves a fair shot. It's currently pretty badly regulated (if you are concerned with safety there is something pretty perverse about making it so hard to build new passively safe reactors while allowing old designs to keep running) so if you improve that situation maybe it's cost competitive. Though the cost per kWh for pure renewables is getting cheap enough that even w/ grid storage it may be the cheaper option.
Why should the efficiency of producing it from nuclear matter? What matters is cost. The levelized cost of nuclear electricity from new reactors is much higher than the levelized cost of electricity from renewables. The efficiency of low cost alkaline electrolysers may be slightly lower than more expensive PEM electrolysers, but that's not enough to make up for the difference.
The only way nuclear might make sense for hydrogen production is thermochemical cycles, but that involves much higher temperature than existing reactors, as well as handling such wonderful chemicals as vaporized sulfuric acid at 850 C. No one has ever made this work economically.
Yes, ofc it's total cost that matters. Efficiency matters in so far as it contributes. And yes, I mean thermochemical cycles but there are a ton of different such reaction pathways in the literature which vary in what kind of chemicals they require.
And the reason efficiency is a pretty big here is that you are proposing to use hydrogen as energy storage to even out the variability in renewable production. That means you are inevitably going to have the usual losses associated with combustion based energy generation on top of any losses involved in the production of the hydrogen. Once you take all that into account I'm very skeptical it's competitive for providing the kind of reliable power generation needed to keep the grid stable.
Now, it's quite possible that the much lower cost of renewable production will still be cheaper than nuclear even for reliable power generation combined with some other kind of power storage scheme (eg maybe distributed storage, smattering of pumped hydro, some large chemical batteries etc etc) but I'm very skeptical it will be hydrogen.
I mean I've never even heard anyone suggest onsite energy storage as a reason for hydrogen because of the cost. The use case that motivated plans for a hydrogen economy was always about transporting it and using it as a high energy density (J/kg) replacement for fossil fuels.
“ Biodiversity loss has financial impacts: The cost of recent losses of ecosystem services has been estimated at USD 4 trillion–USD 20 trillion per year. Land degradation is estimated to cost USD 6 trillion–USD 11 trillion per year, and oceanic degradation USD 200 billion per year.6, 7, 8”
This seems high but if it is true, even within an order of magnitude, it would behoove economists to take these numbers seriously in GDP calculations. If the US is losing midwestern soil at these values, at what point does the bank run out and real economic damage is done to the economy? Ten years? Twenty? Do we have $100,000,000,000,000 worth of soil to run through?
While biodiversity loss no doubt has negative economic effects not only am I also skeptical of the estimates, I fear things like this do far more harm than good. Even the non-scienticicly literate reader is going to realize this piece isn't a serious attempt to quantify an economic harm but is an advocacy piece that is delibrately picking a broad category (biodiversity) to rig the discussion to favor particular policies/conclusions.
It's not that the claims are per se wrong but it's like writing a piece in the context of US gun laws that quantified the economic harms to guns by including the harms from the war in Ukraine and deaths in failed states.
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I would love to know the true costs of various aspects of our modern world but as long as the incentives essentially never favor anyone arguing: actually there isn't much economic harm from losing X kinds of populations it makes it very hard to really figure out what makes sense. I think more clarity on that would help us out of the morass we are in where we all just throw up our hands bc it feels like merely living comfortable not to mention knowing where to focus efforts.
And it's extra frustrating bc maybe in this case it really is that big a deal and I just can't be sure.
Well keep in mind that MY primary reason to protect biodiversity is altruistic. It's just useful to point out that destroying biodiversity also does have *some* costs for humans.
Of course, that's the source of my frustration with these estimates. If I didn't think there were real costs to losing some kinds of biodiversity I wouldn't care.
I care because I fear it diverts our efforts into general feel good policies rather than where they will make the most difference to the next generation and encourage a kind of general skepticism about the idea.
I want the hardheaded version where we call out some things as wasteful or not that helpful because I think it will help us convince more ppl it matters and focus effort on the most impactful areas.
"Seems high but true" Your argument is based on a model of biodiversity which again feeds into a model of soil degradation, which again feeds into a model of economic impact and so on. The uncertainties in these models has to be multiplied. The estimate is high and most likely untrue.
Agreed with this, although I will say it was a bit of a close call with Borlaug and the Green Revolution. One of the things that came across in Charles Mann's account of Borlaug's efforts is the role of contingency in its timing, and we got very lucky there - a decade's delay in its implementation was not implausible, and would have been very bad for world hunger.
The Green Revolution was actually a bunch of different technologies, of which Borlaug's wheat technology was only one. I think the biggest innovation was simply large-scale application of artificial fertilizer.
"This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness."
This may be the first time I've seen your love of bunnies influence your writing. I approve.
Maybe Ehrlich was thinking of bunnies also when he came up with his fertility projections. In both cases, this seems to be not a good model for reality.
When you walk on the University of Minnesota campus, it has statues ready for the discovery as most campuses do. One of them is of an alumni named Norman Borlaug, an agronomist. While there are many metrics by which lists are made, Mr. Borlaug eventually won a Nobel Prize for his decades of efforts to bring the green revolution to the world. It can be reasonably argued that he led an effort that saved 1B lives. By that measure, one of the greatest people who ever lived and almost no one knows who he is. For the baseball aficionado he is key in the effort to bringing baseball to Mexico where the game has flourished. I wrote about him early in my Substack journey but bad forn to include links. Continue to love your writing.
I got a big kick out of the baseball thing as I'm a fan. He was involved with little league baseball as his family spent a bunch of time working through the crossbreeding of dwarf wheat.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. Presumably had he not been doing it there would have been a greater chance someone else would have done it. And he built his work on that of earlier chemists and biologists. Should we say that Mendelev is responsible for all the lives saved by anything that uses modern chemistry?
Don't get me wrong, he deserves celebration. But I feel crediting him with saving a billion people undervalues all the people who contribute to basic research that enables these kind of advances.
More generally, I'm skeptical of this kind of moral luck based acclaim. One could equally we'll say the same thing about
Of course it is not completely accurate. The Nobel committee often splits the difference and acknowledges those who they felt made the difference. The problem of hunger and malnourishment, especially in the 3rd world was a big one during the period. I have no doubt there were a lot of people working the mix of problems. Leibniz developed calculus concurrent with Newton. It hardly means Newton is overrated :)
So happy to see you put the emphasis on non-human animals and habitat loss in this post Noah. The non-human world is one of the great lacunas in our collective consciousness. Notice how the recent COP meeting on biodiversity in Montreal only garnered a fraction of the attention of the climate COPs for example. Relatedly, a lot of folks have been led to believe that it is climate change that has inflicted much of the present damage on the natural world when in fact habitat destruction, inefficient agriculture, harvesting and invasive species have done most of it by far.
What is missing from the discussion is luck. Charles Mann in his book "The Wizard and the Prophet" lays out a compelling case that the success of the dwarf-stem wheat hybrid that Norman Borlaug created was by no measure a sure thing due to the unique genetics of wheat. While many point to the Green Revolution as proof of mankind's ingenuity and capacity to adapt to circumstances, my own view is that the world was very lucky that Borlaug achieved his breakthrough when he did. Exclusively due to his own perseverance, he was able to provide high-yield seed to Pakistan and India in 1968, the same year as The Population Bomb was published. Many of those who are eager to critique Ehrlich are too cavalier in my opinion to history. Hence I tend to be quite more pessimistic that high population growth areas in the world such as Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the poor parts of the Middle East will be able to avoid the perils that Ehrlich warned about.
It's fun to lionize Borlaug as a singular hero, and he does deserve it. But dwarf-stem wheat was only one of many inventions that characterized the Green Revolution. Rice production increased by as much as wheat production did, and corn by much more. This suggests that the most impactful innovations were things that could be applied to many different crops, such as artificial fertilizers and irrigation.
I think we'd need to look at more than one crop to decide this, and showing total African production consistently lagging total Asian production doesn't mean much when Asia's population has consistently been much greater than Africa's.
The relative difference in pace is overdetermined.
Africa has more Holdridge life zones (combinations of climate, geography, and ecology, including water and temperature patterns, soils, plants, insects and fungi) than Asia, and similar areas are often "islanded", separated from each other by different ones. In Asia they shade into each other more, so adaptation is gradual.
An agronomy (set of crop varieties, irrigation methods, fertilizer applications, weed, pest, and fungus control methods and timings) that works in one area probably won't work in a nearby area with different temperatures, water availability, weeds, pests, and blights. So there was a lot more work to be done with less payoff.
Africa's soils are also poorer, as they are old, and they weren't recently replenished by glacier-created ground rock.
Transport is more difficult in Africa as it doesn't have long navigable rivers (except the Nile), and its weather is hard on roads and railways. It takes longer to set up systems (requiring new fertilizer and pesticide stores, machinery depots, etc.) for this reason alone.
Much of Africa depended on starchy tubers (cassava, yams) for calories, and it may be the case that these had less potential for yield improvement than cereals. (This is just a guess, I know no details.)
The cereals that were grown in various parts of Africa--millet, teff, sorghum, others--themselves may not have had the same potential for improvement as wheat, rice, and maize. (Again, guessing. Was the research done?)
In any case the sheer number and variety of crops and and geographies meant a lot more work would have been required to improve yields.
Certainly NGOs took the short cut of "persuading" farmers to plant Borlaug's new crops and use his methods instead of repeating Borlaug's work 100 times with African crop plants. Usually by questionable political methods, trying to get the new crops imposed top-down, which of course slowed things down immensely.
But blaming it all on western NGOs is oversimplifying heavily. It was always going to take longer in Africa.
However, one needs to consider that rice and corn may not be suitable for India and Pakistan agricultural lands, which then raise an issue of affordability and adequacy of transportation and distribution channels. You have made the point yourself that economists often focus on aggregates and neglect distributive effects. Furthermore, this argument understates the difficulty of creating and maintaining international political will to sustain food aid efforts.
While this is narrowly true, Borlaug led to breakthroughs in rice cultivation in India, Pakistan and China. He was far from a one-trick pony. Having a relative who served in the Peace Corp in India, Borlaug's name is synonymous there (as well as Pakistan) as one of the prime movers to modern agriculture with heavy emphasis on integrating Haber-Bosch based fertilizers that led to grand increases in crop yields. All of this was already in play in a different neighborhood where he grew up. A particularly good example of NIMBYism even when people were starving! South Asians are not consuming a lot of wheat. Finally, it is rare for the agronomist to shift into the world of politics and persuasion and play such a heavy role in changing approaches all around the globe. He is a fascinating and rare individual, much more than an agronomist. I would encourage all to learn more about him. Quite a figure. You sell him short with your less than accurate second sentence which is quite deceptive. His philosophical focus of his method was to make small plot farming (and even subsistence) prevalent around the world viable. Your conclusion about fertilizer / irrigation, likewise is merely a half-truth. The wild variation in corn yields was its unusual asexual cross-breeding that even Native Americans were practicing for centuries. Borlaug's approach and a similar dwarf, sturdy stem focus for rice was the key breakthrough as such a large subset of rice was lost wallowing in a paddy due to a weak stem. The wonder of science and progress we have today via CRISPR and other technologies can select the hundreds of slight adjustments Borlaug explored via trial and error at just the right time in history only shows that doomsayers sell short the next great human innovation efforts. The modern corn seeds have been evolved to the most absurdly strong and sturdy of stems possible with miniminzed leaves now planted in the best of soils only 8" apart.
If Borlaug hadn't succeeded then, do you think people would have just laid down and starved?
No. They would have tried something else.
The tech that wins is just the one that was cheapest, or that came first, or was lucky in some other way. The eventual winner isn't a sure thing, prospectively. So some folks imagine that solving the problem was a matter of luck.
But we can and do try lots of things. Will the solution to climate change be solar, wind, magnesium batteries, sodium batteries, lithium batteries, vanadium batteries, fusion, fission, demand response, grid interconnection, direct air capture, geoengineering, electric cars, hydrogen cars, alcohol fuel cell cars, cellulosic ethanol, etc., etc., etc.?
It'll be some of those! And/or something new. The story of the ones that win might look lucky in retrospect. But the failure of any one approach doesn't mean we're screwed. It just means that one of the other approaches wins instead.
I don't see that that rebuts Jeff's point. If Borlaug hadn't succeeded when he did, other people (and presumably Borlaug himself!) would've kept hammering away at alternative approaches, but those alternative approaches would, by definition, have taken longer to come to fruition. In the meantime more people would have starved (and perhaps even "laid down" first).
Jeff didn't claim that no one else would've tried alternatives if Borlaug hadn't got lucky, Jeff claimed that we're lucky that Borlaug hit pay dirt as soon as he did. Like, we're lucky that the Sinopharm BIBP, CoronaVac, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines turned out to basically work. That statement is not affected by pointing out that other vaccines also later turned out to work; time mattered.
The question is, how much longer? Delivering seeds the same year that the The Population Bomb was published sounded significant at first. But on reflection it seemed more coincidental. It's not like a collapse on the scale Ehrlich predicted was imminent at that point.
The larger point is that Ehrlich-types assume that *none* of the possible solutions help in a useful time frame. And that's a bad bet, because people *do* try different things. Focusing only on the approach that ended up succeeding obscures the depth and breadth of those possibilities.
Your COVID vaccine example is actually a case where multiple approaches worked out. Sure, we were lucky to have so many working options. But the fact that we tried so many different vaccine approaches so quickly wasn't luck at all.
We still would have had options even if only one of them worked. Or we would have had options (like non-pharmaceutical interventions) if none of the vaccine candidates worked!
Ehrlich was incorrect. The fact remains that luck is a significant factor. We can reduce the role of luck by exploring more plans at once ("that we tried so many different vaccine approaches so quickly wasn't luck at all") but this does not eliminate luck.
We ended up with 4 scalable COVID-19 vaccines at the end of 2020; if the universe were a tiny bit different we could've ended up with just 3, and in that case we would almost certainly have been worse off, and we could've ended up with 5, in which case we would almost certainly have been better off.
The larger point is that the universe can in fact foreclose options, and that can make us meaningfully worse off, because human ingenuity, while great and an important factor, is not boundless. There is not always an equally good Plan B waiting in the wings if Plan A turns out to fail, or a superior Plan E if Plans A, B, C, & D all kinda suck.
Well, now we're arguing about matters of degree. Luck can be a factor, yes. The universe can foreclose options, yes. Ingenuity isn't boundless, yes. An earlier solution is better than a later one, yes.
People who emphasize luck, doomers like Ehrlich, and the degrowth people sometimes seem to have an incomplete sense of just how many alternative possibilities there are. A history-based lens (like focusing on Borlaug's success) might encourage a view that outcomes are contingent, because the specific outcome often is.
A more science- or engineering-focused view might have looked at the amount of energy available (and the amount required) and concluded that *some* solution was likely. Solving climate change with alternative energy technologies is another example of this.
So maybe it's a two-cultures thing? Or maybe it's just an optimism vs. pessimism thing. But there does often seem to be a real information gap between the solution-focused folks and the problem-focused ones.
Well said. I am afraid many do not understand the difference between luck and persistence with trial and error, ie. the scientific method. The focus on yields in the American Midwest were coming to a crisis of oversupply and its was in many ways the Nixon grain deal coupled with detente that unleashed even more crop yield per acre breakthroughs. Corn and soybeans, suited to a PARTICULAR optimized climate and the EASIEST of plants to hybridize have led the way ever since in yields. Africa simply provided the wrong climate and conditions to join the bandwagon as easily as other locations I am afraid. Having studied, understood and heard Borlaug speak lends me to the conclusion as many seem to veer as some sort of one-trick pony. He offered a broad array of skills, organization and competence to his six decade effort to stem world hunger. He remained into his 90s a cogent voice explaining the wonders of GMO rather than conspiracy.
As a mostly retired engineer, I am struck by humanity in the scientific age has been largely successful at providing solutions for one degree of freedom problems. Climate, habitat loss and the rapid change in suitable crops in situ is a completely different class of problems this and the next generation will face. While I hope we can be up to the task, anyone who knows the difference between one degree of freedom problems (basic diffferential equations) and PARTIAL differential equations knows that the possible trial and error solutions multiply geometrically. As a resident of the upper Midwest, it is not lost on me that it has become reasonable to plant corn in North Dakota and even into southern Canada as the isotherms inexorably climb due to climate. Minnesotans are amidst the last generation to broadly enjoy a boreal forest as the trees of Northern Minnesota are simply wrong for our rapidly transitioning climate. These are a broadly different set of problems.
One simple observation is the Green Revolution emerged with heavy emphasis on the explosive growth in fertilizer use. Plant yields are high to a GREAT EXTENT due to fertilizer use. Next to carbon-based fuels, the nitrogen cycle will need to be tackled to keep global temperatures within a safe region. A classic statement of a problem where we cannot live without heavy fertilizer use but must reduce drastically or drive climate issues outside of a controllable loop.
For the record, I am a mostly retired control systems engineer. What my career taught me most was there are classes of problems we can control and those we cannot. The enemy of safety is when we allow relatively well understood systems operate with too much overshoot and just hope for the best.
The big lesson the mathematics of system control is that when ANY SYSTEM begins to approach regions where control is not readily managed, we shut it down as it is patently unsafe. Complex systems, like global climate (or even regional climates like the US Midwest) for which there is much we DO NOT UNDERSTAND are exactly the types of systems where there is a need to act conservatively. Predicting climate may be the largest number of degrees of freedom problem that we have ever tried to model on planet earth. What my career has taught me is that all sorts of closed systems behave abberantly when they approach the boundaries of uncontrollability. I believe the challenge of climate is VERY INTERESTING because the clash of economic desires with scientific uncertainty make it likely we will cross some thresholds without pumping the brakes in time. It will be the classic clash of possibility with the human condition.
We may be "arguing about matters of degree" but we are not JUST arguing about that. (That's right, I not only disagree but disagree about whether we disagree, I got LAYERS.)
You're looking down your nose at a "history-based lens" through which "outcomes are contingent" and contrasting it with a "science- or engineering-focused view", and speculating about people adopting the former view because they're deficient in good ol' STEM information. I reject that absolutely.
I reject the disdain for the idea that contingency and luck matter, and reject your posited "information gap" as self-serving hokum (I could just as easily relabel your "solution-focused folks" as complacent, glib luck-deniers suffering from an "information gap" about how bad things could get).
I really scratch my head at how someone ends up thinking that this could be a "two-cultures thing". To my knowledge, none of the key "[p]eople who emphasize luck" or "doomers" in this immediate dispute comes from an arts/humanities background. Paul Ehrlich was a professor of biology and his co-author Anne Ehrlich is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford's biology department (https://news.stanford.edu/expert/anne-ehrlich/). Noah has a physics degree and an economics degree (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nquixote/cv.pdf). None of these 3 people, AFAIK, have any kind of arts/humanities degree.
I can't speak for you and Jeff, and I don't wish to delve into my background here (though you might be able to guess from my back catalog: https://splained.substack.com/archive), but I've spent a lot of time talking to lots of physicists and STEM students, and in my experience they believe more strongly on average in anthropogenic global warming and its seriousness than non-STEM people. People who do scientific research are ACUTELY aware of how much contingency and luck feed into their research; as they say, if you could be sure of the answer going in, it wouldn't be research.
Maybe so, but as far as I can tell, Paul Erlich isn’t arguing that luck saved us. In his 90s, he still seems to be claiming that the doom he predicted is still just around the corner.
When I heard predictions about the future in the 60s and 70s--which did not come true--I realized that that those linear measurements did not reconcile the nature of human knowledge and achievement. Scientific advances, knowledge, and experience have effects which are exponential, not linear. In other words, those (incomplete) predictions are based on a linear timeline assuming that the knowledge of the past will march along in a straight line. Loved your article!
"one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions." Watch out - Noah is a declared techno-optimist. Which error does tecno-optimists make? Presume that technology's historic capability to provide solutions to historic problems implies the capablity of future technology to provide solutions to (different) future problems. No better than Ehrlich.
Technology's long record of solving hard problems. The Green Revolution is an obvious case. Vaccine development just saved many millions of lives (and of course saved many more in the past). Those are just two of a long long line of examples. And the recent massive cost drops in renewable energy suggest that once again, technology has come through for us.
Yes, there are nice examples from the past. But these are not evidence that tehno-optimism is valid - in the sense that future technology will anyhow solve any future problem (before it is too late). Techno-optimism is a faith - we simply cannot know. This uncertainty may make degrowth a better bet than techno-optimism.
Tech pessimists block all of the data points that validate optimism as more than just a recent trend. When people freak out about viruses and the possibility of vaccines, it is great to remind the negative folks we've only been doing vaccines for 220 years. It is estimated that 300m people died in the 20th century from SMALLPOX, 3x as many as the world wars combined! SMALLPOX was eradicated and it had been the bane of existence at least going back to the Egyptians! Smallpox vaccinatioon took 170 of those 220 years to get to the finish line. Technology can take a bow. Vaccine development has entered the exponential region of the curve. Lucky for us!
This reminds me of Y2K. We discussed the impending Y2K disaster in software development already in the 1980s. By 1998, the industry had begun investing heavily in Y2K mitigation. Development teams throughout the industry were identifying and correcting Y2K problems. By 1999, the investment must have been in the billions.
When 1 Jan 2000 rolled around, I, along with many other engineers, was on 24hr call. I got no calls. Y2K was a big meh. I, and thousands of others, breathed a long sigh of relief as hundreds of thousands of fixes averted a disaster. The rest of the world laughed at the apparently needless panic over a non-event. What a waste of concern, they said. But the insiders knew that the world had dodged a devastating bullet.
The Y2K phenomenon is relevant to Ehrlich. He inspired remedial thinking, not as direct, perhaps, as Y2K, but folks began to look at global development in a new way. His crystal ball was wrong, but he inspired a way of thinking that will save us.
Yep, I occasionally read accounts suggesting that because Y2k bug didn’t happen, that was proof it was overblown, ignoring the fact that every organization’s software engineering team was working on fixing the bug and testing systems for years. It was so ubiquitously spoken about that any regular newspaper reader was tired of reading about it.
I, too, was a software developer who was on 24 hour call for Y2K. The company I worked for devoted MANY months over 2 years of effort to Y2K-proof the software. If they hadn't, their software would have failed for weeks or months, bringing lots of businesses to a standstill.
If you look at the graphs in the article the changes (decreasing fertility and increasing food production) were underway globally before his book came out. The only thing Ehrlich inspired was first panic and then ridicule.
The problem with successful prevention is that those who aren't involved in the effort see only the world operating as normal. They then conclude the prevention was wasted effort. (We're seeing this dramatically around COVID. "If we have a vaccine, why do we still have deaths?" Answer: "We had a million deaths whereas we were projected to have 3 million without a vaccine." But no one sees the 2 million deaths that were averted.)
“This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness.”
Hmm. My doggie is loving and playful. His favourite play is MURDERING his squeaky toy, and he’s also never happier than when killing rats. I’m not sure bunnies (❤️❤️❤️) are the right sample to generalize from to the whole animal population.
The biodiversity being threatened is mostly not mammas anyway ( and it’s mostly threatened by habitat loss which is not directly related to climate change, although expanding solar and wind farms will cause habitat loss) it’s mostly insects reptiles and sea life, so the love playfulness and kindness are not much of a factor anyway.
Again, a gloss of “progress” with no mention of the downsides. The Green Revolution of a souped-up wheat variety requires previously unheard-of amounts of fertilizer and water. The petrochemical/corporate farming industry is more than happy to continue greater consumption of hydrocarbons and desertification of vast tracts of soil via irrigation. The chemical runoffs poison our biggest river systems, creating an ever-growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, to say nothing of the salts precipitating into soil horizons from irrigation of semi-arid areas that shouldn’t be farmed. Once you kill off enough bacteria in the soil via osmosis, desertification begins. There is a reason Darwin spent the last 20 years of his life studying earthworms and formation of soil. If scientists acknowledged how long it takes for one inch of new soil to be created and the current rate of lost soil/agricultural land, they couldn’t justify their creation of agrochemicals, pesticides, etc. and their participation in corporate farming. We’re repeating the centuries-old trend of eroding civilizations -- the difference being that with the “advancement” of science we should know better. Mono-cropping agricultural land, killing off pollinating insects (arthropods largest biomass on the planet) via insecticides, exhausting fresh-water acquirers to accelerate desertification (75% of pivot irrigation water is lost to evaporation on a hot summer day), is a recipe for disaster. With all-time record heatwaves, droughts and high winds, the amount of annual soil lost is accelerating. Why is all this excluded from analysis of future trends? More people than ever before are forced to migrate because of climate change, and this will only worsen unless we start to question corporate farming and supposed “scientific advances.” Sure, the “Population Bomb” was wrong, but only because it measured the wrong things.
This was such a relief to see a sane and balanced discussion of the issues. I hadn't realised the extent to which fertility declines were already occurring in China and India before the major Government interventions. But as you say, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity are still pressing problems that have not disappeared just because we haven't had mass human starvation. I also wonder whether the social and political consequences of where rapid population growth is still occurring can be accommodated in a world where migration is such a contentious issue. As Brad DeLong shows there's plenty to go round but we're not a very sharing species.
Even if we never got more productive at farming, one thing that was never clear to me is why Erlich predicted a population combustion and mass famine, versus a situation where population asymptotically leveled off at the level of agricultural productivity. Moreover, the price mechanism and other economic forces would probably lead to a smoother and potentially higher asymptote than a situation where nothing changed but population level. For instance, increases in the relative price of arable land and food could make it such that before people would starved outright, market forces would push rural folks into denser settlements, making more room for food growth.. Meat would become relatively more expensive to grow, and shifts to cereals would increase calorie yield per hectare . Other accommodations too numerous to think of would probably occur and lead to a smoother and maybe much higher asymptote, even in the absence of the revolution in crop yields per hectare.
The historical record shows how civilizations progress through boom and bust, primarily related to loss of topsoil or soil quality. Examples are salification of irrigated farmland in Babylon and erosion of the North Africa farmlands which supplied Rome with wheat. Market forces are not going to create more farmland which is subject to processes of glaciation and weathering, and substitution is not practical considering that substitutes are substantially inferior in energy content or transportability. I would refer you the work of geomorphologist David Montgomery in the book "Dirt". The modern analogy would be fossil fuels where declining yields, energy return on energy invested, means that the marginal cost for energy return increases at the same time that increased energy is required for fertilizer and food production.
Thanks for the perspective. I wonder, though, wouldn’t the historical record show that there were long periods of population stasis. I never read Paul Erlich’s book, only secondary accounts, but he seemed to be predicting a near-certain global population collapse within a few decades, rather than the historical arc of boom and bust.
A great book. Also, “The Dawn of Everything,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unlike the authors of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Sapiens,” Graeber and Wengrow read/surveyed the archaeological record before making empirical arguments, not assumptions based on scant and outdated evidence.
Pushing rural folks into dense urban settlements?
More like the other way around. There are lots of ways more farm labor can be turned into more food. Like hand picking every weed.
Famine (I had to google this one)
In technical terms, a famine is a situation where one in five households experience “an extreme lack of food and other basic needs where starvation, death, and destitution are evident.” More than 30 percent of people are “acutely malnourished” and two out of every 10,000 people die from starvation.
I think I get it now.
Thanks Mark
Degrowthers are just one element of an approach to the environment which treats the environment as a moral (see below) rather than practical issue. And they pose a massive political barrier to actually getting something done about the environment.
I mean why is the right so anti-enviornmental? It's because they've learned over long decades that most environmental messages they hear can't be trusted as they try to slip in value propositions they disagree with.
I myself used to be a relative skeptic of global warming simply because so much stuff I'd seen about environmentalism was ultimately crap driven by feelings about wastefulness or growth. I had the ability to actually understand the science and figure out what was serious scientific concern and what were value judgements posing as concern.
Until there is a backlash from those of us who care about the environment (because we want to keep it around for ppl to enjoy and avoid flooding cities) against the constant stream of anti-growth ideas masquerading as environmentalism (just a few weeks ago the NYT was running a story about the environmental harm of throwing away cheap furniture despite the fact that there is scarcity of places we could put garbage) I fear it's going to be very hard to get a large chunk of the western world onboard with things like a serious carbon tax.
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Of course practical concerns have moral impact but here I mean moral in something like the Haidt purity foundation sense. For them it's not about weighing costs and benefits but about reducing our wasteful western lifestyle that they in some sense see as an afront to the natural order.
Well, tackling waste is also helping the environment. Something like 1/3 of all energy production is wasted. The power lines are too long or whatever. So if we could somehow recover that 1/3 or produce power closer to those who consumed it we'd be some way providing better and possibly more resilient power to those who need it while simultaneously keeping the status quo as far as environmental impacts.
Similarly millions of tons of ugly, blemished plants are just buried in landfill every year because they can't be sold to grocery stores. What if we could turn ugly plants into food for the homeless or like soup for the general public?
I'm certainly not against tackling waste as a way to improve the fruits of production.
No one is in favor of waste for the sake of waste. And certainly if there is a costless way to avoid waste we should do it.
But I could also write an article saying that if we take less breaths then we'd produce less CO2. That would be true but the implication that this is a useful place to expend limited attention and effort would be totally false.
The problem I have with these articles is that they focus on things that *feel* wasteful at a human level rather than seriously balancing the benefits from that activity versus the environmental gains.
More generally, I feel this attitude is fundamentally in tension with the best policy solutions (carbon taxes etc) exactly because those policies don't end up changing how consumption feels to us but incentivize small changes in industrial process that can result in substantial environmental wins but don't change the experience the consumer has. As long as we focus on the experience of consumption rather than the technocratic problem I fear we won't make enough progress.
That sounds fair, generally. But in the two examples I provided, energy and food, the waste is both so egregious and so easy to remediate with tweaks to how the system works generally it seems stupid not to. Until you realize that several large corporations (even, sometimes, multi-nationals) will get burned with less profit.
One of the valid questions de-growthers pose is, "can we limit, curtail or redirect human greed?" I know the general answer is "no," it's part of human (even animal) DNA, it can be a survival strategy. However, it's still worth asking. There do need to be some structural changes if we're ever going to really focus longer term on human viability. In the same sense that changes happen when you grow from a teenager focused on yourself and what your friends are doing into a man focused on a family, a house, kids and even retirement. I feel our society is still, even after about 10,000 years of what is generally known as "civilization", a nascent experiment. There's plenty of "growing up" to do. So far it's been mostly our limited view and lack of planning on something closer to geologic timescales that have been our species biggest downfall.
Regarding throwing away plants is that really so bad? I mean that's how you lock away CO2 from the atmosphere. Bury it in an anerobic environment.
But sure, I agree that in an ideal world we could probably be more efficient in how those plants are used. But is that sense of waste actually a good guide to where we can make the most impact? I'm skeptical. Indeed, making use of those plants seems like a harder problem than at first glance. You need to figure out a way to distribute them to those who want them that doesn't result in more harm (fuel burning etc) than benefit. And sure part of the reason we throw away plants is that we like the luxury of buying bruise free perfect looking fruits and vegetables.
But I don't think that luxury is any morally worse than the luxury of driving more or buying aluminum (high use of energy to refine). And the beauty of things like carbon taxes is avoiding those judgements so we don't treat the luxury of buying pretty fruit differently from other luxuries with similar environmental impact which don't trigger our emotions.
Also I don't like think the 'greed' framing is really that helpful. The issue isn't people being too greedy. People want a better life for them and their children. The problem isn't that people are too unwilling to make sacrifices for their children but coordination. It's like fishing quotas. Without coordination you get overfishing and everyone suffers. Coordinate limits and you can increase the size of the pie and make people better off but not because people in the later scenario are any less greedy. They just have better coordination technology to help them be greedy more efficiently.
I 100% agree a big part of the problem is insufficient ability to make plans on a long enough time scale but that seems very different than greed to me.
As far as the plants go:
Sure, you could lock away carbon, but is that the end-all-be-all of our efforts? Is carbon sequestration really more important than feeding people who are literally starving to death? I'm not sure, either morally or even economically that math works. For instance, transportation routes are already there. They already pick up produce from farms and truck it to warehouses where it goes to both factories (for finished goods like, say, canned stew) and to supermarkets (where you buy ingredients for your own stew). The main issue is that the cost of transport does not equal the value of raw vegetables that aren't pristine. But the cost of growing those non-pristine vegetables has already been paid.
Carrots, for instance (in case you haven't farmed yourself, I have) only sometimes grow long and straight. No matter the variety or amount of weeding and fertilizer, etc. you often get "twisty" or corkscrew shaped carrots in any average bunch. Now, baring other factors, a lot of these carrots manage to get "used" and end up in bags of "baby peeled carrots" at your local supermarket or in canned stew where you have no idea if they were straight carrots or twisty carrots because they're cut up in pieces too small to tell. But some amount of those "twisty" carrots just go into landfill which only sometimes fully captures the carbon. There's plenty of it that rots, producing, one would presume, a non-zero volume of carbon. There are ways to construct farms though that produce finished products and thus use far far more of "unwanted" produce. It tends to be more expensive because the economic incentives we've made are deliberately geared towards monoculture and specifically towards large multinationals like Bayer and Monsanto getting more value for genetically modified seed (which, up till not have NOT solved the twisty carrot issue, despite some work and money going into it), farm equipment dealers (beginning to sell robotic tractors, good at doing single crops, not yet designed to switch from different types of crops) and banks and shipping companies. I mean sure, let's concentrate more wealth and less choice (and thus less resilience) into the basics. Is that greed? Could be, could also just be shortsighted and possibly focused on the wrong type of asset. The asset you can't replace is land. The assets hard to replace are knowledge bases and experienced farmers. Tractors and trucks are relatively easy to replace. Companies come and go all the time. Company directors can be changed out in a day. So which asset is really the more valuable one?
Regarding luxuries:
Sure, luxury has been part and parcel of human existence since at least the artwork in the caves at Lascaux. It's probably not going anywhere. But luxuries do change price. Some artwork increases in value and some goes down, often in cycles. I think this can generally be applied to nearly all luxuries as well. But is the value of blemish-less plants really greater than the value of the planet as a whole and carbon generally? Part of that value is supported not by logic but by marketing (which is often the opposite of logic). People only 60-70 years ago had no issue with twisty carrots, having often grown them themselves in their own or their parents/grandparents gardens. It's the power of marketing that made us all revile the humble twisty carrot. But is the humble little twisty carrot really so bad? Will it lead to moral turpitude? Will anyone die from eating one? Surely we can rule it out as the cause of gun violence and partisan politics, right? How, really, are we harmed by the twisty carrot? Can we not rehabilitate it and make it cool again? Maybe the twisty carrot is a rebel. Maybe it's giving its twisty little orange finger to the man. Maybe we should really be rooting for the twisty carrot! Why not elect it Speaker of the House! Okay, that might be a step too far. Or maybe, just maybe this time the twisty carrot is just a twisty carrot (as in, "the cigar is just a cigar") and we could easily put as much effort into acceptance as rejection. ;-)
I am hopeful that the christian/catholic framing of environmentalism will catch on and make this issue a little less toxic. God gave us dominion over the earth and it’s our job to look after all of its creatures, etc. I personally believe in a more secular version of the “land ethic,” but I think it’s something that people could agree on across party lines, and leads to better solutions than trying to repent for the sins of capitalism.
I am very unclear on how turning "capitalism" into a "sin" is LESS toxic. I'm also not sure how coming to believe that we are both responsible for and entitled to dominion over the earth leads to any sort of better choices. Haven't we already been behaving as if this were fact for centuries, first in Europe and then all over? Isn't there some proof that an Indigenous view of land "ownership" (collectively - never individual, in harmony - never exploitative, etc.) is clearly the less environmentally detrimental (although unable to sustain current levels of consumption and possibly unable to sustain current numbers of people generally)?
Oops no scarcity of places we could put garbage (it might cost a bit but a trivial amount per piece of furniture).
Another example of moralism getting in the way of practical solutions is hydrogen. There's a strain of vocal thought that hydrogen is bad because fossil fuel companies are trying to use it to stay relevant, and therefore no use of hydrogen should be considered. Never mind that hydrogen is necessary for ammonia production for fertilizer, but it also could be extremely useful for getting to a 100% renewable grid (and demolishing the nuclear fan argument that this isn't possible) by providing long term/rare event storage via green hydrogen burned in combustion turbines.
Ohh you mean for use as grid level storage.
I misinterpreted you initially. Though, ironically, I believe it's significantly more efficient to produce hydrogen from nuclear (well really any process with a ton of heat) than renewable sources. More generally, I don't think hydrogen is cost competitive with other grid scale storage solutions currently on the market.
But what's wrong with nuclear. The NRC needs to get it's shit together and simplify the regs for mass produced reactors and if we can ever get a carbon tax going we can just see if nuclear or renewable plus grid storage works out cheaper.
Personally I think nuclear deserves a fair shot. It's currently pretty badly regulated (if you are concerned with safety there is something pretty perverse about making it so hard to build new passively safe reactors while allowing old designs to keep running) so if you improve that situation maybe it's cost competitive. Though the cost per kWh for pure renewables is getting cheap enough that even w/ grid storage it may be the cheaper option.
Why should the efficiency of producing it from nuclear matter? What matters is cost. The levelized cost of nuclear electricity from new reactors is much higher than the levelized cost of electricity from renewables. The efficiency of low cost alkaline electrolysers may be slightly lower than more expensive PEM electrolysers, but that's not enough to make up for the difference.
The only way nuclear might make sense for hydrogen production is thermochemical cycles, but that involves much higher temperature than existing reactors, as well as handling such wonderful chemicals as vaporized sulfuric acid at 850 C. No one has ever made this work economically.
Yes, ofc it's total cost that matters. Efficiency matters in so far as it contributes. And yes, I mean thermochemical cycles but there are a ton of different such reaction pathways in the literature which vary in what kind of chemicals they require.
And the reason efficiency is a pretty big here is that you are proposing to use hydrogen as energy storage to even out the variability in renewable production. That means you are inevitably going to have the usual losses associated with combustion based energy generation on top of any losses involved in the production of the hydrogen. Once you take all that into account I'm very skeptical it's competitive for providing the kind of reliable power generation needed to keep the grid stable.
Now, it's quite possible that the much lower cost of renewable production will still be cheaper than nuclear even for reliable power generation combined with some other kind of power storage scheme (eg maybe distributed storage, smattering of pumped hydro, some large chemical batteries etc etc) but I'm very skeptical it will be hydrogen.
I mean I've never even heard anyone suggest onsite energy storage as a reason for hydrogen because of the cost. The use case that motivated plans for a hydrogen economy was always about transporting it and using it as a high energy density (J/kg) replacement for fossil fuels.
“ Biodiversity loss has financial impacts: The cost of recent losses of ecosystem services has been estimated at USD 4 trillion–USD 20 trillion per year. Land degradation is estimated to cost USD 6 trillion–USD 11 trillion per year, and oceanic degradation USD 200 billion per year.6, 7, 8”
This seems high but if it is true, even within an order of magnitude, it would behoove economists to take these numbers seriously in GDP calculations. If the US is losing midwestern soil at these values, at what point does the bank run out and real economic damage is done to the economy? Ten years? Twenty? Do we have $100,000,000,000,000 worth of soil to run through?
See https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/insights/portfolio-insights/sustainable-investing/the-economic-importance-of-biodiversity/
That's a good point.
While biodiversity loss no doubt has negative economic effects not only am I also skeptical of the estimates, I fear things like this do far more harm than good. Even the non-scienticicly literate reader is going to realize this piece isn't a serious attempt to quantify an economic harm but is an advocacy piece that is delibrately picking a broad category (biodiversity) to rig the discussion to favor particular policies/conclusions.
It's not that the claims are per se wrong but it's like writing a piece in the context of US gun laws that quantified the economic harms to guns by including the harms from the war in Ukraine and deaths in failed states.
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I would love to know the true costs of various aspects of our modern world but as long as the incentives essentially never favor anyone arguing: actually there isn't much economic harm from losing X kinds of populations it makes it very hard to really figure out what makes sense. I think more clarity on that would help us out of the morass we are in where we all just throw up our hands bc it feels like merely living comfortable not to mention knowing where to focus efforts.
And it's extra frustrating bc maybe in this case it really is that big a deal and I just can't be sure.
Well keep in mind that MY primary reason to protect biodiversity is altruistic. It's just useful to point out that destroying biodiversity also does have *some* costs for humans.
Of course, that's the source of my frustration with these estimates. If I didn't think there were real costs to losing some kinds of biodiversity I wouldn't care.
I care because I fear it diverts our efforts into general feel good policies rather than where they will make the most difference to the next generation and encourage a kind of general skepticism about the idea.
I want the hardheaded version where we call out some things as wasteful or not that helpful because I think it will help us convince more ppl it matters and focus effort on the most impactful areas.
"Seems high but true" Your argument is based on a model of biodiversity which again feeds into a model of soil degradation, which again feeds into a model of economic impact and so on. The uncertainties in these models has to be multiplied. The estimate is high and most likely untrue.
Agreed with this, although I will say it was a bit of a close call with Borlaug and the Green Revolution. One of the things that came across in Charles Mann's account of Borlaug's efforts is the role of contingency in its timing, and we got very lucky there - a decade's delay in its implementation was not implausible, and would have been very bad for world hunger.
The Green Revolution was actually a bunch of different technologies, of which Borlaug's wheat technology was only one. I think the biggest innovation was simply large-scale application of artificial fertilizer.
Thanks to convicted war criminal Fritz Haber. Talk about a mixed legacy.
"This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness."
This may be the first time I've seen your love of bunnies influence your writing. I approve.
Well, yeah, bunnies, but a lot of other animals too! :-)
Maybe Ehrlich was thinking of bunnies also when he came up with his fertility projections. In both cases, this seems to be not a good model for reality.
When you walk on the University of Minnesota campus, it has statues ready for the discovery as most campuses do. One of them is of an alumni named Norman Borlaug, an agronomist. While there are many metrics by which lists are made, Mr. Borlaug eventually won a Nobel Prize for his decades of efforts to bring the green revolution to the world. It can be reasonably argued that he led an effort that saved 1B lives. By that measure, one of the greatest people who ever lived and almost no one knows who he is. For the baseball aficionado he is key in the effort to bringing baseball to Mexico where the game has flourished. I wrote about him early in my Substack journey but bad forn to include links. Continue to love your writing.
Norman Borlaug blessed us with Fernandomania?
I got a big kick out of the baseball thing as I'm a fan. He was involved with little league baseball as his family spent a bunch of time working through the crossbreeding of dwarf wheat.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. Presumably had he not been doing it there would have been a greater chance someone else would have done it. And he built his work on that of earlier chemists and biologists. Should we say that Mendelev is responsible for all the lives saved by anything that uses modern chemistry?
Don't get me wrong, he deserves celebration. But I feel crediting him with saving a billion people undervalues all the people who contribute to basic research that enables these kind of advances.
More generally, I'm skeptical of this kind of moral luck based acclaim. One could equally we'll say the same thing about
Of course it is not completely accurate. The Nobel committee often splits the difference and acknowledges those who they felt made the difference. The problem of hunger and malnourishment, especially in the 3rd world was a big one during the period. I have no doubt there were a lot of people working the mix of problems. Leibniz developed calculus concurrent with Newton. It hardly means Newton is overrated :)
So happy to see you put the emphasis on non-human animals and habitat loss in this post Noah. The non-human world is one of the great lacunas in our collective consciousness. Notice how the recent COP meeting on biodiversity in Montreal only garnered a fraction of the attention of the climate COPs for example. Relatedly, a lot of folks have been led to believe that it is climate change that has inflicted much of the present damage on the natural world when in fact habitat destruction, inefficient agriculture, harvesting and invasive species have done most of it by far.
What is missing from the discussion is luck. Charles Mann in his book "The Wizard and the Prophet" lays out a compelling case that the success of the dwarf-stem wheat hybrid that Norman Borlaug created was by no measure a sure thing due to the unique genetics of wheat. While many point to the Green Revolution as proof of mankind's ingenuity and capacity to adapt to circumstances, my own view is that the world was very lucky that Borlaug achieved his breakthrough when he did. Exclusively due to his own perseverance, he was able to provide high-yield seed to Pakistan and India in 1968, the same year as The Population Bomb was published. Many of those who are eager to critique Ehrlich are too cavalier in my opinion to history. Hence I tend to be quite more pessimistic that high population growth areas in the world such as Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the poor parts of the Middle East will be able to avoid the perils that Ehrlich warned about.
It's fun to lionize Borlaug as a singular hero, and he does deserve it. But dwarf-stem wheat was only one of many inventions that characterized the Green Revolution. Rice production increased by as much as wheat production did, and corn by much more. This suggests that the most impactful innovations were things that could be applied to many different crops, such as artificial fertilizers and irrigation.
There is a debate as to why the Green revolution was successful in Asia not Africa. Western NGOs are regarded as the cause of crushing it in Africa.
Was it unsuccessful??
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/global-food?tab=chart&facet=none&Food=Maize+%28corn%29&Metric=Production&Per+Capita=false&country=ZAF%3BhideControls~NGA
I think so.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/global-food?tab=chart&facet=none&Food=Maize+%28corn%29&Metric=Production&Per+Capita=false&country=ZAF%3BhideControls~Africa~Asia
I think we'd need to look at more than one crop to decide this, and showing total African production consistently lagging total Asian production doesn't mean much when Asia's population has consistently been much greater than Africa's.
That is interesting.
The relative difference in pace is overdetermined.
Africa has more Holdridge life zones (combinations of climate, geography, and ecology, including water and temperature patterns, soils, plants, insects and fungi) than Asia, and similar areas are often "islanded", separated from each other by different ones. In Asia they shade into each other more, so adaptation is gradual.
An agronomy (set of crop varieties, irrigation methods, fertilizer applications, weed, pest, and fungus control methods and timings) that works in one area probably won't work in a nearby area with different temperatures, water availability, weeds, pests, and blights. So there was a lot more work to be done with less payoff.
Africa's soils are also poorer, as they are old, and they weren't recently replenished by glacier-created ground rock.
Transport is more difficult in Africa as it doesn't have long navigable rivers (except the Nile), and its weather is hard on roads and railways. It takes longer to set up systems (requiring new fertilizer and pesticide stores, machinery depots, etc.) for this reason alone.
Much of Africa depended on starchy tubers (cassava, yams) for calories, and it may be the case that these had less potential for yield improvement than cereals. (This is just a guess, I know no details.)
The cereals that were grown in various parts of Africa--millet, teff, sorghum, others--themselves may not have had the same potential for improvement as wheat, rice, and maize. (Again, guessing. Was the research done?)
In any case the sheer number and variety of crops and and geographies meant a lot more work would have been required to improve yields.
Certainly NGOs took the short cut of "persuading" farmers to plant Borlaug's new crops and use his methods instead of repeating Borlaug's work 100 times with African crop plants. Usually by questionable political methods, trying to get the new crops imposed top-down, which of course slowed things down immensely.
But blaming it all on western NGOs is oversimplifying heavily. It was always going to take longer in Africa.
However, one needs to consider that rice and corn may not be suitable for India and Pakistan agricultural lands, which then raise an issue of affordability and adequacy of transportation and distribution channels. You have made the point yourself that economists often focus on aggregates and neglect distributive effects. Furthermore, this argument understates the difficulty of creating and maintaining international political will to sustain food aid efforts.
While this is narrowly true, Borlaug led to breakthroughs in rice cultivation in India, Pakistan and China. He was far from a one-trick pony. Having a relative who served in the Peace Corp in India, Borlaug's name is synonymous there (as well as Pakistan) as one of the prime movers to modern agriculture with heavy emphasis on integrating Haber-Bosch based fertilizers that led to grand increases in crop yields. All of this was already in play in a different neighborhood where he grew up. A particularly good example of NIMBYism even when people were starving! South Asians are not consuming a lot of wheat. Finally, it is rare for the agronomist to shift into the world of politics and persuasion and play such a heavy role in changing approaches all around the globe. He is a fascinating and rare individual, much more than an agronomist. I would encourage all to learn more about him. Quite a figure. You sell him short with your less than accurate second sentence which is quite deceptive. His philosophical focus of his method was to make small plot farming (and even subsistence) prevalent around the world viable. Your conclusion about fertilizer / irrigation, likewise is merely a half-truth. The wild variation in corn yields was its unusual asexual cross-breeding that even Native Americans were practicing for centuries. Borlaug's approach and a similar dwarf, sturdy stem focus for rice was the key breakthrough as such a large subset of rice was lost wallowing in a paddy due to a weak stem. The wonder of science and progress we have today via CRISPR and other technologies can select the hundreds of slight adjustments Borlaug explored via trial and error at just the right time in history only shows that doomsayers sell short the next great human innovation efforts. The modern corn seeds have been evolved to the most absurdly strong and sturdy of stems possible with miniminzed leaves now planted in the best of soils only 8" apart.
If Borlaug hadn't succeeded then, do you think people would have just laid down and starved?
No. They would have tried something else.
The tech that wins is just the one that was cheapest, or that came first, or was lucky in some other way. The eventual winner isn't a sure thing, prospectively. So some folks imagine that solving the problem was a matter of luck.
But we can and do try lots of things. Will the solution to climate change be solar, wind, magnesium batteries, sodium batteries, lithium batteries, vanadium batteries, fusion, fission, demand response, grid interconnection, direct air capture, geoengineering, electric cars, hydrogen cars, alcohol fuel cell cars, cellulosic ethanol, etc., etc., etc.?
It'll be some of those! And/or something new. The story of the ones that win might look lucky in retrospect. But the failure of any one approach doesn't mean we're screwed. It just means that one of the other approaches wins instead.
I don't see that that rebuts Jeff's point. If Borlaug hadn't succeeded when he did, other people (and presumably Borlaug himself!) would've kept hammering away at alternative approaches, but those alternative approaches would, by definition, have taken longer to come to fruition. In the meantime more people would have starved (and perhaps even "laid down" first).
Jeff didn't claim that no one else would've tried alternatives if Borlaug hadn't got lucky, Jeff claimed that we're lucky that Borlaug hit pay dirt as soon as he did. Like, we're lucky that the Sinopharm BIBP, CoronaVac, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines turned out to basically work. That statement is not affected by pointing out that other vaccines also later turned out to work; time mattered.
The question is, how much longer? Delivering seeds the same year that the The Population Bomb was published sounded significant at first. But on reflection it seemed more coincidental. It's not like a collapse on the scale Ehrlich predicted was imminent at that point.
The larger point is that Ehrlich-types assume that *none* of the possible solutions help in a useful time frame. And that's a bad bet, because people *do* try different things. Focusing only on the approach that ended up succeeding obscures the depth and breadth of those possibilities.
Your COVID vaccine example is actually a case where multiple approaches worked out. Sure, we were lucky to have so many working options. But the fact that we tried so many different vaccine approaches so quickly wasn't luck at all.
We still would have had options even if only one of them worked. Or we would have had options (like non-pharmaceutical interventions) if none of the vaccine candidates worked!
Ehrlich was incorrect. The fact remains that luck is a significant factor. We can reduce the role of luck by exploring more plans at once ("that we tried so many different vaccine approaches so quickly wasn't luck at all") but this does not eliminate luck.
We ended up with 4 scalable COVID-19 vaccines at the end of 2020; if the universe were a tiny bit different we could've ended up with just 3, and in that case we would almost certainly have been worse off, and we could've ended up with 5, in which case we would almost certainly have been better off.
The larger point is that the universe can in fact foreclose options, and that can make us meaningfully worse off, because human ingenuity, while great and an important factor, is not boundless. There is not always an equally good Plan B waiting in the wings if Plan A turns out to fail, or a superior Plan E if Plans A, B, C, & D all kinda suck.
Well, now we're arguing about matters of degree. Luck can be a factor, yes. The universe can foreclose options, yes. Ingenuity isn't boundless, yes. An earlier solution is better than a later one, yes.
People who emphasize luck, doomers like Ehrlich, and the degrowth people sometimes seem to have an incomplete sense of just how many alternative possibilities there are. A history-based lens (like focusing on Borlaug's success) might encourage a view that outcomes are contingent, because the specific outcome often is.
A more science- or engineering-focused view might have looked at the amount of energy available (and the amount required) and concluded that *some* solution was likely. Solving climate change with alternative energy technologies is another example of this.
So maybe it's a two-cultures thing? Or maybe it's just an optimism vs. pessimism thing. But there does often seem to be a real information gap between the solution-focused folks and the problem-focused ones.
Well said. I am afraid many do not understand the difference between luck and persistence with trial and error, ie. the scientific method. The focus on yields in the American Midwest were coming to a crisis of oversupply and its was in many ways the Nixon grain deal coupled with detente that unleashed even more crop yield per acre breakthroughs. Corn and soybeans, suited to a PARTICULAR optimized climate and the EASIEST of plants to hybridize have led the way ever since in yields. Africa simply provided the wrong climate and conditions to join the bandwagon as easily as other locations I am afraid. Having studied, understood and heard Borlaug speak lends me to the conclusion as many seem to veer as some sort of one-trick pony. He offered a broad array of skills, organization and competence to his six decade effort to stem world hunger. He remained into his 90s a cogent voice explaining the wonders of GMO rather than conspiracy.
As a mostly retired engineer, I am struck by humanity in the scientific age has been largely successful at providing solutions for one degree of freedom problems. Climate, habitat loss and the rapid change in suitable crops in situ is a completely different class of problems this and the next generation will face. While I hope we can be up to the task, anyone who knows the difference between one degree of freedom problems (basic diffferential equations) and PARTIAL differential equations knows that the possible trial and error solutions multiply geometrically. As a resident of the upper Midwest, it is not lost on me that it has become reasonable to plant corn in North Dakota and even into southern Canada as the isotherms inexorably climb due to climate. Minnesotans are amidst the last generation to broadly enjoy a boreal forest as the trees of Northern Minnesota are simply wrong for our rapidly transitioning climate. These are a broadly different set of problems.
One simple observation is the Green Revolution emerged with heavy emphasis on the explosive growth in fertilizer use. Plant yields are high to a GREAT EXTENT due to fertilizer use. Next to carbon-based fuels, the nitrogen cycle will need to be tackled to keep global temperatures within a safe region. A classic statement of a problem where we cannot live without heavy fertilizer use but must reduce drastically or drive climate issues outside of a controllable loop.
For the record, I am a mostly retired control systems engineer. What my career taught me most was there are classes of problems we can control and those we cannot. The enemy of safety is when we allow relatively well understood systems operate with too much overshoot and just hope for the best.
The big lesson the mathematics of system control is that when ANY SYSTEM begins to approach regions where control is not readily managed, we shut it down as it is patently unsafe. Complex systems, like global climate (or even regional climates like the US Midwest) for which there is much we DO NOT UNDERSTAND are exactly the types of systems where there is a need to act conservatively. Predicting climate may be the largest number of degrees of freedom problem that we have ever tried to model on planet earth. What my career has taught me is that all sorts of closed systems behave abberantly when they approach the boundaries of uncontrollability. I believe the challenge of climate is VERY INTERESTING because the clash of economic desires with scientific uncertainty make it likely we will cross some thresholds without pumping the brakes in time. It will be the classic clash of possibility with the human condition.
We may be "arguing about matters of degree" but we are not JUST arguing about that. (That's right, I not only disagree but disagree about whether we disagree, I got LAYERS.)
You're looking down your nose at a "history-based lens" through which "outcomes are contingent" and contrasting it with a "science- or engineering-focused view", and speculating about people adopting the former view because they're deficient in good ol' STEM information. I reject that absolutely.
I reject the disdain for the idea that contingency and luck matter, and reject your posited "information gap" as self-serving hokum (I could just as easily relabel your "solution-focused folks" as complacent, glib luck-deniers suffering from an "information gap" about how bad things could get).
I really scratch my head at how someone ends up thinking that this could be a "two-cultures thing". To my knowledge, none of the key "[p]eople who emphasize luck" or "doomers" in this immediate dispute comes from an arts/humanities background. Paul Ehrlich was a professor of biology and his co-author Anne Ehrlich is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford's biology department (https://news.stanford.edu/expert/anne-ehrlich/). Noah has a physics degree and an economics degree (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nquixote/cv.pdf). None of these 3 people, AFAIK, have any kind of arts/humanities degree.
I can't speak for you and Jeff, and I don't wish to delve into my background here (though you might be able to guess from my back catalog: https://splained.substack.com/archive), but I've spent a lot of time talking to lots of physicists and STEM students, and in my experience they believe more strongly on average in anthropogenic global warming and its seriousness than non-STEM people. People who do scientific research are ACUTELY aware of how much contingency and luck feed into their research; as they say, if you could be sure of the answer going in, it wouldn't be research.
I think Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about luck as a factor that matters in the success equation.
Still, yes, we get very lucky at times.
Maybe so, but as far as I can tell, Paul Erlich isn’t arguing that luck saved us. In his 90s, he still seems to be claiming that the doom he predicted is still just around the corner.
It is indeed.
Let's see how things evolve from this point.
“Luck swallows everything.”
— Galen Strawson
You can 'degrow' the economy and still ruin the planet
When I heard predictions about the future in the 60s and 70s--which did not come true--I realized that that those linear measurements did not reconcile the nature of human knowledge and achievement. Scientific advances, knowledge, and experience have effects which are exponential, not linear. In other words, those (incomplete) predictions are based on a linear timeline assuming that the knowledge of the past will march along in a straight line. Loved your article!
"one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions." Watch out - Noah is a declared techno-optimist. Which error does tecno-optimists make? Presume that technology's historic capability to provide solutions to historic problems implies the capablity of future technology to provide solutions to (different) future problems. No better than Ehrlich.
I am a techno-optimist because of the evidence, not out of faith! You have the direction of causality reversed here.
Which evidence?
Technology's long record of solving hard problems. The Green Revolution is an obvious case. Vaccine development just saved many millions of lives (and of course saved many more in the past). Those are just two of a long long line of examples. And the recent massive cost drops in renewable energy suggest that once again, technology has come through for us.
𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘴.
Past performance is no indication of future results. Seems you are making the same type of error as Ehrlich: pasting past trends onto the future.
Most of human history has been static or declining technological ability. To assume we can innovate forever; innovate out of every problem; is naive.
Yes, there are nice examples from the past. But these are not evidence that tehno-optimism is valid - in the sense that future technology will anyhow solve any future problem (before it is too late). Techno-optimism is a faith - we simply cannot know. This uncertainty may make degrowth a better bet than techno-optimism.
Tech pessimists block all of the data points that validate optimism as more than just a recent trend. When people freak out about viruses and the possibility of vaccines, it is great to remind the negative folks we've only been doing vaccines for 220 years. It is estimated that 300m people died in the 20th century from SMALLPOX, 3x as many as the world wars combined! SMALLPOX was eradicated and it had been the bane of existence at least going back to the Egyptians! Smallpox vaccinatioon took 170 of those 220 years to get to the finish line. Technology can take a bow. Vaccine development has entered the exponential region of the curve. Lucky for us!
This reminds me of Y2K. We discussed the impending Y2K disaster in software development already in the 1980s. By 1998, the industry had begun investing heavily in Y2K mitigation. Development teams throughout the industry were identifying and correcting Y2K problems. By 1999, the investment must have been in the billions.
When 1 Jan 2000 rolled around, I, along with many other engineers, was on 24hr call. I got no calls. Y2K was a big meh. I, and thousands of others, breathed a long sigh of relief as hundreds of thousands of fixes averted a disaster. The rest of the world laughed at the apparently needless panic over a non-event. What a waste of concern, they said. But the insiders knew that the world had dodged a devastating bullet.
The Y2K phenomenon is relevant to Ehrlich. He inspired remedial thinking, not as direct, perhaps, as Y2K, but folks began to look at global development in a new way. His crystal ball was wrong, but he inspired a way of thinking that will save us.
Yep, I occasionally read accounts suggesting that because Y2k bug didn’t happen, that was proof it was overblown, ignoring the fact that every organization’s software engineering team was working on fixing the bug and testing systems for years. It was so ubiquitously spoken about that any regular newspaper reader was tired of reading about it.
I, too, was a software developer who was on 24 hour call for Y2K. The company I worked for devoted MANY months over 2 years of effort to Y2K-proof the software. If they hadn't, their software would have failed for weeks or months, bringing lots of businesses to a standstill.
If you look at the graphs in the article the changes (decreasing fertility and increasing food production) were underway globally before his book came out. The only thing Ehrlich inspired was first panic and then ridicule.
The problem with successful prevention is that those who aren't involved in the effort see only the world operating as normal. They then conclude the prevention was wasted effort. (We're seeing this dramatically around COVID. "If we have a vaccine, why do we still have deaths?" Answer: "We had a million deaths whereas we were projected to have 3 million without a vaccine." But no one sees the 2 million deaths that were averted.)
“This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness.”
Hmm. My doggie is loving and playful. His favourite play is MURDERING his squeaky toy, and he’s also never happier than when killing rats. I’m not sure bunnies (❤️❤️❤️) are the right sample to generalize from to the whole animal population.
The biodiversity being threatened is mostly not mammas anyway ( and it’s mostly threatened by habitat loss which is not directly related to climate change, although expanding solar and wind farms will cause habitat loss) it’s mostly insects reptiles and sea life, so the love playfulness and kindness are not much of a factor anyway.
mammas -> mammals
Again, a gloss of “progress” with no mention of the downsides. The Green Revolution of a souped-up wheat variety requires previously unheard-of amounts of fertilizer and water. The petrochemical/corporate farming industry is more than happy to continue greater consumption of hydrocarbons and desertification of vast tracts of soil via irrigation. The chemical runoffs poison our biggest river systems, creating an ever-growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, to say nothing of the salts precipitating into soil horizons from irrigation of semi-arid areas that shouldn’t be farmed. Once you kill off enough bacteria in the soil via osmosis, desertification begins. There is a reason Darwin spent the last 20 years of his life studying earthworms and formation of soil. If scientists acknowledged how long it takes for one inch of new soil to be created and the current rate of lost soil/agricultural land, they couldn’t justify their creation of agrochemicals, pesticides, etc. and their participation in corporate farming. We’re repeating the centuries-old trend of eroding civilizations -- the difference being that with the “advancement” of science we should know better. Mono-cropping agricultural land, killing off pollinating insects (arthropods largest biomass on the planet) via insecticides, exhausting fresh-water acquirers to accelerate desertification (75% of pivot irrigation water is lost to evaporation on a hot summer day), is a recipe for disaster. With all-time record heatwaves, droughts and high winds, the amount of annual soil lost is accelerating. Why is all this excluded from analysis of future trends? More people than ever before are forced to migrate because of climate change, and this will only worsen unless we start to question corporate farming and supposed “scientific advances.” Sure, the “Population Bomb” was wrong, but only because it measured the wrong things.
Great article and much needed perspective. Brings to mind the predictions of Thomas Malthus in his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population.