Technology and the environment: the case for optimism

I want to make three main points. First, we are habitually too pessimistic about the environment. Second, the invention of new technology is not necessarily a threat to the environment; rather it is usually the best hope of environmental improvement. And third, pessimism about new technology and the environment can itself be harmful.

I am not saying that every environmental trend in every place and at every time is benign; there are plenty of things that are getting worse. Nor am I saying that technology cannot have bad environmental side effects. It can. What I am saying is that we often overlook how many environmental features are improving; and even more we overlook how those improvements are caused by new technology.

I realise that even to make these mild claims is highly unfashionable. Indeed, they are so against the conventional wisdom that they might be termed heresy. I know what happens to heretics: my ancestral relation, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, was burnt at the stake in Oxford for his views. I use the term heresy deliberately: showing your concern for the environment has become one of the superstitions and dogmas of our age. To bring reason to bear on it is considered bad form.

In good faith

It was a faith I used to believe in. I joined Friends of the Earth. I had that old red and yellow 'Atomik-kraft nein danke!' sticker on the bumper of my first car. I was a true product of the 1970s, and right into the late 1980s I regarded myself as a mainstream environmentalist, if not by then an active one. I still regard myself as an environmentalist but I often find myself in almost diametrical disagreement with most of those who professionally use that title. I don't remember exactly what changed my mind but one influence was the work of two American economists whom I encountered when living in Washington in the late 1980s - Julian Simon and Aaron Wildavsky, now sadly both dead.

Julian Simon was a man obsessed with statistics. He was never caught out with an unchecked fact. Laboriously he compiled thousands of graphs and charts to demonstrate his belief that the world was getting better not worse. He discovered, of course, that facts are much less persuasive than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used by those he was arguing against. Pessimism just makes better box office than optimism. For centuries we have taken doom mongers more seriously than starry-eyed optimists. It just seems to be in our nature. It is no more realistic to ask greens to stop being apocalyptic than it was to ask a 16th century puritan to stop preaching hellfire and damnation.

Yet, for centuries the doom mongers have been wrong. Look at the statistics: life expectancy increasing, deaths from hunger falling, medical treatment improving, age-corrected cancer mortality declining, air quality improving almost everywhere, water quality improving in most rivers and lakes, rate of loss of tropical rain forest falling rapidly, net loss of land to desert now officially zero, energy use per unit of GDP falling rapidly, and so on. Most things are getting better most of the time.

What is always getting worse, apparently, is the future. Predictions remain pessimistic. Remember acid rain and how it was going to destroy forests all across Europe and North America? By 1986, the UN reported that 23% of all trees in Europe were moderately or severely damaged by acid rain. What happened? They recovered. The biomass stock of European forests actually increased during the 1980s. The damage all but disappeared. Forests did not decline; they thrived. Ditto in North America: 'There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain,' concluded the official, independent study.

Scare tactics

Yet did you read this in the press? Again and again, we find that the initial scare is given far more coverage than the later climb-down. H.L. Mencken once said: 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safetv - bv menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary'.

Incidentally, not everybody got everything wrong. One quotation from the 1970s was actually rather prophetic.

'Who knows what will be the next [environmental concern] to attract public attention? Perhaps it will be the problems of changing world climate'. That was written by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh in 1977.

The fact that so many past predictions were wrong should give us pause for thought about global warming. Even if the models of predicted climate change prove accurate (and given the accuracy of two-day weather forecasts, I have my doubts about 100 year climate forecasts), there is a massive bias towards pessimism in the reporting of its likely effects. Buried in Nature magazine recently was a report that rising temperatures around Heard Island in the Antarctic Ocean have resulted in dramatic increases in the numbers of breeding animals: king penguins are up from three pairs in 1947 to 25,000 pairs today, Heard Island cormorants are back from the brink of extinction and far seals now number 28,000 pairs. Imagine how much coverage would have been given to the story if those trends were in the other direction.

I'm not saying global warming will not bring some bad results for conservation or for human-kind. I'm just saying it will also bring some good results and people are not nearly so interested in studying or reporting them. The mother of all howlers was the prediction of future scarcity of resources in the 1970s. The view that the oil, the food and the minerals were going to run out shortly was not confined to cranks. It was something we almost all believed. The Club of Rome, which published Limits to Growth in 1970 said total global oil reserves amounted to 550 billion barrels. 'We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade', said President Jimmy Carter. Sure enough, between 1970 and 1990 the world indeed used 600 billion barrels of oil. So, according to the Club of Rome, reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels - not counting the tar shales.

The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc. In every case, it said finite reserves of these minerals were approaching exhaustion and prices would rise steeply. In every case except tin, known reserves have actually grown since the report; in some cases they have quadrupled.

Food fact-finding

The record of mis-predicted food supplies is even worse. Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968: 'The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death'. And his book was a bestseller. He was not alone. Lester Brown of the World-watch Institute began predicting that population would soon outstrip food production in 1973 and still does so. He's in the papers every time there is a temporary increase in wheat prices. So far he has been wrong for 28 years. The facts on world food production are startling for those who have only heard the doomsayers' views. Since 1961, the population of the world has more than doubled, but food production has increased even faster. As a result, food production per head has risen by over 20% since 1961. Nor is this improvement confined to rich countries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, calories consumed per capita per day are 27% higher in the third world than they were in 1963. Incidentally, both Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich were given genius awards by the Mac-Arthur Foundation.

Global 2000 was a report to the president of the United States written in 1980 by a committee of the great and the good. It predicted that population would increase faster than world food production, so that food prices would rise by between 35% and 115% by the year 2000, Instead the world food commodity index fell by 55%.

Why are these Malthusian predictions so spectacularly wrong? After all, resources are limited and at some point we will surely run out of them. We optimists have been compared to the man who said 'So far so good' as he fell past the tenth floor of the skyscraper. The answer brings me to the second part of my argument: the invention of technology. Julian Simon argued, and I believe we need to start taking him seriously, that almost no resource is actually finite. He used to say that, 'Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air'. He meant that everything we use, whether it is food or oil or copper or clean water, can be made more abundant by applying ingenuity to its extraction and use. And that is what we keep doing. By plant breeding, we make agricultural land a more productive resource. By inventing offshore drilling we discover reserves of gas we did not think were there. By inventing fibre-optic cables, we replace copper cables. In all cases, the size of the resource depends on the technology used to exploit it.

Substitution is especially important. If a resource becomes scarce, its price rises and substitutes are quickly found. Oil was first drilled in the 19th century because whale oil was getting expensive. Coal was first mined for industrial purposes because the 16th century British cast-iron industry was running short of wood. According to the latest theories, the reason agriculture was first invented in the Middle East 9,000 years ago was not because nobody had thought of it before but that wild game was getting scarce. Notice in all three cases that the invention of a substitute technology saved a so-called renewable, sustainable, natural resource by replacing it with a so called finite one. Whales, woods and wild game may be renewable, but they are much more easily exhausted than oil, coal or soil. After all, we now know that a few thousand people, armed with a simple stone tool kit, took just 300 years between 13,200 years ago and 12,900 years ago to wipe out all the mammoths and giant ground sloth in North America. Not much modern technology there.

Human invention

The Italian academic Cesare Marchetti has produced a wonderful graph which shows how humanity's source of primary power has gradually shifted from wood to coal to oil to gas during the last century and a half. Each of these fuels is successively richer in hydrogen and poorer in carbon than its predecessor, so we seem to be moving towards using pure hydrogen. Presumably, we will be making it from water or natural gas with some kind of cheap electricity perhaps from nuclear power.

In other words, de-carbonisation of the world economy, accompanied by a shift from dirty to cleaner technologies, is occurring without any political direction. It is driven by human inventiveness. These kinds of ideas are derided by environmentalists as 'technical fixes'. They would much prefer that we cut CO 2 emissions at source. Yet actually it was technical fixes that saved the whales, the woods and the wild game before.

I predict that we will survive global warming and that we will do so no thanks to treaties, global energy policies, or consumer restraint. Instead we will de-carbonise our economy with new inventions. Inventions that the environmental movement will mostly oppose. For instance, the shift to natural gas in power generation was almost universally derided by greens as a dangerous move: the notorious 'dash for gas'. Why? Gas does not need men working underground in black tunnels; it does not spill and make slicks; it is the least carbon rich fossil fuel of all; it can be transported very cheaply in pipes; it can be burned in combined cycle turbines producing 20 or 30% more conversion efficiency than any other fuel. And, above all, it does not require the despoliation of the landscape with forests of hideous, uneconomic, unreliable, unecological, taxpayer-subsidised, concrete hungry, golden-eagle chopping wind turbines. To replace natural gas with solar, wind, hydro or tidal power, with their insatiable demands on large acreages of our precious landscapes, would not, in my view, be green.

Our precious landscape

This is the vast benefit of fossil fuels: that they spare the landscape. Because we have them, we don't need to cook over wood fires, to dam streams for water mills, to grow hay for bullocks to cart our goods to market. So despite 55 million people crammed into a small island we can afford to leave many of our woods for nature, our streams for fishing and our paddocks for horseyculture. To try to turn the clock back to the medieval pattern of local renewable energy in the name of sustainability would do more harm than good.

If this is true of power generation, it is doubly true of agriculture. We have heard a lot recently about the supposed drawbacks of intensive agriculture. Like intensive power production, so intensive agriculture spares the landscape. There is no doubt that the green revolution helped us to produce vastly more food from every acre than we could have dreamed about two generations ago: hybrid seeds, inorganic fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. They are responsible for the failure of Lester Brown's and Paul Ehrlich's neo-Malthusian predictions. They have fed the world with more and more food at less and less cost. As a result modern farming is less land-hungry than its predecessors. Hunter-gathering needs about 5,000 acres to support a human being in a temperate climate. Short fallow organic agriculture needs about ten acres. Intensive, conventional agriculture needs about one acre. Hydroponic, artificially- lit greenhouses can feed 1,000 people from an acre.

According to the economist Indur Goklany, had technology and yield been frozen at 1961 levels, then producing as much food as was actually produced in 1998 would have required increasing the acreage farmed from 12.2 billion acres to 26.3 billion acres or from 38% to 82% of global land area. That would have meant destroying forests, draining swamps, irrigating deserts and exterminating species on an unimaginable scale.

In those 37 years India, for example, doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, but increased its cultivated land acreage by only five per cent. Its area devoted to woodland expanded by more than 20%. The tiger survived - thanks entirely to the intensification of agriculture. As Goklany has put it: 'By reducing hunger, agricultural technology has not only improved human welfare and reduced habitat loss, but has made it easier to view the rest of nature as a source of wonder and not merely as one's next meal or the fire to cook it with. It also decreased the socio-economic cost of conservation'.

That is a point we can appreciate in this country. The very fact that we can have a vigorous debate about the future of the countryside is testament to the value of agricultural intensification. If food was still produced at low intensity by traditional methods, we would not have the luxury of choosing other uses of the land - hobby farming, say, or conservation. Commercial farming would outbid every other use as it did in the 1950s.

Using hydroponics, inorganic fertiliser, electric light and genetic modification we could in theory feed the entire world from a multi-storey farm the size of Wales. The rest could be returned to wildlife conservation. I don't think it will go that far. I think there will always be a market for local produce and for food produced in traditional ways. I hope there is, because I like that kind of food. But I have no illusions that my preference is good for the planet; it is the most selfish thing I could do. The people who deserve our accolades for saving the planet are not the hair-shirted ones wandering around saying 'Woe is us!', but the much maligned white-coated nerds of Monsanto who are steadily reducing the land we need for agriculture.

Private and public innovation

It is true that islands of nature do not do well in a sea of intensive exploitation. National parks, whether in Africa or Yellowstone, arouse resentment among local people who have to put up with the depredations of wildlife on their livelihoods. But a lot of this is a matter of ownership. National parks suffer from the same problems of neglect and under investment as anything that belongs to the state. Where entrepreneurs are encouraged to provide refuges for nature privately, a very different ethos prevails. I am arguing that we can soon afford to have islands of exploitation in a sea of nature, rather than the other way round.

I suggest that by far the most powerful influence on how we treat our environment is not how much we care, nor how much we pass laws, but what technology we invent. You only have to remember the fuel protests of last year [2000] to see how hard it is going to be either to tax people out of their cars or to shame them out of their cars. However, it would be a doddle to tempt them out of their cars if we had better transport running on clean fuel. The innovation does not have to be driven by a green motive. Indeed, when it is, we will be faced with nonsenses like wind power.

I cannot emphasise this point too strongly. The environmental movement is perpetually chastising us for our profligacy and urging us to be more ascetic and to return to older ways. Given what we know about human nature, and given the lessons of ascetic movements in the past, this will not succeed. We'll throw a party on the eve of Armageddon. My point is that it is the wrong sermon anyway. Six billion people going back to nature would simply destroy nature. But as we become more affluent, more technologically dependent and more isolated from nature, so we can afford to look after nature. We can afford to spare the money, the time, the landscape and the energy. Six billion people could feed and fuel themselves comfortably and return most of the planet to wildlife. It may seem a deeply paradoxical idea to today's greens but it deserves a fair hearing.

Writing the rules

Okay, you say, but innovation itself is driven by regulation. People invent clean technologies only when they must comply with legal limits on pollution. So what we need to do is to draw up strict rules for protecting the environment and force inventors to help us meet them. There is a limited truth in this but a legal pollution limit effectively acts as a free licence to pollute so long as the polluter keeps below the limit. He has no incentive to drive his emissions even lower. The US introduced tradeable emissions in its 1990 clean air act precisely to address this issue - to internalise the externalities as the jargon goes. Bad polluters would have to buy permits from better polluters who could thereby profit from driving down their emissions. As the Washington correspondent of The Economist at the time, I covered the debate. Environmentalists were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the scheme - only the Environmental Defence Fund was prepared to support it. The idea of polluters buying their way out of their obligations appalled them. It offended against the creed of asceticism. Yet in practice it worked well because the polluters were far more keen on being sellers than buyers of pollution permits. So emissions reduction went farther and faster and cheaper than anybody had predicted. In effect, where polluters had previously argued that emission control was too expensive, the new system called their bluff.

Inventions that seem to have nothing to do with the environment are often of the greatest significance. Consider silicon. Large chunks of the world economy now depend on manipulating electrons in silicon wafers. This invention has done much for communication, automation and computing. It is hard to think of a more benign trend from the environmental point of view. Silicon is superabundant; it is cheap; its products are light to transport: its production carries few and small pollution risks; its power demands are low. And it has freed many of us from work in heavy industry, where we generated worse environmental problems. In the north-east of England where I live, I now drive my children to school through the same suburbs as my parents drove me to school. When I was a boy, each morning we would pass the pit at Seaton Bum just as the night shift was coming above ground: men with soot-black faces with lamps on their helmets. Today we pass commuters heading for a call centre (and fewer people are unemployed). It may not be a great place to work but it beats digging coal 300 feet below ground.

Why the precautionary principle is wrong

Or consider pesticides. In the 1940s, the commonest insecticide was a compound of arsenic, lethal to humans and birds as well as insects. It was replaced by DDT, harmless to people, but because of its persistence in the environment it had knock-on effects for otters and hawks. DDT was replaced in turn by synthetic pyrethroids, which persist in the environment for only a short time and kill only target species. So otters and hawks have returned. Pyrethroids are being replaced by genetically modified plants that produce a natural pesticide from inside the plant, cutting out the need for sprays and reducing the collateral impact on non-target species to almost nil. Only, of course, Greenpeace does not want this improvement, so the rest of us may not be allowed to have it either.

However, it is much easier to see how technological innovation has reduced our impact on the landscape and the environment. That is what is so painfully wrong with the precautionary principle. Now, you say, he has surely gone too far. What can be wrong with taking a precautionary approach to the future? Better safe than sorry. What is wrong with it is simply this: it ignores the risk of doing nothing. Had we not improved agriculture we would have faced a stark choice between famine and the cultivation of all wild land. Had we not drilled for oil in the 1860s, we would have wiped out the whales. Standing still is not a risk-free option. It is precisely because today's technology is too dirty and dangerous that we must encourage inventors to improve on it. And that has been true ever since technology consisted of a stone-tipped spear capable of felling a mammoth.

If the world is getting better all the time for nature, why are species still going extinct? Why are habitats under threat? Why is pollution getting worse in some places? Not because we are using more technology, but because there are more of us. Population growth, especially in the third world, brings pressure to bear on the environment and on resources. As somebody who loves wild places, I will not deny that the world would be a nicer place with fewer people, but I am not volunteering for euthanasia and nor, I notice, are most environmentalists. The misanthropy that many of them nonetheless express, verges on the criminal. Garrett Hardin, a much admired eco-guru, has said, 'Freedom to breed is intolerable'.

Remarks like that are intolerable but that is not the worst of them. They are also unnecessarily pessimistic. By a miracle the graph of world population is gradually flattening out. I say a miracle because as a zoologist I find it immensely surprising that any species could be capable of voluntarily limiting its fecundity. Yet the facts are undeniable. There is no need for coercion to achieve population control. In every nation on earth, when prosperity and freedom reach a certain level, the 'demographic transition' occurs and birth rates fall rapidly. It happened here about a century ago. It is happening in Bangladesh and Kenya now. As a result, estimates of peak world population in the mid-21st century have been falling steadily for 40 years. Where once we thought there would be 15 billion and rising, we now expect only nine billion and falling. All you have to do to make this happen is reduce infant mortality, improve living standards, encourage female education and allow access to family planning - was there ever an easier policy to adopt?

Of course nine billion is still a great deal but there is absolutely no evidence that it is unsustainable, that it is beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Quite the reverse: all the evidence suggests that we can feed and fuel that number with ease and still increase the land devoted to conservation.

The language of fatalism

Well, you may say, he can only afford his optimism because of the good work the environment movement has done over the years to raise public consciousness and to generate concern for the environment. To some extent I am prepared to concede this point. Especially on the subject of species in danger of extinction, consciousness-raising is important. But I fear that the environment movement has too often promulgated a counsel of despair. It has spoken of an, uncontrolled population explosion; of an 'inevitable' famine; of an 'irreversible loss of rain forest'; of a permanent climatic catastrophe, of a total exhaustion of natural resources. This is the language of fatalism. It has all too often given the impression that because of ecological limits, we must now prevent the poor using exactly the tools that enriched the rich - technology and free trade. Steeped in false nostalgia for a supposedly better past, it has told us to retreat, not to press ahead. This is not just flying in the face of facts. It is also disgracefully complacent. It ignores the cost of standing still.

Joseph Schumpeter once pointed out that in the early 19th century, those economic giants Malthus, Mill and Ricardo were all agreed that economic stagnation was imminent and that the law of diminishing returns was about to cramp economic progress forever. Yet they stood on the threshold of a wave of progress that has generated 10 times the population, twice the life expectancy and 100 times the wealth, yet with pollution getting better not worse. Do we have to repeat their complacent mistake?

So there you have the heresy. I think it possible to be in favour of saving the planet without being a pessimist or an enemy of new technology. I predict that in 2050 the nine billion people in the world will have a far better living standard than today; large parts of Scotland and Brazil will be managed wilderness devoted to wildlife and recreation; the air in Bangkok will be cleaner than today; most cars will run silently on hydrogen fuel cells; fossil fuels will be barely needed; GM crops will grow in butterfly-rich fields. Oh yes, and we will have dismantled every last wind turbine in Wales.