Technology and the environment: the case for optimism

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'.