We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously
We’ve just had the best decade in
human history. Seriously
Little of this made the news, because good news is no news
Let nobody tell you that the
second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through
the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty
has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It
was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa
and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child
mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct;
malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.
Little of this made the news,
because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since
I wrote The Rational Optimist in
2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great
recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly
say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad
things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it
has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even
starry-eyed me.
Perhaps one of the least
fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological
footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more
sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our
population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take
from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee,
recently documented this in a book called More from
Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff:
less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less
stuff overall.
This does not quite fit with what
the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir
David Attenborough say: ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on
a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist’, ask him
this: ‘But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ For
example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminum, much of it
recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the
latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources
consumed per drink.
As for Britain, our consumption
of ‘stuff’ probably peaked around the turn of the century — an achievement that
has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris
Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the
UK was now using not just relatively less ‘stuff’ every year, but absolutely
less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources
consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals,
minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between
2000 and 2017, from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That’s a faster decline than the
increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.
If this doesn’t seem to make
sense, then think about your own home. Cell phones have the computing power of
room-sized computers of the 1970s. I use mine instead of a camera, radio,
torch, compass, map, calendar, watch, CD player, newspaper and pack of cards. LED
light bulbs consume about a quarter as much electricity as incandescent bulbs
for the same light. Modern buildings generally contain less steel and more of
it is recycled. Offices are not yet paperless, but they use much less paper.
Even in cases when the use of
stuff is not falling, it is rising more slowly than expected. For instance,
experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the
year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted.
Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed
more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.
Until recently, most economists
assumed that these improvements were almost always in vain, because of rebound
effects: if you cut the cost of something, people would just use more of it.
Make lights less energy-hungry and people leave them on for longer. This is
known as the Jevons paradox, after the 19th-century economist William Stanley
Jevons, who first described it. But Andrew McAfee argues that the Jevons
paradox doesn’t hold up. Suppose you switch from incandescent to LED bulbs in
your house and save about three-quarters of your electricity bill for lighting.
You might leave more lights on for longer, but surely not four times as long.
Efficiencies in agriculture mean
the world is now approaching ‘peak farmland’ — despite the growing number of
people and their demand for more and better food, the productivity of
agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking
amount of land. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his
colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 percent less
land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050,
it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the
plough and the cow.
Land-sparing is the reason that
forests are expanding, especially in rich countries. In 2006 Ausubel worked out
that no reasonably wealthy country had a falling stock of forest, in terms of
both tree density and acreage. Large animals are returning in abundance in rich
countries; populations of wolves, deer, beavers, lynx, seals, sea eagles and
bald eagles are all increasing; and now even tiger numbers are slowly climbing.
Perhaps the most surprising
statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the
Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK’s economy has
almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 percent, total
primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 percent.
Much of that decline has happened in recent years. This is not necessarily good
news, Constable argues: although the improving energy efficiency of light
bulbs, airplanes and cars is part of the story, it also means we are importing
more embedded energy in products, having driven much of our steel, aluminum and
chemical industries abroad with some of the highest energy prices for industry
in the world.
In fact, all this energy-saving
might cause problems. Innovation requires experiments (most of which fail).
Experiments require energy. So cheap energy is crucial — as shown by the
industrial revolution. Thus, energy may be the one resource that a prospering
population should be using more of. Fortunately, it is now possible that
nuclear fusion will one day deliver energy in minimalist form, using very
little fuel and land.
Since its inception, the
environmental movement has been obsessed by finite resources. The two books
that kicked off the green industry in the early 1970s, The
Limits to Growth in America and Blueprint for
Survival in Britain, both lamented the imminent exhaustion of
metals, minerals and fuels. The Limits to Growth predicted
that if growth continued, the world would run out of gold, mercury, silver,
tin, zinc, copper and lead well before 2000. School textbooks soon echoed these
claims.
This caused the economist Julian
Simon to challenge the ecologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet that a basket of five
metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would cost less in 1990 than in 1980. The Stone Age
did not end for lack of stone, Simon said, arguing that we would find
substitutes if metals grew scarce. Simon won the bet easily, although Ehrlich
wrote the check with reluctance, sniping that ‘the one thing we’ll never run
out of is imbeciles’. To this day none of those metals has significantly risen
in price or fallen in volume of reserves, let alone run out. (One of my
treasured possessions is the Julian Simon award I won in 2012, made from the five
metals.)
A modern irony is that many green
policies advocated now would actually reverse the trend towards using less
stuff. A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent
system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the
generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or
concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the
exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions.
Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a
path to a cleaner, greener planet. We don’t need to veer off in a new
direction. If we do, we risk retarding progress.
As we enter the third decade of
this century, I’ll make a prediction: by the end of it, we will see less
poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world.
There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. Britons will be
richer, and each of us will use fewer resources. The global political future
may be uncertain, but the environmental and technological trends are pretty
clear — and pointing in the right direction.
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