Cerebral Fodder

January 2006

Home

 

Environmental Confusions

a perspective

The debate heats up

by Jayant Deshpande

first appeared in

NEW Quest, No.162 (Oct-Dec 2005)

a quarterly journal of participatory inquiry

devoted to politics, culture, literature & society

 

"Is the world getting greener? Or are we selling it short for a fistful of greenbacks?" This is the simple rhetoric of a passionate environmentalist like Carl Pope, of the Sierra Club. He reflects the high passions that animate many who feel that our precious environment is being raped by cruel and insensitive men for monetary gain. Pope draws our attention to a report called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which notes that 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on Earth are in a degraded or overdrawn state. "That’s like a doctor telling you that 60 percent of your organs are failing," he says with alarm. Very recently, Pope was engaged in a debate with Bjørn Lomborg, whose work I discuss here.

 

Polar ice caps melting, ecosystems on life support, clean water disappearing; unusually severe and unusually frequent storms, floods, landslides, heat and cold waves, droughts (in places as unlikely as the Amazon rainforest), cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons—all these events have fuelled a certain frenzy among those who envision imminent collapse. Jared Diamond declares that "collapse is a consequence of 'ecocide'—environmental damage caused by deforestation, intensive agriculture, and the destruction of local flora and fauna." He has a kinship with Wes Jackson, whom I also discuss here. To this ecocide add industrial progress—feeding not only on age-old fossil fuels, but also gobbling up and causing damage to our surroundings—and the resulting fury of nature in the form of extreme weather only compounds the destruction.

 

Just as some predict ecocide, some others entertain visions of eco-nirvanas. In his book The Magic of Findhorn, Paul Hawken tells the story of Findhorn, a community in the north of Scotland, where a caravan site was transformed into an oasis of spiritual communion, and a rubbish dump blossomed into a Garden of Eden. There may well be a select few rural communities in India that fit this description. Writing in 1975, Hawken reflects: "Findhorn may be a manifestation of a light and power which could transform our planet within a lifetime, or it could be an illusory bubble on the troubled waters of the world civilization that will burst, leaving no traces." D.T. Suzuki, the Zen master and scholar, said the idea is to try and live with nature, not seek to conquer it. He contrasted East and West in this regard, using a metaphorical example: the former simply admires a flower in its natural state, while the latter feels the urge to pluck it. The whole idea behind cities is to conquer nature and create a human habitat. Cities flourish because they bring a focus on communications, and offer the excitement and creative opportunity that only a critical mass of human beings can provide. Yet they become inefficiently big, causing all sorts of problems, including pollution—Aristotle thought the ideal size for a city was 10,000 people. Given the phenomenal rise in the world's population since his time, I suppose that number would translate to something like one million or so today; though many are likely to think that even one million is larger than the ideal size for today.

 

The environment has always been a vexed and often confused subject, not to mention contentious. It brings into play a host of disciplines. But however complex a picture it presents, we can at least begin to paint it with broad, sober strokes to reveal the 'big' picture. I'd like to present both sides of this 'heated' debate.

 

The Lomborg Phenomenon

 

What we humans are running out of are not natural resources but 'proper' human resources. For want of a less clichéd phrase, our problem is that we have lost faith in civilized behavior. Bjørn Lomborg is the infamous author of the highly controversial work, The Skeptical Environmentalist, and has been branded by the Danish authorities as a heretic, Galileo-style. These are some of his words, criticizing the popular litany of gloom:

 

Instead of focusing on limits to growth, humanity would be better served by focusing on the real threats to growth and prosperity: not population growth or mineral exhaustion but corruption, barriers to trade, and war. Unfortunately, history has shown that these sources of human misery have always been in ample supply.

 

How relevant in today's war- and conflict-ridden world, where military diplomacy is in the ascendant. The materials of war, and the resulting destruction, have caused untold damage to the environment and the delicate ecological balance that sustains us. No proper assessment, if indeed that's possible, has been made of this loss and its long-term consequences.

 

Lomborg urges us not to scale back the use of the environment, but to use it as wisely as possible to gain—or recover—what we're trying to protect in the long run: clean air, land and water that will sustain us even as we grow and remain productive. In tune with Lomborg's cry for sanity, we might reflect on what the economist Friedrich von Hayek once said. Being a champion of free enterprise, von Hayek made this eye-opening observation: in principle a burgeoning population can lead to a greater, and better, division of labor, and thus higher levels of productivity, not merely a further division of existing wealth. Greater numbers, harnessed wisely, can lead to a kind of synergy.

 

Scientific American has been in the forefront of this controversy, though it has tended to side with scientists and environmentalists of the Greenpeace variety. Many of them think Lomborg's conclusions are misguided, that he's an optimistic statistician who presents no 'real' science to back his claims. They, on the other hand, marshal all sorts of hard scientific evidence to support their pessimism. Though Lomborg concedes that some of this evidence, like global warming and species loss, is valid, he tempers it with a positive outlook (Scientific American, May 2002):

 

"We have a world in which we live longer and are healthier, with more food, fewer starving, better education, higher standards of living, less poverty, less inequality, more leisure time and fewer risks. And this is true for both the developed and the developing world (although getting better, some regions start off with very little, and in my book I draw special attention to the relatively poorer situation in Africa). Moreover, the best models predict that trends will continue." And offers this example: "Take air pollution, the most important social environmental indicator. In the developed world, the air has been getting cleaner throughout the century—in London, the air is cleaner today than at any time since 1585! And for the developing countries, where urban air pollution undeniably is a problem, air pollution will likewise decline when they (as we did) get sufficiently rich to stop worrying about hunger and start caring for the environment."

 

And so he points out that even 30 years later the dire forecasts of the Club of Rome's study Limits to Growth have failed to come true. As far back as 1798, Thomas Malthus had predicted that human population growth would eventually outstrip the earth's food supply—most thinkers and economists today, including Lomborg, refute this theory.

 

With so many in the scientific community ganging up on Lomborg, you may well ask: Is this a kind of Inquisition in the 21st century, supposedly the apotheosis of the digital age, when more information on just about anything is available than at any other time in history? Information that allows us to make intelligent choices.

 

As though to defend Lomborg someone wrote to a broadcast network, "Believe the farce about global warming and I'll sell you some heating oil" in the context of the abnormal icy grip in which the Eastern U.S. found itself just a few years ago. Some argue of course that global warming around the earth in general is what leads to such extremes in local weather, hot or cold; moreover, such extreme events keep recurring. The recent flooding and massive destruction of property in Mumbai and New Orleans (and the adjacent Gulf coast) due to excessive rainfall and the force of a hurricane were certainly unusual events that would support their claim. That is supposedly the scientific view, though open to debate. Earthquakes and the tsunamis caused by them are powerful forces beyond our control. But the indiscriminate pollution of our air, land and water is undoubtedly man-made, over which we have control to a great extent.

 

Lomborg has had a chance to rebut—Scientific American, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal being among the venues—and clarify his position on the environment and human progress. He remains skeptical of doomsayers, and nurses an optimism regarding our future. The debate is polarized, with probably as many who believe in climate change and advocate remedial or preventive action as do not.

 

Global Warming and Climate Change are terms thrown about with great abandon by everyone these days, not always knowing their exact meaning. Being phenomena that take place over decades and centuries, they're not obvious to us on a day-to-day basis. They become apparent only when we're struck by extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts, severe storms with unusual frequency—the end products of a slow process. Are they merely symptoms of the earth's adjustment? Climate change is a planetary phenomenon, caused by any number of different factors, all contributing to distinct and physically measurable changes in the atmosphere and on land and sea surfaces. Global warming is one of these factors, resulting from the greenhouse effect: when fossil fuels are burnt they release CO2  (carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, and this gas absorbs and retains the sun's heat radiated back into the atmosphere from the earth's surface. In the broader sense, though, climate change would come about by irreversibly altering the natural environment, either through the overuse or abuse of raw materials and resources with a devil-may-care attitude, or simply by disturbing the ecological balance as we appropriate more and more land area—destroying the habitats of other creatures in the process—to satisfy our need for housing, economic development and recreation. This is what a critic would say: whatever the cause, we're not fully aware of the consequences. And worse, we're indifferent to them. The devastating effects of climate change are due as much to what happens to our surroundings as we go about our business, as to actual meteorological anomalies triggered by latent forces that have been building up in our atmosphere on account of our misdeeds. The only truth that remains is what we witness, and what we can study and verify through analysis and experiment. Climate change or not, it's incumbent on us as a race to not so much preserve what we have, but to conserve those resources necessary for our survival, and also to bring about distributive justice for all in terms of earth's bounty.

 

Lomborg believes we can do this without sounding an alarm, and without taking extreme measures in terms of conservation and arrested development. He does not deny that we have genuine environmental problems. But create wealth and remove poverty first, and you will automatically reduce pollution, he says. Another critic, Ronald Wright, argues that the real threat to global security is not terror, but the fact that half the world lives in dire poverty: on less than $2 a day—a breeding ground for deadly human pathogens of all kinds, social and biological. Man has become smarter but also myopic, reckless and aggressive. War has claimed around 160 million human lives in the 20th century alone. Man tends to do things that are great in the short run, but disastrous over the long term. Global capitalism is just a virulent strain that eats up precious resources for the privileged few, while endangering what remains for most of humanity. Economic prosperity is seductive till you realize that it's not sustainable—Wright believes there are limits to unbridled economic growth.

 

Will it be a race between technological solutions and Malthus' prediction that a burgeoning population will outstrip the earth's capacity to supply food? Malthus was convinced that there were natural limits to what we can do. Much more recently, the Club of Rome echoed his idea of limits on growth—population would be regulated by this limited capacity. Around the same time Paul Ehrlich also predicted that famines would stalk us. Again, von Hayek would refute the basic premise of Malthus' reasoning; he would insist that productivity matters more than population. In fact, that is how things turned out: India managed to feed itself; the U.S. kept shipping surplus grain. Amartya Sen points out that food is much cheaper today than in Malthus' time, and also cheaper than in recent decades. The late Peter F. Drucker, a versatile thinker and business theorist who considered himself a 'social ecologist', insisted that people—in particular, those  in any enterprise—are valuable resources, not just costs to be burdened with. Like von Hayek, technological optimists believe that standards of living will increase precisely because of rising population; a view championed by their progenitor, Ester Boserup, a Danish economist. Lomborg is in good company.

 

The popular writer, Michael Crichton is dead set against the idea of global warming as a 'problem', and in his book State of Fear, he marshals all sorts of evidence to discredit the global warming-climate change-mongers who place the highest priority on dealing with the emissions of greenhouse gases. Lomborg would applaud him—he says quite simply that the Kyoto protocol will only end up spending billions for decades to achieve just a marginal difference in the key indicators of the environment. He's convinced that the money will be better spent on Human Development Index (HDI) factors like clean water, eradication of disease, education, health care, housing, jobs, etc., which would lead to more responsible societies, that in turn would prevent harmful gas emissions that cause global warming in the first place. His emphasis falls on the opportunity cost of blindly following the Kyoto Treaty, that puts curbs on polluting industries in Thirld World countries, and hence on much-needed wealth creation. He believes that we should free up the resources before committing them to a mantra: STOP emitting gases, and thus STOP global warming and climate change—a mantra that may lead only to an unwarranted fear psychosis, a chimera that we worship at all costs. We can easily fall into the trap set by hype and an overestimation of the dangers.

 

Developing countries like India consume and pollute far less than, say, the U.S. Yet they need to industrialize and prosper so they can raise the general standard of living of their people, and lift as many out of poverty as possible. Arguably, they have a stronger moral claim on natural resources than America or Europe. To much of the developing world wealth creation through industry is an urgent necessity, but the concern to reduce emissions that pollute the environment or find ways to sequester the pollutants is not so urgent.

 

So the question is: which economic argument is on balance superior? How will the numbers turn out? What about unintended consequences? As a frightening example, the Aswan Dam in Egypt caused untold damage to the area's ecosystem, as have countless other dam projects throughout the world which have upset the local ecological balance.

 

The Carbon Trap

 

On the other side of the debate are predictable voices that express concern that it is pollution which must be controlled first, and that would automatically result in savings which in turn could be used for development and so on. But one scientific view is that even if we were to stop or substantially reduce emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, it would still take a long time to reverse the global warming resulting from existing greenhouse gases like CO2, since the oceans’ uptake of carbon is rather slow.

 

We're also trapped in a vicious cycle: more CO2 into the atmosphere means more warming; this in turn increases the demand for cooling systems, which of course requires more energy, and that obviously means burning more fossil fuels to generate even more CO2!

 

And consider this argument against the use of hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel for cars on a large scale: "Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen power would demand so much electricity that the country would need enough wind turbines to cover half of California or 1,000 extra nuclear power stations," estimates a British economist. Burning hydrogen produces only water, but making it from methane releases CO2. Making it by splitting water simply needs too much electricity (sourced from fossil fuel which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere), and global warming follows. So indirectly hydrogen is not clean, nor green, nor cool. Otherwise hydrogen must be produced by using an enormous number of wind turbines or nuclear power stations—clean, alright, but with unsightly clutter and monstrous costs. Imagine the environmental impact of that.

 

Our reliance on fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas has another dimension that was brought home to me in "Tragedy of Agriculture" by Wes Jackson, of the Land Institute in Kansas. Jackson elaborates on this theme: the age of our energy sources. He begins with the Nobel biologist, George Wald's observation that living beings are the late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy; the carbon which enters our bodies was cooked in the remote past of a dying star. From it came nitrogen and oxygen, which were later spewed into space to form planets and eventually us. Ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood, and ancient atmospheres shaped our metabolism. Man, originating in the upper Paleolithic period, has existed for about 200,000 years, but has had agriculture for only about 10,000 years. Jackson thinks that agriculture is the most devastating phenomenon to have occurred on our planet; he minces no words when he says that the plough may have destroyed more options for the future than the sword.

 

Jackson goes on to explain this, offering a scientific basis for the whole subject of agriculture. When we gathered and hunted, we lived on 'horizontal energy', the energy that falls on the earth in the form of sunlight. The age of the carbon molecule we broke open for energy, whether it was an animal or the wood to cook it, was in the tens of years. Then agriculture started, and the mining of soil carbon—the age of these carbon packages is around 300 years. But in the fossil fuel epoch, we broke open energy-rich petroleum molecules with an age of hundreds of millions of years. And then, moving into the nuclear age, we broke open energy packages in the billions of years. Arguing further: we did not evolve by using ancient energy packages; there's an inherent dilemma between the use of  'old' energy in fossil fuels and the 'new' energy of sunlight—this creates an evolutionary imbalance since there are no cybernetic mechanisms in nature that allow our bodies to handle the waste products of 'old' energy. Tragically, all modern agriculture uses old energy sources—fertilizers made from natural gas—for nourishment, and so its success comes from the transfer of fossil carbon to food carbon. But in the process, the chemicals entering our bodies are those for which we have no evolutionary experience. Jackson is convinced that this is a great failure of evolutionary biology. Not only are we losing species through deforestation, but the genetic base of our major crops is shrinking; genetic variation is being treated the same way as we treat fossil fuels—in other words we are trapped in an economy that only 'extracts', that does not 'renew' and re-invest in resources, like soil, that we depend on. Moreover, the loss of bio-diversity puts our ecosystems in peril, destroying the natural defences against epidemics that a varied gene pool offers—ecocide, as Diamond calls it. The truth is that sustainability with virtually no human intervention is an obvious ideal to strive for in agriculture. Or simply, to live with nature, not conquer it.

 

The curse of fossil, or carbon-based, fuels hangs over us in diverse ways—and there appears to be no escape from global warming and its consequences.

 

In Closing

 

The word is officially out: In 1995 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming is a reality. In a dry understatement, the Panel of 1500 scientists summed up its findings: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." It warned that if we don't reduce emissions of CO2 and other gases, temperatures will probably rise 3.6° Fahrenheit by 2100, and perhaps as much as 6.3°. Our planet has already heated a degree or more, faster than at any time in human history, and the adverse ecological effects are well underway. Nitrogen, methane and carbon are now fixtures in our atmosphere, efficiently trapping the sun's energy radiated from the earth's surface, giving us that greenhouse blanket of warmth. And slowly transforming the planet—the most obvious effect of our exploding numbers and voracious appetites. A new earth is being born. The question is, "Will this climate change be irreversible?". Lomborg and Crichton have their battle cut out for them. May the truth prevail.

 

Bill McKibben, that tireless crusader and perceptive writer on the environment, has himself weighed in with a review of serious books in the New York Review of Books (appropriately titled Crossing the Red Line, June 10, 2004) concerning the whole phenomenon of climate change, and more importantly, on the urgent need for seeking and developing alternative energy sources. The over-dependence on fossil fuels has brought us to this sorry pass.

 

Our faith in the earth's capacity to absorb our excesses seems almost unshakeable. To balance Lomborg's infectious optimism I'd like to quote a passage from an article by Bill McKibben, titled "Worried? Us?" that appeared in an issue of Granta (No.83: The Overheating World):

 

The excretion of our economy has become the most important influence on the planet we were born into. We’re what counts.... Our ultimate sadness lies in the fact that we know that this is not a pre-ordained destiny; it isn’t fate. New ways of behaving, of getting and spending, can still change the future: there is, as the religious evangelist would say, still time, though not much of it, and a miraculous conversion is called for—Americans in the year 2000 produced 15% more CO2 than they had ten years before. The contrast between two speeds is the key fact of our age: between the pace at which the physical world is changing and the pace at which human society is reacting to this change. In history, if it exists, we shall be praised or damned.

 

It may well be that the nature of man is the problem, and not the limited resources of nature. This is a conservative view, which the Greens naturally abhor, but needs to be heard nonetheless. To condemn Lomborg outright would be a grave injustice. As one astute critic pointed out, optimism and pessimism are not arguments but opposite forms of the same surrender to simplicity, even though both sides offer their own remedies. On first impression Lomborg seems merely optimistic. But in some ways he does not surrender entirely to optimism and the benevolent future it implies; instead he seems concerned that the future depends on us, and is trying to mediate between the two extremes in attitude and approach. This has to be one of the great debates of our time, affecting almost everything we do. Shall we give all sides a just hearing?

 

Jan 23, 2006