Climate change means dismantling free markets with government controls over resources, population
In 1980, economist Julian L Simon challenged Paul R Ehrlich, the biologist and author of the best-selling
Population Bomb, to put his money where his catastrophist mouth was by staking $10,000 on his belief that ‘the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials… will not rise in the long run’, with the minimum period of time over which the bet could take place being one year (1). If, as Ehrlich believed, the store of valuable resources was absolutely finite and subject to ever-increasing demand, the
resources’ price would rise. Simon, however, argued that in a
market economy characterised by freely determined prices and secured property rights, a rise in the price of a valuable resource could only be temporary as it would
provide incentives for people to look for more of it, to produce and use it more efficiently, and to
develop substitutes. In the long run,
even non-renewable resources would become ever-less scarce as they are ultimately created by the always renewable and ever-expanding human intellect.
Ehrlich, along with his regular collaborators John P Holdren and John Harte, accepted ‘Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people’ jumped in and offered ‘to pay him on September 29, 1990, the 1990 equivalent of 10,000 1980 dollars (corrected by the CPI) for the quantity that $2,000 would buy of each of the following five metals on September 29, 1980: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten’ (2).
Between Ehrlich’s chosen dates, the
world’s population grew by more than 800 million individuals while standards of living rose. In spite of this, the
prices of all these commodities fell – from a 3.5 per cent fall for copper to a 72 per cent fall for tin – as, just as Simon had predicted,
new deposits were brought into production and
new substitutes created. Ehrlich honoured his financial engagement by mailing Simon a check to the amount of $576.07, but never acknowledged the superiority of his intellectual opponent’s outlook.
Looking back, his ‘astonishing offer’ was arguably the clever ploy of a serious poker player with a background in marketing and statistical analysis who sought to draw attention to a perspective then shunned by most environmentally minded academics, activists and public intellectuals. Indeed, prominent critics of overpopulation rhetoric were then mostly limited to old-fashioned Marxists who, following (mostly) Engel’s writings, believed that scientific advances would overcome natural limits (3); the Vatican whose doctrine opposed population control on (mostly) theological grounds; and a few free-market economists and think-tank analysts who also believed in scientific advances, but guided by the price system rather than
central planning.
Although much less prominent these days, the old population-control and resource-depletion rhetoric is still alive and well in some of its traditional strongholds, be they some institutions dominated by the British upper classes (see, among others, recent remarks by,
Jane Goodall,
David Attenborough and
John Sulston) or international-development bureaucracies.
For instance, when asked why Indians shouldn’t aspire to the same standard of living as the Westerners, the
former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra K Pachauri answered, ‘Gandhi was asked if he wanted India to reach the same level of prosperity as the United Kingdom. He
replied: “It took Britain half the resources of the planet to reach its level of prosperity. How many planets would India require?”’
Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Christiana Figueres
once said, ‘We should make every effort to
reduce the world’s population in an effort to fight climate change’, that ‘obviously fewer people would exert less pressure on the natural resources’, and that humanity is ‘already exceeding the planet’s planetary carrying capacity, today’. She added that
population control wasn’t enough and that fundamental changes needed to be made to our current
economic system. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,
director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an influential contributor to the recent encyclical letter
Laudato si, is similarly on record estimating the carrying capacity of the planet at
‘below one billion people’.
Of course, the fear that a growing population is rapidly depleting its finite store of natural resources while mercilessly wrecking its environment is probably as old as civilisation. Some scholars thus interpret the oldest surviving written story,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
as a warning against the rapid deforestation of Mesopotamia nearly 5,000 years ago. Two millennia later, Confucius (551 – 479 BC) and some of his followers
reportedly argued that excessive population growth may reduce output per worker, lower standards of living and create strife.
After having determined that the ideal number of citizens per city-state was 5,040, Plato
suggested measures such as fiscal and other incentives to increase the number if need be, or else to implement birth control or favour emigration if warranted. He
further warned that ‘exceed[ing] the
limit of necessity’ and the ‘unlimited accumulation of wealth’ would result in expansionary wars. One problem was the populace’s fondness for meat that would result in struggles over pastureland. Plato’s solution was a vegetarian diet consisting mainly of cereals (wheat and barley), fruits (grapes in the form of wine, olives, figs and myrtle berries), pulses (peas and beans), dairy products (mostly cheese), flavouring ingredients (relish-salt, roots and herbs) and a few other wild foods (mostly acorn). Echoing his Mesopotamian predecessors, he
further lamented that Athens’ back country, whose hills had once been ‘covered with soil’, the plains ‘full of rich earth’, and the mountains displaying an ‘abundance of wood’, had been turned after years of abuse into a landscape that could ‘only afford sustenance to bees’ because all the ‘richer and softer parts of the soil [had] fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land [was] being left’.
Shortly afterward, Aristotle
cautioned that populations could outstrip their resource base and end up mired in poverty and social unrest.
These risks justified drastic population-control measures such as abortion and exposing children to the elements. Writing half a century later, the Carthaginian Christian theologian
Tertullian observed matter-of-factly that:
‘[What] most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race…’
The first full-fledged population catastrophist among modern writers is generally acknowledged to be the Italian Jesuit
Giovanni Botero (1544-1617) who, more than two centuries before the better known Thomas Robert
Malthus (1766-1834), argued that human population would increase to the maximum extent permitted by human fertility, that the means of subsistence wouldn’t keep up, and that the unavoidable result would be
poverty, starvation, war, diseases and population crashes.
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