What Can We Hope To Leave Our Children?

The following post is the third in a series about The Skeptical Environmentalist, written by Bjorn Lombarg. This installment will be drawing on sections of the part of the book entitled Can Human Prosperity Continue?

Analysis of any depth requires good questions as starting points, to serve as filters against the endless sea of information which exists to draw upon.

In the first section of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg asked: by what standard should the quality of any source be judged?

The second section wrestled with the question: Are we better off today than people historically have been, and how has progress varied around the world?

Concluding that we are overwhelmingly better off than we have ever been, Lomborg goes on to address whether or not our prosperity is sustainable.

There is a brand of argument, as old or older than Malthus, which goes something like this: there are a finite amount of resources on God's green Earth. Industrialization, technological growth, modernization, and population booms all result in an exponential increase in consumption rates. For Malthus, this meant that we would eventually be unable to feed ourselves. For Peak Oil proponents, it means that we will eventually not be able to sustain our prosperity because we will run out of fuel to power our technology.

The great weakness of this argument is that it is entirely theoretical, and relies entirely on its own internal logic--for there are no historic parallels to draw upon.

The strength of Lomborg's position, statistician that he is, is that it relies entirely upon long-term trends and historic parallels.

Looking at where we have been and where we seem to be headed, Lomborg argues that there is all the reason in the world to believe that we can not only sustain what we already have, but we can sustain the growth and modernization of the less developed regions. Thus, the future holds an continuing improvement of mankind's lot, particularly for those who have everything to gain and less to lose than the developed world.

The solid historical example which best demonstrates the mechanisms of growth and adaptation which are the foundation of Lomborg's argument can be found in the case of the development of sources of energy in England.

The steam engine laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, which in England over the next hundred years changed production from being based almost exclusively on human labor to obtaining its primary energy input from fossil fuel.

But at the same time it became obvious that production was no longer able to rely on wood for energy supply. England was quickly becoming deforested. Increasingly coal was being used in both England and the US partly because it was a better energy source than wood, partly because it was available in much larger quantity. This process repeated itself in all industrialized countries and cemented our dependence on energy and non-renewable resources. In this century coal has been replaced by oil, because it is easier to transport, store and use.

Before there was a Peak Oil, there was a "Peak Coal" of sorts--people who watched the tremendous progress of Western industrialization and feared that the energy source on which it depended would eventually run dry, particularly as it was being used in ever-increasing amounts.

Yet these "Peak Coal" people had not learned the lesson of charcoal--when an energy source becomes scarce or harder to utilize in any way than some other source, it will be gradually replaced.

It's how the market works. When a new technology is invented, does anyone honestly expect it to become a commodity overnight? Of course not. No matter how revolutionary, it takes time for predecessors to fall behind from the massive head start that they've got over the new innovation.

Likewise, at any given point, it might seem scary to contemplate the fact that oil cannot possibly last forever. But there are already other sources out there--natural gas which is a good source of energy but expensive to transport, and other alternative sources such as solar and nuclear energy exist even if they are not yet largely utilized and/or cost-effective.

But Oil wasn't cost-effective to begin with, either, as the process to extract and refine it had to be mastered over time. So Coal didn't go away overnight--and neither will Oil, though it will most likely go away long before it runs out, as both of its predecessors did.

For further assurance, Lomborg breaks down the annual world consumption, and remaining oil, gas, uranium, and coal, in joules.

Remaining oil could produce 8,690EJ, gas can produce a total of 17,280EJ, uranium could produce a total of 114,000EJ, and coal could produce a total of 185,330EJ.

All of this in the context of an annual world consumption averaging at just 400EJ.

So the process of replacement, which has been demonstrated by history to work in two major energy source transitions, should give us some comfort. But we are also a long ways away from running out.

Lomborg addresses other issues as well. According to his sources, the world has lost some twenty percent of its forests since the dawn of human agriculture--not fifty percent in a hundred years, as is often proported. What's more, an increase in productivity allows us to get more from fewer trees, with five percent of forests accounting for most of the paper produced.

Lester Brown, like Malthus before him, feared that continued human growth would lead to a mass starvation. Yet it is clear from the example of China that when property rights are granted and government takes a lighter hand in government, the capacity to feed increases drastically. China went through the most horrific famine in human history under Mao's thumb in 1959-62. Today, China feeds more than one fifth of the world's population from only one fifteenth of the world's farmland.

By tracing trends in energy, agricultural, and consumption history, Lomborg finds that the chances are good that our descendents will not only have what we have, but much more.

In this time of rapid change and progress, I do not find that so difficult a pill to swallow.

That concludes this installment. Next time, we will look at Pollution: Does it Undercut Human Prosperity, when Lomborg begins his in-depth look at the more acutely environmental issues.