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Eco-pessimists underrate human ingenuity in plundering resources
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AFTER reading my “Rush to dam Jinsha River for ‘clean’ energy ignores myriad ecological risks” (August 13, Shanghai Daily), a reader wrote to ask if there is any evidence suggesting the link between dams and earthquakes.
Well, establishing that link is not a simple technical matter.
This Tuesday, I found an investigative article published on the ifeng.com website that said experts believe the high concentration of hydropower stations in an area can trigger earthquakes. When I tried to read the article again the next day, it had already been deleted.
As Dale Jamieson observed on this page on Wednesday (“Billionaire’s about-face shows peril of climate politics”), “Given that fossil fuels are the lifeblood of the global economy, nobody has clean hands — and those who wish to lead the battle against global warming risk attracting the charge of hypocrisy.” This makes frank exchange or expression of contrarian views a challenge.
To varying degrees we are all hypocrites, as investors, consumers, or standard citizens. There is the challenge of being dead earnest in confronting environmental matters in the modern context.
According to the ifeng.com article, the city of Zhaotong, Yunnan Province, which was struck by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake on August 3, has the highest concentration of hydropower stations in the province. The destruction of one such power station in Hongshiyan during the quake represented an economic loss of 800 million yuan (US$131 million).
Given the money at stake, you probably understand why maximum discretion and delicacy is needed in participating in the debate, even though this concerns the fate of our children.
Paul Sabin’s “The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future” tells of a famous bet between biologist Ehrlich and economist Simon, and tries to moralize about the outcome of the two men’s wager. In his 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich helped foment popular fears of overpopulation by arguing that millions were “going to starve to death.” His stance helped catalyze the incipient environmental movement.
Simon regarded Ehrlich’s claims as overblown fear mongering, asserting that technology and market activity would enable people to adapt to challenges like population growth — so it was not a threat to the environment.
In 1980, the two laid the wager, gambling on whether the price of five important metals would rise or fall in the following 10 years. According to the book, “The path to Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich’s bet led through the intellectual jousting of scholarly journals and newspaper op-ed pages.”
Palpable form
In 1972 the Club of Rome, a group of industrialists, scientists and political leaders, published “The Limits to Growth,” arguing that population growth and extreme resources consumption pointed to a disastrous future.
The fear took palpable form in 1973 when OPEC cut oil production, resulting in oil shortages that strongly affected the American economy. In 1977, in cooperation with physicist John Holdren, the Ehrlichs published a textbook, “Ecoscience,” showcasing the advancement in environmental understanding and calling for specific political responses to environmental threats.
“Like many Americans in the 1960s, Ehrlich increasingly questioned whether government and businesses could be trusted to respond effectively to the ecological crisis [since] they did not disclose critical information about the risks of new chemicals and nuclear radiation,” Sabin observes in his book.
As to the outcome of that famous bet, in 1990 Ehrlich sent Simon a check for US$567, adding that his mistake with the bet had been the timeline. Ten years, he now said, was too short. If the two men had chosen most other combinations of commodities, Simon would have lost. Later simulations found “Ehrlich would have won the bet 63 percent of the time.”
Sabin’s book concludes that “One problem with Ehrlich’s style of argument is that environmental pessimism often far exceeds reasonable predictions for how markets function and scarcity develops.”
I think it more pertinent to say that even the most hardened environmental pessimists fail to predict how innovative and efficient human beings have become in extorting resources from the earth.
I also experience a sense of irony in seeing an economist distracted in an environmental debate. In any case, economists today are a group of people who derive their professional legitimacy more from extravagance and excess than “economy.”
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