Tag Archives: Thomas Malthus

Bill Gates, Wayward Climate Nerd

17 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Climate, Energy

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Bill Gates’ considerable philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation are well known. Much of the foundation’s activity has focused on disease control and nutrition around the globe. Education reform has also been a priority. Many of these projects are laudable, though I’m repulsed by a few (see here and here). During the coronavirus pandemic, Gates has spoken approvingly of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (lockdown measures), which are both coercive and ineffective (and see here). He has earned the enmity of anti-vaxers, of course, though I’m not anti-vax as long as the jabs are voluntary. The Gates Foundation funded the World Health Organization’s effort to provide guidance on digital vaccine passports, which is a de facto endorsement of discrimination based on vaccination status. His priorities for addressing climate change also raise some troubling issues, a few of which I address below.

Squeezing Policy from a Definition

Gates put a special Malthusian twist on a TED Talk he did back in 2010 using an equation for carbon dioxide emissions, which he’s reprised over the years. It gained a lot of notice in 2016 when a few sticklers noticed that his claim to have “discovered” the equation was false. The equation is:

CO2 = P x S x E x C,

where P = People, S = Services per person, E = Energy per service, and C = CO2 per energy unit.

This equation first appeared as the so-called Kaya Identity in a scientific review in 2002. Such an equation can be helpful in organizing one’s thoughts, but it has no operational implications in and of itself. At one level it is superficial: we could write a similar identity for almost anything, like the quantity of alcohol consumed in a year, which must equal the population times the ounces of alcohol per drink times the number of drinks per person. At a deeper level, it can be tempting to build theories around such equations, and there is no question that any theory about CO2 must at least preserve the identity.

There’s an obvious temptation to treat an equation like this as something that can be manipulated by policy, despite the possibility of behavioral links across components that might lead to unintended consequences. This is where Gates gets into trouble.

Reality Checks

As David Solway writes, Gates’ jumped to the conclusion that population drives carbon emissions, reinforcing a likely perspective that the human population is unsustainable. His benevolent solution? A healthier population won’t breed as fast, so he prescribes more vaccinations (voluntary?) and improved health care. For good measure, he added a third prong: better “reproductive health services”. Let’s see… what share of the 0.9 -1.4 billion reduction in world population Gates prescribed in 2016 would have come from terminated pregnancies?

In fact, healthier people might or might not want more children, but lower child mortality in the developing world would reduce certain economic incentives for high fertility. Another reliable association is between income and child bearing: an increase in “services per person” is likely to lead to smaller families, but that wasn’t given any emphasis by Gates. Income growth is simply not part of the narrative! Yet income growth does something else: it allows us to more easily afford the research and investments required for advanced technologies, including cleaner energy. These things take time, however.

Solway points to other weaknesses in Gates’ interpretation of the Kaya Identity. For example, efforts to slow population growth are not reliably associated with “services per person”, fuel efficiency, or carbon efficiency. In other words, carbon emissions may be powerfully influenced by factors other than population. China is a case in point.

Centralized industrial and social planning is generally ill-suited to advancing human well being. It’s especially suspect if the sole objective is to reduce carbon emissions. But Gates knows that lowering emissions without a corresponding drop in real income requires continuing technological advances and/or more efficient decisions about which technologies to deploy. He is a big advocate of developing cheap hydrogen power, which is far from a reality. He is also excited about carbon capture technologies, which are still in their infancy.

Renewables like wind and solar power play a large part in Gates’ vision. Those technologies cannot deliver a reliable flow of power, however, without either adequate backup capacity or a dramatic advance in battery technology. Gates over-promotes wind and solar, but I give him credit for acknowledging their intermittency. He attempts to come to grips with it by advocating nuclear backup, but it’s just not clear that he has integrated the incremental cost of the necessary backup capacity with other direct costs of these renewables… not to mention the considerable environmental costs imposed by wind and solar (see the “back-to-nature” photo at the top for a cogent illustration). Power storage at scale is still a long way off, and its cost will be significant as well.

We could deploy existing energy technologies to greater advantage with respect to carbon efficiency. We’ve already reduced CO2 emissions in the U.S. by substituting natural gas for less carbon-efficient fuels, but the Biden Administration would rather discourage its use. Gates deserves credit for recognizing the huge role that nuclear energy can play in providing zero-carbon power. Despite that, he still can’t quite bring himself to admit the boneheadedness of heavy reliance on intermittent renewables.

Bill’s “Green Premium”

Gates seems to have deemphasized the Kaya Identity more recently. Instead, his focus has shifted to the so-called “green premium”, or the incremental cost of using zero-carbon technology relative to a traditional source. Needless to say, the premium is large for truly zero-carbon sources, but Gates emphasizes the importance of using the green premium to guide development even in the here and now.

That’s fine, but it’s not clear that he gives adequate consideration to cases in which emissions, while not eliminated, can be reduced at a negative incremental cost via appropriate substitution. That describes the transition to natural gas from other fuels. This is something that markets can do without the assistance of ham-handed interventionists. Gates prefers nuclear power and says natural gas is “not a real bridge technology” to a zero carbon future. That’s short-sighted and reflects an absolutist mindset that ignores both the economic and political environment. The thinking is that if it’s not zero emissions, it’s not worth doing.

Gates emphasizes the need to sharply reduce the range of green premia on various technologies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But the goal of net-zero emissions 2050 is based on the highly unlikely proposition that global catastrophe awaits failing net-zero. In fact, the predicted consequences of doing nothing are based on drastic and outdated carbon growth scenarios and rudimentary carbon-forcing models that have proven to be severely biased to the upside in terms of predicting global temperature trends.

The idea that 2050 is some kind of “deadline” is a wholly arbitrary determination. Furthermore, the absolutism with which such goals are stated belies a failure to properly assess the true costs and benefits of carbon-based energy. If we so much as accept the notion that fossil fuels have external costs, we are then expected to accept that zero carbon emissions is optimal. This is not “science”; it is doctrine propped-up by bizarre and false scare stories. It involves massive efforts to manipulate opinion and coerce behavior based upon shoddy forecasts produced by committee. Even carbon capture technology is considered “problematic” because it implies that someone, somewhere, will use a process that emits CO2. That’s a ridiculous bogeyman, of course, and even Gates supports development of carbon capture.

Conclusion

I’ve never felt any real antipathy for Bill Gates as a person. He built a fortune, and I used his company’s software for most of my career. In some ways I still prefer it to macOS. I believe Gates is sincere in his efforts to help humanity even if his efforts are misdirected. He seems to reside on the less crazy end of the spectrum of climate alarmists. He’s putting a great deal of his private resources toward development of technologies that, if successful, might actually lead to less coercion by those attempting to transform private energy decisions. Nevertheless, there is menace in some of the solutions to which Gates clings. They require concerted action on the part of central authorities that would commandeer private resources and abrogate liberty. His assertion that the world is over-populated is both dubious and dangerous. You can offer free health care, but a conviction that the population must be thinned can lead to far more radical and monstrous initiatives.

The “green premium” promoted by Gates is an indirect measure of how far we must go to achieve parity in the pricing of carbon and non-carbon energy sources, as if parity should be an objective of public policy. That proposition is based on bad economics, fraudulent analyses of trends in carbon concentrations and climate trends, and a purposely incomplete menu of technological alternatives. Yes, the green premium highlights various technological challenges, but it is also a direct measure of how much intervention via taxes or subsidies are necessary to achieve parity. Is that a temptation to policymakers? Or does it represent a daunting political barrier? It’s pretty clear that the “median voter” does not view climate change as the only priority.

Markets, Ingenuity and Genuine Sustainability

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Environment, Markets, Scarcity

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img_3778

Will mankind drain the world of resources and ruin the environment? Must we curtail economic growth in order to ensure our long-term survival? Only if we give up on markets and give-in to central economic direction and control. Ronald Bailey at Reason.com covers the technical assumptions underlying a recent piece of neo-Malthusian “research” purporting to demonstrate the impossibility of environmentally-sustainable economic growth. Bailey’s article makes a great follow-up to my last post, “The Greening-Carbon Nexus“, in which I discussed the bloom in vegetation taking place around the globe attributable to greater levels of atmospheric CO2.

Bailey describes the concept of “decoupling” resource use from economic growth as fundamental to long-term environmental sustainability. This is another twist on good old-fashioned growth in factor productivity. In the new research cited by Bailey, Australian hydrologist James Ward and his co-authors assert that population growth and consumption will eventually overwhelm technological advance. However, it has long been recognized by demographers that freedom from need and growth in material comfort reduces fertility. Bailey notes that world population growth has been decelerating for many years, and the global population is likely to stabilize within a couple of decades.

Ward, et al lean heavily on assumptions about how various classes of resources are not substitutable, and that mankind will run-up against hard production requirements for minimum resource use, a point at which many tradeoffs become impossible. Bailey summarizes their results:

“They crank the notion that there are nonsubstitutable physical limits on material and energy resources through their equations until 2100, and they find that eventually consumption of both rise at the same rate as economic growth. QED: Economic growth is unsustainable. Or as they report, ‘Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits.’“

Bailey proceeds to pick apart the assumptions made by Ward and his co-authors. First, even if true, those assumptions would apply with much more force to physical outputs, as opposed to service outputs. The latter are likely to continue on a path garnering an increasing share of world output over time. More fundamentally, Ward, et al give short-shrift to the limitless potential of human ingenuity. A few specific examples of the physical limits they contemplate are already verifiably false, having been overcome by technological breakthroughs. This includes agricultural productivity related to enhancements in plant photosynthesis, new manufacturing methods requiring dramatically fewer raw materials, and methods of energy production that are already available, if not yet heavily relied upon. A glaring assumption made by Ward, et al is that the use of fossil fuels will continue to grow through at least the year 2100. In fact, existing alternatives such as nuclear power might well be more economical. Ironically, greater adoption of nuclear power is held hostage by the political resistance of groups who oppose the burning of fossil fuels.

Bailey also cites the work of Jesse Ausubel, whom I cited at length in a post on “rewilding” in 2015. Ausubel’s work shows that Americans’ use of a variety of productive inputs already has “decoupled absolutely” from production, or is approaching that point. That includes farmland, water, timber, plastics, aluminum and steel. Our use of all of those things has peaked and is now in decline. Ausubel’s work implies that “decoupling” is just a matter of time for many other resources for which use is growing at rates declining relative to production. These trends will spread overseas with continued economic development.

Efficiencies like these are a direct effect of technological advance, but the process of technical change is dependent on incentives, which are, in turn, dependent on market prices, profit opportunities, and secure property rights. First, the funding of research into new techniques and methods is driven in large part by market incentives. That’s the real mechanism at play when we marvel that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Necessity, of course, is often manifest in scarcity of existing productive inputs and high input prices.

New technologies present profit opportunities by promising lower input costs, greater production, or other competitive advantages. The adoption of a new technology nearly always entails short-run costs and long-term rewards, both of which are driven by market prices. As the pace of adoption accelerates, the costs of new technologies tend to decrease along with scale economies and sheer experience, reinforcing the process of diffusion. The driving force in all cases is the competitive market and freedom to trade for one’s own benefit. The increasing efficiency of resource use embodied in the “decoupling” phenomena is dependent on the existence of accurate market incentives and secure rights to the rewards that efficiencies in production can bring.

And what if government responds to political pressure by imposing bureaucratically-established production limits, market quotas, efficiency standards, process rules, regulatory reporting, and tax penalties. Apart from direct confiscation and the additional confiscatory risk these actions entail, compliance requires producers to ignore market incentives to one degree or another. These measures force adoption of  less efficient technologies than the market would dictate and add resource costs that would otherwise be absent. The inescapable fact is that market incentives are blunted or destroyed in the process; the consequent waste of resources prevents the kind of natural improvements in factor productivity that lead to decoupling and sustainability.

Sadly, such regulatory actions are often borne out of private rent-seeking efforts. Dominant market players believe that smaller competitors will struggle under the compliance burden created by regulation, so they work with government officials in an effort to have these rules promulgated. This adds a greater degree of market concentration and monopoly power, which implies an efficiency loss relative to competition. Under the protection of regulators, dominant players can survive for too long using wasteful techniques and inputs. Fortunately, with time, new technologies often outpace even these dominant players and the outmoded regulatory rules they rely upon.

Just as wasteful are authoritarian efforts to promote new technologies before the market is ready to adopt them. Picking technological winners and losers is fraught with peril for society. The government usually lacks the foresight possessed by the market, forcibly redirecting resources from one use to another with little consequence for failure except at the taxpayer’s expense. The premature investment is prone to burdening society with stale or defective early versions of new technology. This is not a reliable way to achieve efficiency in resource use. One of the sure signs that such efforts entail waste is the propensity for insiders to be awarded subsidies for promoting politically-favored technologies. Government is invariably drawn to such opportunities for graft.

I conclude with a quote of my earlier post on Ausubel’s work (linked above):

“It’s worth emphasizing that the nature rebound already taking place in the developed world is largely a product of free market capitalism and the growth in wealth and technology they have made possible. A great benefit of secure property rights for society, and for the environment, is that owners have powerful incentives to husband their resources. Likewise, the profit motive gives producers strong incentives to reduce waste and improve productivity. As economic development becomes more widespread, these incentives are promoting a healthier balance between man and nature.“

 

The Greening-Carbon Nexus

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Environment, Global Warming

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carbon_sequestration

Satellite records show that our world is experiencing a remarkable “greening” in the 21st century, to the seeming chagrin of the environmental left. There is now more vegetation than two decades ago, and greener vegetation, across as much as 50% of the Earth’s vegetated surface area. That area is expanding as well, and the creeping greenery has improved soil moisture levels in some drylands. This bodes well for agricultural productivity, putting another nail in Malthus’ coffin. The satellite studies have concluded that most of the enhanced vegetation is attributable to greater concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, as opposed to warming or other possible causes. An interesting feedback is that the enhanced vegetation increases natural absorption of CO2, providing an enhanced carbon sink. This, in turn, has caused a pause in the growth of atmospheric carbon cencentration.

The environmental left knows these developments tend to undermine their preferred narrative that human emissions of CO2 must be reduced — at any cost. In fact, already there are warnings that global greening will “outgrow its benefit” as the greater volume of plants begins to decay, releasing carbon. You just can’t make some people happy! But not all of the carbon release from plant decay adds to atmospheric carbon — some is soil-bound — so the greening should provide a fairly durable carbon sink.

Global greening was one of the major motifs in Matt Ridley’s 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture. Ridley covered various evidence of greening, but he also discussed the failure of a large contingent of climate researchers to follow a legitimate scientific approach to the study of climate change. Instead, they have politicized their field of study, committing a few noteworthy frauds along the way:

“It is irresponsible not to challenge the evidence properly, especially if the policies pursued in its name are causing suffering. Increasingly, many people would like to outlaw, suppress, prosecute and censor all discussion of what they call ‘the science’ rather than engage in debate. …

No wonder that I talk frequently to scientists who are skeptical, but dare not say so openly. That is a ridiculous state of affairs. We’re told that it’s impertinent to question “the science” and that we must think as we are told. But arguments from authority are the refuge of priests. Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin’. 

What keeps science honest, what stops it from succumbing entirely to confirmation bias, is that it is decentralized, allowing one lab to challenge another.“

It is all too true that policies advanced in the interests of curbing a slight warming trend cause real suffering, and the pain is heavily concentrated on the most impoverished. The presumed benefits of activist climate-change policies are speculative, at best. They have little chance of reversing atmospheric carbon concentration on their own.

Ridley makes note of the substantial evidence that sensitivity of the climate to airborne carbon concentration is low. This has become increasingly evident with the unfolding of a consistent record of over-forecasts of global temperatures by climate forcing models. Roy Spencer provides insights about these models in a recent discussion of global warming and “dodgy science” on his blog.

There is a widespread myth that 97 percent of climate scientists believe human activity is the main cause of global warming. In fact, that claim was based on a paper counting citations, not scientists; the methods used in the study and the citations themselves were also questionable. I have reviewed that evidence here on Sacred Cow Chips. David Henderson reviewed it here. A large number of studies find fault with so-called “consensus” pronouncements. They should always be viewed with suspicion.

There is also a lively debate underway over whether CO2 should be considered a pollutant! I exhale, therefore I pollute? To the extent that fecal matter is considered a pollutant, is it fair that to say that CO2 is, too? After all, both are anthropogenic. No, they are not even close in terms of an immediate threat to human health. As a philosophical matter, the idea that anything done by man is “unnatural” denies the fact that we are a very part of nature. Obviously, CO2 is not in the same class as pollutants like sulfur dioxide, ammonia, carbon monoxide or toxic metals. Today, these pollutants are very common in many parts of the world, and they are very threatening to human life. Effective mitigation technologies are available, but instead, in the developed West, we fixate on an increase in CO2 concentration of 100 parts per million over many decades, the climate implications of which are de minimis.

Rand Paul’s Facebook page has an ungated link to a WSJ.com commentary by Rodney W. Nichols and Harrison H. Schmitt on “The Phony War Against CO2”. Their commentary provokes questions as to the motives of the environmental left, and certain members of the research community, in shilling for the cause. That we would fight the greening of the globe, and the potential agricultural benefit it could bring, is bizarre. To devote enormous resources to an endeavor that is largely futile is a waste and a tragedy.

 

Those Halcyon Days of Desperation

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Capitalism, Markets, Poverty

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chickennostalgic

Nostalgia is hard to resist. Youth is fleeting, and for most of us, it seems more magical in hindsight than it might have been at the time. It’s also easy to imagine that certain historical eras were more interesting or romantic than the present. For example, my spouse tells me she’d love to have lived in the frontier days, yet she can’t tolerate the reality of a camping trip. We also tend to lionize certain leaders of the distant past, ascribing greatness based on history written by victors. Our objectivity may be obscured by narratives shaped over many years.

Today, some imagine and aggrandize the past in a different way: as a time when motives were “selfless”; when the world was inhabited by less acquisitive and more “minimalist” folk; when practices were more “sustainable”, or even “legitimate”. Despite the primitive conditions of that world, it was a better place for “free” human beings. So it is said, seriously!

Sarah Sqwire takes a look at these flights of fancy in “The Good Old Days of Poverty and Filth“. She dissects the views of one Luc Sante, a cultural historian, as an archetypical patron of primitivism. She invokes the French phrase “nostalgie de la boue, ‘longing for the mud,’ which means a romantic yearning for a primitive or degraded behavior or condition.” Here are some of Skwire’s colorful comments about the past:

“We don’t need every medieval romance novel to remind us that the heroine’s breath didn’t smell like cool mint Listerine. It’s probably for the best that the historical re-enactors at Colonial Williamsburg don’t actually use authentic colonial medical remedies for their health problems…. Any lover of history will occasionally find him or herself dreaming about attending a performance in the pit at Shakespeare’s Globe, or roughing it in the saloons and shacks of a gold rush town. … But a good student of history will acknowledge that the Globe was undoubtedly loud, smelly, crowded, and occasionally even dangerous for playgoers. And the rugged romance of the gold rush town is offset by the knowledge that you were probably far more likely to die of gangrene or cholera than you were to strike it even moderately rich. And those glorious 18th-century wigs? Heavy, hot, smelly, and prone to harboring bugs.“

She then quotes Sante:

“In the Paris I write about, people ran businesses to make a living, not to make a profit. Cafes, bars: they’re no longer public institutions or part of a community. There’s no possibility for eccentric self-determination amongst the shopkeepers.”

Skwire notes the odd distinction that Sante makes in the first sentence above, as if profit is not how proprietors ever made “a living”, or that they observed certain limits on their finances not imposed by market forces (i.e., their customers). She adds that businesses often seek to “create communities” as part of their business models, now in the era of social media more than ever, contrary to Sante’s presumption. Here’s Skwire’s verdict:

“Sante, though, has so much mud in his eyes that he is blind to the tangible and important progress that has been made in human wealth and welfare. His mucky nostalgia leads him to claim that our increasing wealth — which has given us more health, more discretionary income, more food, and more free time — is a danger more pernicious than terrorism.“

I am surprised that Skwire fails to mentions the environmental left in this context. It is, after all, the source of hysteria related to population and scarcity, and the source of so much criticism of modernity. As an antidote to such nonsense, I recommend the Human Progress web site. This recent entry on Julian Simon is instructive. I also recommend Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist blog. Try this entry on “The Long Shadow of Malthus” for a start.

Skwire views Luc Sante’s infatuation with pre-modern life and lifestyles as an elitist’s prescription for “other” people. That may well be. It also fits the profile of many environmental elites. Whether or not Skwire’s characterization of Sante is accurate, he is at least ignorant of the great diffusion of prosperity taking place around the globe, fueled by markets and economic development. It seems awkward that anyone would bemoan economic progress when, in fact, world poverty is declining, yet that very misgiving is implied by many critiques of markets and modernity.

Green Hubris: The Flub of Rome

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Global Warming

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paleo hubris

The Papal Encyclical published last week has generated controversy for venturing into areas about which Pope Francis, and for that matter the Catholic Church, has absolutely no authority or expertise. Pope Francis has noble aims. His compassion for the poor is admirable and even poignant. Nevertheless, the Pope errs in his assessment of scientific, technological and economic issues, and he fails to reference or consider mountains of evidence that contradict the views that dominate this encyclical. It should come as no surprise that he has been swept along by the Leftist orthodoxy, of which he has long been a part.

On one hand, Pope Francis expresses a viewpoint that is almost universally shared: that we are stewards of the natural world and have a moral obligation to treat it well for the benefit of others now and in the future. However, he also believes in the unproven proposition of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW), that human activities are causing global temperatures to rise inexorably. He takes the questionable view that ongoing technological advances will benefit only the rich, leaving the poor behind in increasingly desperate circumstances. And he recklessly questions the morality of free markets and capitalism, asserting that they benefit only the rich and work against the interests of the broader masses.

One of the most interesting pieces of commentary on the Encyclical appeared in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “The Pope’s Green Theology“, written by Fr. Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest. (If the link doesn’t work, Google “wsj Sirico Green Theology”.)

“… capitalism has spurred the greatest reduction in global poverty in world history: The number of people living on $1.25 a day fell to 375 million in 2013 from 811 million in 1991, according to the International Labor Office. This is only one statistic among reams of evidence that vindicate capitalism. An honest debate among experts will lay this canard to rest.

The encyclical unwisely concedes too much to the secular environmental agenda, for example, by denigrating fossil fuels. But it also voices moral statements dismissing popular, ill-conceived positions. The repeated lie that overpopulation is harming the planet—expressed by even some of the advisers for the Vatican—is soundly rejected.“

Much of the evidence on global temperatures contradicts the Pope’s position, yet he sides with the groupthink of the environmental Left based on model predictions that have been consistently wrong over several decades. The models have drastically over-predicted global temperature trends, even before the “pause” in warming that began in the late 1990s.

It is rather early in the game for the Catholic Church to take such an unequivocal position on an issue as far afield from matters of religious faith as climate science. As Dr. Tim Ball notes, the Catholic Church has not always bet well on science, going back to its denunciation of Galileo almost 400 years ago. Apparently, any lessons learned from that episode about the process of scientific inquiry have been forgotten. Matt Ridley has a great (if lengthy) essay on the politics of science and the damage that politicized climate science has done to the cause of real understanding:

“Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.’ Richard Feynman was even pithier: ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’”

Climate science is really in its infancy. Recorded history of the climate is in its infancy as well. The scant evidence of global warming during the 20th century is well within the range of natural variation estimated for the past 8,000 years, according to a study by a former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). For the Pope, or anyone else, to make strong claims about “the science”, or to prescribe draconian limits on individual liberty in an effort to plan “the climate”, is hubris of the first order. That’s ironic given the Pope’s condemnation of what he characterizes as mankind’s Promethean hubris, as if making the world more livable was sinful. The Encyclical condemns technological progress, going so far as to denigrate the use of air conditioning. That attitude is driven by objections to energy use; nevertheless, the Pope reveals a deep mistrust of technology and betrays the soul of a Luddite.

Patrick J. Michaels of CATO’s Center for the Study of Science wrote about the Pope’s climate views and the morality of “dense energy” in April:

“Abundant and dependable energy frees mankind from a menial existence, allowing us to use our given talents for the greater good. The mental capital of the poor in the underdeveloped world is untapped without dense energy. The burning of dung for cooking is a major cause of early death from pulmonary disease. The massive deforestation that must occur without dense energy amplifies floods from ubiquitous tropical downpours.“

Here is a link to some very sarcastic commentary from Brendan O’Neil at Reason on the Pope’s “Dotty Green Theology“. O’Neil mentions the tyrannical fantasies dancing in the minds of some on the environmental Left:

“Christianity’s end-of-worldism is getting a new airing in the apocalypse obsession of greens, who warn of an eco-unfriendly End of Days. Its promise of Godly judgement for our wicked ways has been replaced by greens’ promise that we’ll one day be judged for our planetary destructiveness. A leading British green has fantasised about ‘international criminal tribunals’ for climate-change deniers, who will be ‘partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths.'”

Let’s hope the Pope isn’t on board with that, though he did propose that a worldwide governing body take charge of environmental issues. Please, no favors! John Hinderaker, in the context of the Encyclical, discusses the regressive impact of policies that raise energy prices. That’s consistent with the Pope’s green objectives. Hinderaker cites figures showing that those earning less than $30,000 per year in the U.S. spend 23% of their after-tax income on energy, compared to just 7% for those earning $50,000 or more.

It is extremely late in the game for the Pope to inveigh against capitalism, with all evidence pointing to the long-term success of free markets in lifting the poor from the depths of privation. In fact, the Encyclical is strongly reminiscent of the Malthusian “Limits to Growth” published by the Club of Rome. That “study” contained what has proven to be among the worst collections of prognostications of all time, and the Club persists in purveying doom and gloom to this day.

I have written before on Sacred Cow Chips about Pope Francis’ statist, anti-market inclinations. From that post:

“… it is not just the secular Left that fails to recognize the inherent conflict between big government and religious liberty. Pope Francis himself seems oblivious to the dangerous implications of big government for religious freedom. His apostolic exhortation for greater reliance on the state to care for the poor simultaneously embraces socialism and condemns capitalism. I take no issue in principle with the provision of a social safety net, but the Pope should be more results-oriented in assessing different forms of social organization and their impacts on poverty. Big government typically fails to achieve the kinds of humane objectives usually espoused by the Left. The sad ‘road to serfdom’ has played out too many times in the past.“

Progressives Identify Twin Evils: Progress and People

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by in Human Welfare

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doom and gloom

“The Big Coffee Table Book of Doom” is an entertaining review of an actual coffee table book entitled “Overdevelopment Overpopulation Overshoot“, which appeals to the progressive Left’s neo-Malthusian mindset. I am almost tempted to buy this book for my coffee table as fodder for my own amusement, sort of like the board game “Class Struggle” I bought for laughs when I was in grad school. The review, written by Ron Bailey in Reason, pokes fun at the selection of photos in the book, which are chosen to reinforce such fables as over-population, climate change and the supposed evils of capitalism. Of course, this sort of nonsense will never die, primarily because people love a good scare story and because it aligns with the privileged Left’s sense of righteousness and noblesse oblige. Bailey highlights several actual trends that contradict the doomsday narrative:

“Agricultural productivity per acre is improving faster than the demand for food; as a result, fewer acres are needed to grow crops. These trends suggest that as much as 400 million hectares could be restored to nature by 2060, an area nearly double the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River.“

“… the total global fertility rate has fallen from over 5 children per woman in 1970 to 2.45 today, rapidly approaching the 2.1 rate that is the threshold of population stability.“

And on the “perils” of urbanization:

“Urban dwellers have greater access to education, market opportunities, and medicine, and they have fewer kids.“

As Kevin Williamson has pointed out, an egregious distortion of the neo-Malthusian perspective is an attitude that human beings are liabilities rather than assets. This is underscored by the recent comments of a UN official calling for depopulation as a serious objective. One wonders how she might propose to attain that objective. Can the eliminationists be far behind? In rebuttal to such thinking, Bailey quotes Ramez Naam, author of “Infinite Resource“:

“‘Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you?’ In this thought experiment, you don’t get to pick which people are never born. Perhaps there would have been no Newton, Edison, or Pasteur, no Socrates, Shakespeare, or Jefferson. ‘Each additional idea is a gift to the future,’ Naam writes. ‘Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.’ Fewer people means fewer new ideas about how to improve humanity’s lot and to further decouple our endeavors from the natural world. ‘If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor,’ Naam writes, ‘then we should welcome every new person born as a source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.'”

Population growth has traditionally been a source of economic growth and enhanced welfare, and that is likely to remain the case. I do not claim that population growth will always be an imperative. Rather, fertility decisions are properly the business of families and individuals, not central authorities or public policy, which should take a neutral stance with respect to these decisions.

Malthusian doom is related to the economic law of scarcity, but it is not a direct implication of that law: scarcity means that resource availability is limited relative to potentially limitless demand. The law of scarcity does not assert that there are absolute limits to raw materials or production in the long run, only that human wants, if unrestrained, will always exceed available supplies. There are many ways in which supplies of resources increase over time. Exploration reveals new supplies and technology makes new supplies accessible at lower cost. More fundamentally, growth in the productivity of utilized resources causes effective economic supplies to grow. This is illustrated in Don Beaudreaux’s recent essay on the productivity of land (and see a follow-ups on the topic here):

“The economic supply of land, like that of any other resources you can name, is not a physical phenomenon. As long as people are free and inspired to innovate – and as long as input and output prices are free to adjust to changes in supply and demand – the economic supplies of even the most ‘fixed’ and ‘nonrenewable’ resources will expand.“

Prognostications of doom for humanity appeal to the ignorance of those with no perspective on the mechanisms by which well-being has improved in the developed world over the past few centuries. This has occurred largely by virtue of human ingenuity and free markets. The growth has also enabled greatly improved environmental conditions. The developing world will share in the prosperity only when those governments embrace real market liberalization.

Peak-Resource Myopia Serves the State

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in Peak Oil

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smith-marx-schumpeter-keynes We often hear we’re at the “peak” availability of some resource, but what’s really meant is that we’re at a cliff’s edge, about to run dry. These claims are usually uninformed and have been wrong historically. Of course, scarcity is real; it’s why I do economics and love markets, which solve the problem of scarcity through voluntary, arms length cooperation in balancing needs and wants with the availability of resources. But scarcity at any point in time rarely implies anything about the availability of resources going forward. Current knowledge and conditions, and existing technology for extracting and utilizing resources, provide signals about opportunities; they should not dominate our outlook for the future in a dynamic economy.

The view that the availability of resources is subject to hard limits, or that they will “run out”, is discussed by David Henderson in his post “The Jevons Fallacy,” regarding the “peak” views often credited to economist William Jevons. Henderson quotes his own bio of Jevons:

“Jevons failed to appreciate the fact that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternate sources. In particular, he did not anticipate oil or natural gas. Also, he did not take account of the incentive, as the price of coal rose, to use it more efficiently or to develop technology that brought down the cost of discovering and mining (see natural resources).”

Don Boudreaux has a few thoughts on Henderson’s post and the topic of scarcity, emphasizing the contribution of human ingenuity to the supply of resources:

“Atoms are created and made into matter by the impersonal forces of nature (or, if you are a theist, by God). In contrast, matter is made into resources only by human creativity, especially when this creativity is unleashed and directed by markets. So more humans – and more markets – quite realistically (and, so far, historically) mean an increasing, not a decreasing, supply of resources.”

A 2005 post at the humansunderrated blog made the same point: “Only one resource truly matters and that is the human mind.” And the human mind, guided by market signals, is what ultimately solves the problem of scarcity. It does not get solved when human initiative is shackled by regulation, insecure property rights, or protected monopoly interests, which are all varieties of government failure.

In “Peak Nonsense,” Michael Lynch concurs:

“And so here we go again on the trial of exhaustion theory, one step removed from the scientism of central planning where decline rates are projected and a social cost of depletion is calculated for an extraction tax. But it is all bad science. ”

There is no end to scarcity. It will always be with us, but we have not reached peak oil, peak fossil fuels, peak food, or peak anything. The dreary viewpoint credited to Jevons and Thomas Malthus is misguided as long as people remain free to engage in voluntary production and trade. The “peak” perspective serves the interest of statists who’d prefer to impose arbitrary limits on our productive potential.