The End of the World is Near-Not!
Read the latest in this series Environmentalism is a Conservative Cause
The debate on global warming caused by human consumption of hydrocarbons appears to be over. We are told that the polar ice cap will melt. Bangladesh will get inundated. Hurricanes will increase in intensity. Crops will fail. Riots will break out. Anecdotal evidence of the coming catastrophe mounds day by day. A glacier in the Antarctic is shrinking. The NorthWest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (that many generations of explorers looked for in vain) has almost opened up- only 60 miles of ice floes remain unmelted in the summer. The Sacred Phallus of Siva that forms every year from ice almost didn’t appear this year: the Himalayas must be getting too warm. Stranded polar bears have been spotted drowning as the ice floes they are standing on melt. Sea turtles are said to be dying off because the ocean is too warm for their eggs to hatch.
An entire doomsday industry has sprung up. Scientists who are unable to predict next month’s weather, are confidently predicting climate change into the next century. Even mathematicians are getting in on the act. The MSRI had a workshop called “Climate Change: From Global Models to Local Action”.
Everyone is an environmentalist these days. The Sierra Club has been out front sounding the alarm on global warming. Just as, in medieval times, you could buy indulgences from the Vatican to atone for your sins, these days you, can buy carbon credits to neutralize your emissions. Arnold Schwarzenegger has converted one of his seven humvees ( a monstrous gas-guzzling four wheel drive vehicle used mostly by the US military) to run on bio-fuel, to show his commitment to the cause. Al Gore has jetted himself around the world, lecturing on the Inconvenient Truth of the coming catastrophe. Bono was at the G8 summit cajoling world leaders into action. 
So how good is the track record of the Sierra club and others on making such global predictions?I remember another set of dire predictions from the early seventies, when I was in middle school in India. The impending catastrophe of that time was the population explosion. Hundreds of millions of people were predicted to starve to death in the 70s and 80s, in India and elsewhere, something that could not be averted even by a crash program by the wealthiest nations. The Economist and The New Scientist printed many charts and graphs and mathematical formulas driving home the scientific basis of the predictions. The British children’s magazine I used to read then (Look and Learn) did its share to scare the bejeesus out of us about the coming food shortages. It resonated with us because in the sixties, in my childhood, there really were some near-famine conditions in parts of India. Things had gotten better, but perhaps all these smart people knew that it was only a temporary reprieve?
As it turned out, the world did not self-destruct from overpopulation. While there still is famine in parts of the world, notably Africa, the conditions have improved remarkably for most of us. The number of humans did increase substantially: from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 6.6 billion now. But the average person is better fed now than at any time in human history. Rather than famine, the major health problems of the world now are obesity and diabetes, because the meaty diets of the developed world are displacing the traditional lean food of the masses. It is the rich who are thin now; they can afford gym classes and calorie-restricted diets.
Moreover, many of the most populated countries are also the ones with the most rapid economic growth. Japan and Western Europe, which have the slowest population growth, are worrying today about having too few young people to support their elderly. The US does not worry, only because of the large influx of young immigrants into the workforce.
So why did the predictions of a catastrophe fail so completely, although the population did explode? Every additional human being is a new mouth to feed, but also a pair of arms to work and a new brain capable of thought. In populous countries like China and India that provide cheap mass education, the generation born after the seventies is the backbone of the labor force. They generate wealth in call centers, factories and the cubicles of software companies, more than paying for the increased demands on resources required to sustain them.
The median age in India is merely twenty five, while Brazil’s is twenty nine. That in China is higher (34) because of a draconian population control program. The US is older (median age of 39) but is unique among the industrialized nations in having a stable age distribution. These are the major young nations of the world. Together they make up a little less than half the world’s population.
The oldest country, among the major economies, is Japan with a median age of 44; Italy and Germany (43) are not far behind. What is worrisome about these countries is not the age itself, but the trend: the fertility rate is abnormally low there and people are living to advanced old age. Immigration, legal and otherwise, saves the US from this difficulty. Russia (38) is unlikely to get any younger-there is no substantial immigration into Russia and it has a low fertility rate. Russia is one of the few places in the world where the total population is expected to decline.
The young nations, with investments from the advanced economies of North America and Europe, are poised to dominate the world both as consumers and producers. They will also dominate culture, as the young always have. The Sixties were a time of cultural transformation in the US, caused by the post war baby boom. A similar transformation led by the population explosion of the seventies is already under way, but this time on a global scale. Their values will displace the existing ones.
Ironically, it is precisely the generation born of the population explosion that will support the aging populations of the developed world. If you retire today and invest your savings in the stock market, you are hoping that these young people will be productive enough to provide you with a return for the rest of your life. Rather than cause a catastrophe, the near-doubling of the world population turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to all of us.
Population increase in the absence of liberty could indeed be catastrophic. There are a few pockets in the world where, for one reason or other, things have not worked out. Except in Africa, the problem is not lack of food or poverty. It appears that not all the ills of the world have an economic explanation. The youngest nation in the world is Yemen (the land that gave us coffee and Bin Laden) with a median age of just 17. There may indeed be reason to worry about instabilities in the Middle East: the early phases of the population boom there shows different trends than in the rest of the world.
The doom-sayers of old did not take into account the fact that scientific progress can totally transform the fortunes of billions of people. The new strains of wheat and rice developed by great scientists such as Norman Borlaug made enough food to feed the billions of people born in the population explosion. Only in Africa has this green revolution not taken place. Borlaug, who recieved the Congressional Gold Medal this week, has proposed a program for Africa, similar to the amazingly successful one he gave to Mexico and India. In his view, the problems there are fixable too. Borlaug is not as famous as some of the other people who received the Congressional Gold Medal (John Wayne) but who has had a more beneficial effect on humanity than him?
Other technical advances like satellite communication, cell phones and computers have made it possible to integrate this vast new population into the world culture. This information exchange is leading to an even faster pace of economic growth. The more people there are in the world, the more talented people there are who can fix its problems.
So let us not get too depressed by the doomsday predictions of today. There was a time not too long ago when people used to hunt whales not for food but for fuel: their blubber was melted down and used in lamps. Before the whales went extinct, petroleum was discovered as a substitute for whale oil. In time we will find a substitute for petroleum too. Somewhere in the world the next Norman Borlaug is growing up, who will develop a source of energy that is not polluting. Perhaps the world will warm as predicted, but we will find a way to thrive in that warmer world. May be we should let the people from an inundated Bangladesh to emigrate to the newly fertile and warm Siberia.
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A couple of thoughtful comments by Biswajit and Miuw on my last post have provoked me to write a follow up. Several points were raised and I will try to give my response to each.
Is Global Warming for Real?
I have not formed an independent opinion as a scientist about this, because I find the Earth’s atmosphere such a daunting physical system that I wouldn’t know how to accurate predictions. However, people who know much more about it are doing so confidently so I have to concede that Global Warming must be for real. It is even harder to predict how human beings will react to such a global change. My argument is that solutions will be found, but not necessarily without tension and struggles.
The very fact that there are many more people in the world today, and many of them are in areas that provide decent cheap education, means that there is a greater chance of finding solutions. To take the example of Norman Borlaug again, at the time he was growing up, the world was still dominated by the British Empire. You would have expected then that any scientific breakthrough that affects billions of people would come out of Cambridge or Oxford. His education at the University of Minnesota and his family background in agriculture provided him with the basic knowledge he needed. Many people growing up in the US as well as India, China, Brazil right now have the same opportunities. A few of them will rise to the occasion. The funding needed is not large compared to the gigantic amounts spent on weapons research or scientific white elephants . Widespread awareness of the problem is needed, a welcome outcome of the current debates.
Is Reasoned Optimism Justified?
We are supposed to be boundlessly optimistic when we are young and turn cynical with experience. However, I think many of us were too pessimistic in the seventies and slow to absorb the good news as it came in. The last thirty years or so have been some of the best years in human history.
The `good life’ used to be available only to an elite in the `good old days’. Now more and more of us are able to live comfortably and think of larger issues. This has come at some cost to the environment, but not irreversibly so. Apart from food security, the world has improved in other ways as well in the last decades. The religious and political totalitarianisms that ruled over billions of people have decayed.
Of course, this depends on what time interval we use as a baseline. If we were to look at the world 1900-1950, it would be dominated by colonialism and two world wars. It was in the build up to World War II that Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilization. “It would be a good idea”, he replied.Still, the seeds of the next age were planted at that time, in part by Gandhi himself.
Will Old Cultures be Destroyed by Globalization?
I am from an old culture and I have seen some of it destroyed in the name of progress. The village I grew up in has been bought up wholesale by a secretive clay mining company, and is about to be wiped off the map. The huge gashes on the Earth made by clay mines in nearby villages are visible on Wikimapia’s aerial map. I weep knowing that this is about to happen to our place too. Yet the people who lived there longer than me don’t have the same sense of loss: they all got a good price for the land and were able to move to other locations. An old way of life has been destroyed but their new life is better, according to most of them. Although I think what is happening is a tragedy, their opinion about it is what matters, as I moved away thirty years ago.
The feeling is not unanimous. A couple of my stubborn uncles have refused to sell out: their homes will be perched at the edge of a precipice in a few years as the bulldozers get to work.
Part of the reason it turned out for the better is that Kerala is a place with a left wing government where global corporations have to tread carefully. Coca Cola and Pepsi have learned their lessons there. Without a vigilant and representative government to look after their interests, the people there would have been ravaged in the name of progress. Other parts of the world are not as fortunate.
So, the answer is not simple.It is often outsiders (or people who have moved away) who weep at the injury to the land and loss of habitat due to ecological destruction. The people who live in the affected regions are not sentimental about it. Should we, who might only visit Alaska on a cruise, have greater say in what happens there than the people who live there the whole year? If we care about saving the Bonobo, should we not also find a way for their human neighbors to make a living?
The messy and occasionally corrupt politics of India and the US ( the two countries that I know about) has somehow found a reasonable balance over such conflicting demands over the last few decades. This is not so in many other parts of the world, as the comment by Miuw points out. There is no substitute for representative local government. But perhaps international awareness can mitigate the worst abuses by corporations. They all want to project a green image these days. Next time I see a British Petroleum commercial on how environmentally correct they are, I will be skeptical.
What is the Good Life?
I subscribe to the old Indian (not just Buddhist) view that a good life is one devoid of extremes, allowing contemplation. Extremes of poverty or concentrations of wealth lead to catastrophes. Even elites who enjoy comforts in a world surrounded by desperation do not truly have the good life. This was true of the Spartans and the Namboothiri Brahmins of old India. The elite lived with the constant fear that the have-nots will dispossess them. But things have been getting better, more people have this good life than ever before. I suppose these days the good life would include not only food security, but also political freedom. Some would include air conditioning and WiFi.
Can everyone have it?
The surprising answer is yes. All through history people have been fighting with each other thinking that their good fortune has to come at the expense of others. But it turns out that someone else does not need to starve and toil for us to be well fed. It goes beyond food security. Scarcity of resources is often exaggerated.
If someone had predicted in 1985 that in twenty years 18% of India would have telephones I would have laughed. Back then it took a two year wait to get a telephone connection, a very scarce commodity in the days when you needed a wire to connect you to the world. Even in the US, the telephone company was a monopoly that jealously fought off any competition. Breaking up that monopoly improved not only the lives of Americans. The internet and cell phones came about as a result: the technical innovations had already been discovered. The technological revolution it unleashed spread through the world. While 80% of India is still not on the grid, growth is phenomenal: six million new connections (more than the entire population of Ireland) every month. The social implications of being connected are important. It is harder to exploit someone who can reach out to the world and complain about it.
Here are some words of caution about the new environmentalism of our times.
Sustainability has Social Costs
The traditional farming methods in India were sustainable (over a thousand years), organic and provided the good life for a tiny elite. This elite wrote the Sanskrit poetry and discovered the advanced mathematics and astronomy I have written about elsewhere. But it was at the expense of millions who worked in the rice fields. That old way of life is all but gone. We must do our best to preserve and build on the sophisticated culture of that time. But I have no nostalgia for the vanished `good old days’: the new social order, while more prosaic, is fairer and will produce even more interesting culture. Modern farming methods, based on fertilizers, genetically engineered seeds and large scale irrigation are less elegant. But they are effective. They feed a large population, while freeing up most of us to concentrate on other work.
There is Politics in Science Also
I remain skeptical about the confident predictions of Global Warming because I know that there is politics in science as in any other human activity. Just as one needs to learn religion but remain skeptical about its excesses, we must keep in mind that science too is susceptible to manipulation. In general, those views that help scientists drum up more research dollars will be favored. This is not because people are corrupt, merely the natural tendency of any human activity. This skepticism should not prevent us from acting on the consensus of experts: only that we need to be aware of possible pitfalls.
Environmentalism Can also Be Exploited
Exploitation of humans beings always happens in the name of a greater cause. Now that environmentalism has gone mainstream, it will also be used as a way to concentrate wealth and prevent competitors from growing. In the name of preserving the environment, newly developing countries are being asked to take steps that will slow down their growth. Cynical use of environmentalism as a way to reduce competition for the developed economies is inevitable. Corporations are going to use environmental arguments to get their way.There is nothing wrong in that, but we need to be vigilant, as the possibility of abuse exists.
In general you want to get rich first and only then worry about the environment. Think of Britain during the Industrial revolution or the US during its period of growth 1850-1900. And the tendency is usually to make someone else bear the burden of preserving nature’s beauty.
Environmentalism is a Conservative Cause!
Something odd is happening with environmentalism. It is being opposed vehemently by American Conservatives. Al Gore is a particularly favorite target. What does a man have to do get some respect from these guys? Win the Nobel Prize?
What is strange about this is that usually the drive to preserve nature comes from conservatives. It is not a coincidence that the words `conservative’ and `conservation’ have the same root. In most societies conservatives are the power elite, who don’t want to change things because they already have it good. The same conservatives also tend to own nice patches of land. They do not need to log it or develop it to make more money. Preserving nature intact and passing on its bounty to the next generation of landed aristocracy sounds a propos to them.
The Industrial Revolution devastated the environment before making Britain rich and powerful. The Monghol tribes which took over most of Asia in the middle ages seemed to care very little about preserving the Earth; they were not rooted to the land. Rich countries of yore, like India, dominated by traditional society, thought of preserving nature and maintaining the social order both as dharma. You let one go, the other would inevitably fall apart. There is no more conservative text than the Law of Manu, the first man of Hindu mythology. Manu is very clear about this connection between preserving natural and social orders.
You have to be willing to do what is necessary to develop the economy, in order to become a rich nation. An elite class will then develop that is powerful enough to set its ethos . They will evolve a conservatism which wants to preserve nature. It is a just world to them, and one worth preserving. Lifespans increase. Birthrates go down, as children are no longer needed for their labor. Leisure activities allow people opportunity to enjoy nature. The average age of the population goes up. The old and the rich tend to be the preservationists. Only the rich can afford it anyways. Some competing economy, where people are more willing to live with smoke and dust in return for greater productivity will seize the opportunity. This leads to the decay of the conservative society and its domination by the more rapidly growing power. Then the new guys develop their own elite and the whole cycle repeats itself.
What we are seeing in the US is a transition from a young, aggressive, unscrupulous nation to a rich, thoughtful, mature one. The anomaly of conservatives opposing environmentalists is a transient phenomenon. In another few years, the Yalees at the National Review will be staunch environmentalists. The formerly old societies like India and China will be- already are- the new youth, being lectured by the wise old men of America on the need to grow cautiously.
For people struggling to get by, a change in climate is not the end of the world. If some concrete needs to be poured to build a dam, they are looking at it as a means of employment. May be they are thinking short term, but who are we to say that they are wrong? The electricity generated at the dam will benefit those further up the social ladder. The laborer at the dam will struggle to send his children to school and some day they will also have a lifestyle that benefits from it. This is happening in China now and happened in the US in the 1930’s. The Hoover dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Work Projects Administration, were all solid liberal programs. I know an Italian immigrant to the US who dug tunnels for the Merrit Parkway (as part of WPA) in Connecticut and remained very proud of his handiwork fifty years later. His children went to college and his grandchildren are now enjoying a good life. Some of his great-grand children could very well grow up to be environmentalists. But Papa was right.
People protesting the three gorges dam in China and the Narmada project in India mean well. Some of them are great writers and philosophers. But there is wisdom also in the common man who wants to make a living from the project and even in the greedy developers who hope make more than a buck out of it. Truth has many facets.
We have forgotten the grand American projects of the Roosevelt era because we don’t need those gritty jobs anymore. It is the newly wealthy liberals of America who oppose nuclear reactors and insist on carbon neutrality for the third world. Where is the energy supposed to come from? They are not liberals, but conservatives who have not yet realized it. And the conservatives who oppose this sort of elitism are mostly representing the working class that needs economic development and is worried about competition from more youthful nations. They have not yet realized that they are the new progressives.
What Would Gandhi Drive?
Nano has been a buzz word in physics for a while. Now it is also the name of a car, made by Tata Motors of India. It is cute, looking more like a toy car than a real one. It is small. I have seen potholes in Calcutta that are bigger. And most of all it is cheap. It costs less than the DVD player in the SUV that my neighbor drives. The Nano is unlikely to be another Yugo: India is not in danger of breaking up, destroying its supply chain. The dream is that will be the next Volkswagen Bug. More likely it will be the next Trabant. Not too bad.
Whether the Nano succeeds or not, it is part of a larger trend. This is what engineering for the masses will look like in the future. What the iPod did to the record industry and the arxiv did to costly journals is about to happen to many well-established businesses.
So what does the $2,500 car and the $200 laptop say outside of the business world? Driving and computing are not the only things that can be done much cheaper and smaller. Let us look at our own business. Even scientific research is currently bogged down by bloated burocracies. A typical Experimental High Energy Physics paper can have 600 authors. Collaborations with 2000 authors are being formed as you read this. Are all of them really necessary?
Is the enormous cost of these scientist-armies justified by the results? The last true surprise in High Energy Physics (the tau lepton) was in 1972, at the dawn of the current age of dinosaurs. Is there a better way to spend the taxpayer’s precious gift to us?
It is not that all big science is doomed to failure. Cosmology and Astrophysics have made great advances recently. But if you look into it, you will see that the papers are written by teams of thirty to forty people, who may be using facilities built by much larger teams. This might be a model to follow. Considering that the biggest white elephant in science is the space station, it is ironic that other parts of NASA can be a model of efficiency.
Competition from lean, even if not mean, institutes set up in cheaper countries like India and Korea have already put many inefficient industrial research labs out of business. A smaller operation is not only cheaper but can also be more innovative and respond to changes quickly. Thus, it benefits science as much as the sclerotic operations harms society. A project with over a thousand PhDs cannot afford to take risks. No one really understands it from top to bottom. It can find something already predicted by some established theory. But is that really a discovery?
Why did Indian engineers achieve something that their much better paid counterparts in Detroit could not? The point is that no one else was even trying to make so cheap a car. There is no market for it except in India and other developing countries. So, the presumption is that there is no profit in it. This is wrong because those are the fastest growing markets, with the opportunity for greatest profit. There are already two cars per household in the US. Where is the growth?
Safety standards in the US are often blamed for the inefficiency. There is some truth to this. Safety standards are nonexistent and irrelevant in a country like India. Any car is safer than the entire family traveling on a scooter, weaving through the insane Indian traffic.
Other Nano ideas are more adaptable. A fifty horse power engine is enough . It consumes less and pollutes less. 45 miles per hour is breakneck speed on an Indian road. So it is in an American city. There could a class of car that is certified only for city streets, not for the highway. A/C would be great to have but people don’t demand it at this price range. Hard to give up heating though, as they did in the Nano.
The truth is that the Indian willingness to put up with all sorts of inconveniences and hazards at work is part of why things can be done so much cheaper over there. But this was true of the US as well in the days of Edison and Carnegie. A nation with a median age of 25 simply thinks of comfort differently.
The bloated and pampered auto industry in the US is slowly selling off its assets, defeated by its own linear thinking. GM is spends more on its retired employees than the currently active ones. Ironically, Tata might end up buying Jaguar from Ford. There is no contradiction in making both the cheapest and one of the most expensive cars. That is the way it has always been in India: squalor and luxury separated by a thin wall.
By the way, Gandhi didn’t drive. He was much more into walking. And I confess to being no Gandhi. I drive a Toyota SUV. It is an unusually balmy 33 degrees F (1C) today in Rochester. A good day to walk to work.
July 25th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[…] Continued in Part 2 Part 3 […]
July 25th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
[…] See also Part 1 Part 3 […]