Curb Your Malthusiasm

The Economist has an interesting piece on the rapid decline in fertility rates in developing countries as they grow wealthier.  This is a strong rebuke to the recent upsurge in Neo-Malthusian thinking, which is associated with the Peak Oil crowd and various “dark green” movements.  Alex Steffen of Worldchanging makes some smart points in this post about the problems with the “transition town” dark green movement, although I don’t really agree with the second half of the post.  He also has a useful post from a while back outlining what these various “green” terms mean.

The current fad for “dark green” Neo-Malthusianism is of course stimulated mainly by climate change, and a lot of its popularity likely stems from the increasingly dire nature of a lot of research on global warming.  The peak oil folks are coming at this from a slightly different direction, but a clearly related one.  I’ll admit to having written about this stuff in somewhat positive terms myself, but I’m reluctant to go too far down the Malthus-hole.  One of the major influences on my thinking has been Peter Huber‘s Hard Green, which is a problematic book in a lot of ways that can probably be deduced largely from its subtitle(s), but which is also an important challenge to environmentalists, especially those who rely overly on Malthus and models.  Huber’s a conservative, and the book has lots of standard-issue environmentalist-bashing, but it also puts forth a vision of a conservative environmentalism that Huber calls “hard green,” in contrast to the “soft green” of the Malthusians and the model-builders and the EPA regulators.  (The fact that he lumps all these groups together is one of the major problems with the book.)  “Hard green” is basically old-fashioned conservationism of the sort Teddy Roosevelt engaged in, and Huber talks about Roosevelt a lot in the book.  Unlike “soft green,” which is based fundamentally on concerns for human health, “hard green” is based primarily on aesthetics.

To Huber, nature is worth conserving because it’s beautiful, not because we need it.  He makes a lot of strange arguments in support of this, starting with the idea that human ingenuity and free markets can find substitutes for any and all natural resources (which is just straightforwardly wrong, as Robert Ayres shows in an interesting though somewhat odd paper).  He is most convincing, however, in discussing the problems with relying too much on models, whether environmental or economic.  He doesn’t quite practice what he preaches, but he makes the important and indisputably true point that it’s not actually possible to predict the future, so we should be hesitant about relying on models that purport to do so.  There is a long line of such models that got their predictions laughably wrong, starting of course with Malthus himself.  Huber also talks about the exact same phenomenon that the Economist piece discusses, namely the way wealth leads to lower fertility, which reinforces the growth in wealth, which ultimately (he claims) results in more environmental protection than a poor society can produce.  His solution for environmental problems is thus to promote economic growth rather than to regulate anything.

I obviously don’t agree with a lot of the things Huber says, but he’s right about some things, and since reading his book I’ve been shying away from the Malthusiasts and reverting more to my natural optimism when it comes to climate change.  I have no idea which climate models are better than others or what the future holds for global climate.  It does seem clear that global warming has begun and at least some of its effects are likely irreversible, so adaptation will almost certainly be important, along with mitigation of further effects, but beyond that I won’t make any predictions.  I’m fairly optimistic about efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill (a mechanism Huber supports in the book, by the way, though he doesn’t apply it to carbon specifically) in the US.  I’m not necessarily opposed to fossil fuels, however, and while I do think wind and solar energy are important and worthy of strong support I don’t see how we can realistically depend on them for a substantial portion of electricity production anytime soon.

So that’s where I stand as of now.  There may well be limits to growth, but trying to predict them is a fool’s wager, and the future is always full of surprises.  I’m just along for the ride.

AYRES, R. (2007). On the practical limits to substitution Ecological Economics, 61 (1), 115-128 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2006.02.011