How to Achieve Peak Environmental Impact
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You won’t hear about it from green campaigners, but many of
the key drivers of environmental destruction are slowing down.
How to Achieve Peak Environmental Impact by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
(This post was written for Mark Lynas, who is co-hosting an event with us on ecomodernism at “Sense About Science" in London next Thursday evening.)
The rate of
population growth is nearly half today what it was in 1970. The global
population could peak as early as the middle of this century. By some
calculations, the amount of farmland needed to grow food globally has already
peaked. Meanwhile, per capita water use, food consumption, and material use have all
already peaked in rich countries, and many developing ones as well.
Taken
together, these trends suggest a truly remarkable possibility: overall, negative human
impacts on the environment could peak and then
decline within the next several decades.
How soon we hit the peak, and how rapidly impacts decline,
depends on how quickly key trends driving the slowing of environmental impacts
can be accelerated. And therein lies the rub for environmentalists: to get to
peak environmental impact quickly, we will need to accelerate key economic and
technological processes that greens have long opposed.
Consider population. The primary determinant of whether
global population peaks around 2050 at 9 billion people or 2100 at 11 billion
will be how quickly sub-saharan Africa develops. The faster Africa moves its
population out of the subsistence agrarian economy and into cities, the faster
population will stabilize. That’s because in the agrarian economy, children are
needed to work the fields and support aging parents in circumstances in which
there is no social safety net to speak of.
When families move to the city, fertility rates fall from as
many as 5 or 6 to 2 or fewer. Women gain economic opportunities outside the
household. Children are valued for their future earning potential in the formal
economy, rather than their labor in the fields.
Rapid urbanization requires jobs in the city for those who
migrate and higher agricultural productivity for those who continue to farm.
This requires industrialization and agricultural modernization. A growing
manufacturing base has long been a crucial way to integrate a large, low
skilled population into the formal economy, and increase labor productivity. To
grow more food on less land, farming becomes mechanized, relieving agricultural
workers of a lifetime of hard physical labor.
Urbanization and industrialization are hard pills to swallow
for environmentalists who have long valorized peasant farmers, demonized
industrial agriculture, and railed against the evils of consumption and
capitalism. But the evidence is clear that when people move to cities and farm
more intensively, birth rates fall, per capita land use for food production
declines, and pressures on forests, ecosystems, and biodiversity are reduced.
The one driver of global environmental impacts that doesn’t
slow when populations urbanize and economies modernize is energy consumption.
But here again, accommodating the development imperatives of a global
population that remains overwhelmingly poor — while mitigating the
environmental consequences of energy consumption — forces the green movement to
reconsider some long held shibboleths.
The United Nations Sustainable
Energy for All initiative, for instance, is predicated on the notion
that much of the global population stays poor and rural, consuming a tiny
fraction of the energy that citizens of developed economies take for granted.
Even were developing world populations willing to accept this future, which
they most assuredly do not, the consequences would not bode well for the
environment.
Large rural populations dependent on subsistence agriculture
are hard on the land and hard on nature. They clear forests to make room for
low productivity farming and pasture, hunt bushmeat for protein, and depend on
fuelwood and charcoal for cooking and heating.
A cheap solar panel
on a thatched roof hut powering an LED lightbulb and a cell
phone charger can shine a light on rural poverty but can’t help large
populations escape it. That requires far larger amounts of energy to power
irrigation and tractors on the farm and factories in the cities. It requires
roads and other infrastructure to provide farmers with access to markets and
urban populations with access to commercially grown food.
Emerging economies, from Great Britain onwards, have
historically met this need with large hydro-electric dams and fossil energy,
which provides large quantities of cheap, on demand grid electricity to growing
urban populations, industrial facilities, and large scale agricultural
operations.
All energy production comes with tradeoffs. Dams harm local
river ecosystems, but they also provide water for irrigation and power for
farmers, allowing higher agricultural productivity and less clearing of forests
for fuel and food. Fossil fuels emit carbon into the atmosphere and pollute the
air but replace wood and charcoal for heating and cooking, which result in
millions of indoor air pollution deaths annually.
While the environmental consequences of continuing growth in
energy consumption can’t be eliminated, they can be significantly mitigated.
Sub-saharan Africa has enormous hydro-electric
potential and is rich in natural gas. It is possible, indeed even
likely, that rapid urbanization and development in Africa might be powered by
gas and hydro instead of coal.
Many poor and emerging economies are also increasingly
turning to nuclear energy. China and India have both launched ambitious
programs to build large fleets of conventional plants and develop a new
generation of advanced nuclear technologies that are cheaper and burn their own
waste. Kenya and other poor nations have launched joint ventures with China,
Slovakia and South Korea to construct nuclear plants
domestically.
Nuclear power is hands-down the best source
of energy for the environment, producing large quantities of
reliable zero-pollution power on a tiny patch of land while the tiny quantity
of radioactive waste nuclear produces is easily and safely stored.
The environmental benefits of accelerating urbanization,
agricultural productivity, and decarbonization are enormous. With far higher
yields on larger farms, marginal farmlands revert back to grasslands and
forest. Urbanization, agricultural modernization, and rising incomes from industrialization
take pressure off of parks and protected areas in poor countries.
Thanks to those factors, forests are coming back across much
of the United States and Europe and many developing nations like Costa Rica
have been able to protect much more of their forests and biodiversity in parks
and protected areas.
Today, humans use about half the Earth to meet our material
needs, most of that for food production. With accelerated urbanization,
agricultural productivity, and decarbonization, it is possible that we could
very significantly shrink human impacts over the course of the next century,
leaving 70 or even 80 percent of the Earth to nature.
That future is by no means automatic. Accelerating the
diffusion of better and cleaner agriculture and energy technologies is a
program that governments and global institutions ought to be able to get
behind, as they once did for the green revolution in agriculture.
To realize the our full potential to shrink the human
footprint and bring back more nature, we’ll need better technologies still.
We’ll need next generation nuclear plants that can’t meltdown and burn their
own waste; seeds that produce their own pesticides and better tolerate drought
on a hotter planet; water recycling and desalination; aquaculture that spares
wild fish populations; and ways of producing meat requiring far less land and
resources.
Peak human impact is an inspiring vision, and it is within sight.
Achieving it will be difficult, but no technological or scientific
breakthroughs nor significant economic sacrifices are required. Human societies
have repeatedly shown themselves capable of overcoming outmoded dogmas and
myths — not just with science and rationality, but also with positive visions
of the future. We can do that again.
Blomqvist, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are coauthors of “Nature
Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation,” and work at Breakthrough
Institute.
____________
Michael Shellenberger, President, Breakthrough Institute
436 14th St, Suite 820 :: Oakland, CA 94612 :: cell (best): 415-309-4200 :: office: 510.550.8800 x355 :: Skype: Shellenberger
My assistant is Cassie Brunelle, cassie@thebreakthrough.org
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