With or Wihout Us

After this post last week, a reader asked me about my thoughts on overpopulation and resource depletion with special reference to Alan Wiseman's book World Without Us. This is a lot to cover and I haven't time to do it justice here, but I'll try to give a brief overview. Think of this as the Reader's Digest version and pardon the simplicity.

As an Englishman living in America, where Marmite is hard to come by, I'm all too familiar with the concept of scarcity, but a lack of resource in a local or a particular instance is a very different kettle of fish from absolute scarcity. The Malthusian idea of overpopulation leading to the gobbling up of finite resources has been around for a couple of centuries now and what is remarkable about it is how it has proven so consistently wrong–especially when it tries to lay the blame on the doorstep of civilised, industrial nations. I'll grant you that the image of some future New York where a hundred million people live cheek by jowl in polluted squalor until the oil runs out and then they fall on one another like starving rats as nations go to war over what scraps are left does have a certain dramatic appeal in a Mad Max sort of way, but the real world doesn't and never has worked like that.

Overpopulation is a problem, but only locally in certain, to be blunt, backward parts of the world and even there the problem isn't too many people, but too many tyrants robbing them blind. They don't suffer so much from overpopulation as poverty. A village of a hundred people ruled by a dictator with only enough food for fifty and no way to buy more is "overpopulated". A city of a free ten million that can import more than it needs is not.

Then there is the fact that prosperous, democratic, free-market societies suffer from, if anything underpopulation. Why is another discussion, but this is an objective fact and a real problem for the civilised world.

As for resource depletion, I'm surprised it ever survived Julian Simon's famous bet with Paul Ehrlich that the price of any five metals would fall over the next decade against Ehrlich's argument that we'd all die before the year 2000. People are always making doomwatch predictions of this or that resource running out, but they always fail to come true for two reasons:

First, a failure to understand a simple rule of economics that shows that as a resource becomes scarcer alternatives become more attractive. If oak becomes too dear for ships, then iron becomes economical. If oil costs too much, then biodiesel looks good.

Oil brings us to the second reason. The current flap over fossil fuels is a classic example of confusing capacity with reserves with resources with absolute amounts. In terms of capacity, how much oil we can produce day to day, we are in real trouble. There aren't enough refineries and too many wells are located in unstable or enemy hands while Western governments positively obstruct domestic drilling. If most of our oil came from Europe and North America we'd be laughing, but since it comes from the likes of the Saudis, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin, we're not so cheerful. On the other hand, we have twenty years of oil in reserve. This doesn't seem like much until you notice that we never had more than twenty years in reserve. Ever. That has nothing to do with how much oil there is, but with how expensive it is to find. As a rule, oil companies look for enough petroleum to last two decades and call it good. As to resources, these are much greater by orders of magnitude with fields from the Irish Sea to the Falklands just waiting to be tapped. Not to mention "dry" wells that are in reality two-thirds full or low quality oil fields that weren't economical to refine until now. Depending on price per barrel and projected technology, we're talking a reasonable estimate of two hundred years worth of oil. When you bring in absolute supply (oil that we suspect might be in an untouched part of the globe, such as the deep ocean or the interior of Asia, but haven't begun even preliminary exploration for), then all bets are off.

Mind you, I'm only talking about oil. When we bring in other fossil fuels that can substitute for oil at the right price, then we have about a thousand years' worth of energy–More if we assume that we aren't burning up all the gas, coal and shale simultaneously. And oil is a special case because we burn it. With other resources that we can recycle or cultivate the picture is even brighter. Add in a really robust power network based on breeder and high-temperature nuclear reactors followed by fusion power and there isn't any resource problem we can't beat by sheer brute force.

All very well, but what about the environment? Again, we do have a problem and again, it is one that is not of the free, wealthy and advanced, but of the oppressed, poor and backward. Historically and today, it is a fact that it is in wealthy, free nations with loads of technology that the environment is of the best quality and farmland is allowed to revert to forest. It is in places like Sudan where people are stripping the land bare and spilling raw chemicals into the sea. It's in Britain that salmon are swimming straight up the Thames through the heart of London while the rivers of Southeast Asia are open sewers. True, the so-called "developed" world may not have as much pristine wilderness as some would like and it rankles my farmboy's heart to see prime soil buried under houses and roads, but frankly I'll take the garden that is the English country over the universal oak forest of 8000 years ago or the wastelands of Soviet-era oil fields any day.

In summary, we have problems that need solving, some very serious, but with prudence, invention and a willingness to help free and raise up our less fortunate brethren to build their way to prosperity, overpopulation and lack of resources aren't among those for the foreseeable future.

That last part is very important: foreseeable future. One of the real problems we do have today is a tendency on the part of some to make the good hostage to the perfect and demand that solutions be for now and forever or it's worthless. There are seriously those who believe that if you cannot guarantee that, for example, nuclear waste can be stored by us safely for 200,000 years, we should just give up. Given that there is a very real prospect that this "waste" may become a resource within my lifetime to fuel power plants or heal the sick, I'm happy if we can secure the stuff for five hundred years and worry more about keeping our civilisation going. After that, it's time for our descendants to shift their idle selves and look after the next five hundred.

Speaking of the long term, I was also asked about Alan Wiseman's book, which graphically relates how the works of man are transient and how in a surprisingly short time all will become one with Nineveh and Tyre. Again, I don't have time to go into any detail, but I will say that I wasn't impressed by Wiseman's thesis. His scenarios are fun in the same way that a time lapse movie of a rotting apple is fun, but it's a bit pointless. True, if we stop maintaining our buildings and our machines they'll rot and corrode to dust, but as they were built to serve us, so what? If we aren't around, I'm not too bothered about the fate of the Louvre.

Besides, Wiseman is wrong. Decay is widespread, but not universal nor absolute within a reasonable time frame (i.e. In the end, Judgment Day will do for us all no matter what). He tends to cherry pick his examples; focusing on those that support his point and ignoring those that refute it. True, the Golden Gate Bridge won't last more than a century, but it's a steel structure under enormous stresses sitting in the San Francisco Bay. Of course it will rust the moment it stops being painted. On the other hand, I can point to vast libraries and data banks containing a large fraction of our history that sit in converted salt mines in the American Midwest that will be around and legible until the next asteroid impact. Or the tea mug in my hand that could survive a few geological epochs if left in the right place. And I'm not even bringing in various time capsules, microenvironments, and examples of archaeological stasis.

Not a bad set of mementos for a civilisation, if not a species. If you're into that Ozymandias sort of thing. For myself, I prefer the soundest form of earthly posterity, which is to do what I can to make sure we're still here tomorrow and the day after.