Matt Ridley: The Richer We Get, The Greener We’ll Become
The world’s climate change experts are now saying that strong growth doesn’t hurt the environment, it protects it
Matt Ridley, The Times
In the past 50 years, world per capita income roughly trebled in real terms, corrected for inflation. If it continues at this rate (and globally the great recession of recent years was a mere blip) then it will be nine times as high in 2100 as it was in 2000, at which point the average person in the world will be earning three times as much as the average Briton earns today.
I make this point partly to cheer you up on Easter Monday about the prospects for your great-grandchildren, partly to start thinking about what that world will be like if it were to happen, and partly to challenge those who say with confidence that the future will be calamitous because of climate change or environmental degradation.
The curious thing is that they only predict disaster by assuming great enrichment. But perversely, the more enrichment they predict, the greater the chance (they also predict) that we will solve our environmental problems.
Past performance is no guide to future performance, of course, and a well aimed asteroid could derail any projection. But I am not the one doing the extrapolating. In 2012, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asked the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to generate five projections for the economy of the world, and of individual countries, in 2050 and 2100.
[I’ve inserted the graph Matt refers to, PDF here: ENV-EPOC-WPCID(2012)6 – Anthony]
They make fascinating reading. The average per capita income of the world in 2100 is projected to be between three and 20 times what it is today in real terms. The OECD’s “medium” scenario, known as SSP2, also known as “middle of the road” or “muddling through”, sounds pretty dull. It is a world in which, in the OECD’s words, “trends typical of recent decades continue” with “slowly decreasing fossil fuel dependency”, uneven development of poor countries, delayed achievement of Millennium Development Goals, disappointing investment in education and “only intermediate success in addressing air pollution or improving energy access for the poor”.
And yet this is a world in which by 2100 the global average income per head has increased 13-fold to $100,000 (in 2005 dollars) compared with $7,800 today. Britain will be very slightly below that average by then, yet has still trebled its income per head. According to this middling scenario, the average citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who today earns $300 a year, will then earn $42,000, or roughly what an American earns today. The average Indonesian, Brazilian or Chinese will be at least twice as rich as today’s American.
Remember this is in today’s money, corrected for inflation, but people will be spending it on tomorrow’s technologies, most of which will be cleverer, cleaner and kinder to the environment than today’s — and all for the same price. Despite its very modest assumptions, it is an almost unimaginable world: picture Beverly Hills suburbs in Kinshasa where pilotless planes taxi to a halt by gravel drives (or something equally futuristic). Moreover, the OECD reckons that inequality will have declined, because people in poor countries will have been getting rich faster than people in rich countries, as is happening now. All five storylines produce a convergence, though at different rates, between the incomes of poor and rich countries.
Can the planet survive this sort of utopian plutocracy? Actually, here it gets still more interesting. The IPCC has done its own projections to see what sort of greenhouse gas emissions these sorts of world would produce, and vice versa. The one that produces the lowest emissions is the one with the highest income per head in 2100 — a 16-fold increase in income but lower emissions than today: climate change averted. The one that produces the highest emissions is the one with the lowest GDP — a mere trebling of income per head. Economic growth and ecological improvement go together. And it is not mainly because environmental protection produces higher growth, but vice versa. More trade, more innovation and more wealth make possible greater investment in low-carbon energy and smarter adaptation to climate change. Next time you hear some green, doom-mongering Jeremiah insisting that the only way to avoid Armageddon is to go back to eating home-grown organic lentils cooked over wood fires, ask him why it is that the IPCC assumes the very opposite.
In the IPCC’s nightmare high-emissions scenario, with almost no cuts to emissions by 2100, they reckon there might be north of 4 degrees of warming. However, even this depends on models that assume much higher “climate sensitivity” to carbon dioxide than the consensus of science now thinks is reasonable, or indeed than their own expert assessment assumes for the period to 2035.
And in this storyline, by 2100 the world population has reached 12 billion, almost double what it was in 2000. This is unlikely, according to the United Nations: 10.9 billion is reckoned more probable. With sluggish economic growth, the average income per head has (only) trebled. The world economy is using a lot of energy, improvements in energy efficiency having stalled, and about half of it is supplied by coal, whose use has increased tenfold, because progress in other technologies such as shale gas, solar and nuclear has been disappointing.
…
These IPCC and OECD reports are telling us clear as a bell that we cannot ruin the climate with carbon dioxide unless we get a lot more numerous and richer. And they are also telling us that if we get an awful lot richer, we are likely to have invented the technologies to adapt, and to reduce our emissions, so we are then less likely to ruin the planet. Go figure.
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cue predictable Paul Ehrlich insanity rant in 3…2…1
Ah, yes. A central African earning $43,000 per year crafting bush meat sub sandwiches. PETA might go apoplectic.
There is no amount of CO2 that we can release that would have any effect on the climate. The fact is that CO2 partitions 50 to 1 into the oceans, which means to double the CO2 in the atmosphere, we would have to emit 50 times as much as the absolute needed to double CO2. As there is not enough available carbon to burn, we could raise the CO2 about 20% theoretically. In reality we are not the major driver of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the oceans as they warm and cool are in control.
At all time frames, CO2 ALWAYS follows the temperature and not the other way around. Of course, the political agenda demands that we be the driver of CO2 and thus global warming. Remember, they simply rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” because actual global warming stopped about 20 years ago and the oceans basically stopped warming 30 years ago, in the middle 1980s.
It benefits me little to hear predictions of economic growth of poor countries which use the dollar. It may make sense to an economist who can parse the relative values of 2020 African lira or francs, translate those into “real lira” or “real francs” of 2014, toss in an algorithm for the cost of living and convert those figures to dollar amounts, but… it can be easier to see than that.
As Matt Ridley proposes In his book The Rational Optimist, human specialization brings with it enormous gains – gains that are likely to continue. In a chapter titled “A Better Today” he traces the evolution of “cheap light”, a value which we can all appreciate more tangibly than the dollar.
In a sense, he concludes, mankind has undergone a 43,000-fold improvement in quality of life. The fact that such gains are uneven across cultures should not prevent the push to continue.along this path.
Tom J says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:07 am
Or in 1959, saying that men would be landing on the moon in ten years.
Oh, I forgot. I’m afflicted with conspiracist ideation. That landing was a hoax.
Frodo, yes! From Malthus to Eugenics to Ehrlich to CAGW, these movements are plausible, pessimistic, puritanical, paternalistic, and patrician. All benefit the elite at the expense of the poor.
To glaxx zontar:
You wrote: “What jobs will the worlds future worker be performing
that will earn $42000.”
My answer–I don’t know. However, in 1914, the following jobs didn’t
exist, or were extremely rare:
airport manager
aircraft mechanic
airline pilot
blood tester
cardiovascular technician
distance learning educators
electric power line workers
film editors
elevator installers
forensic pathologists
graphics programmers
….
And a horde of others. I’m sure I don’t have to beat you over the
head TOO much with the point. The “creative destruction” of capitalism has
created a LOT of new fields to work in, many of them well-paid.
You need to open your mind a bit.
They are banking on the fusion project to solve the energy problem, but this is a project where there is not yet light at the end of the tunnel.
Your were most likely better off with the In $438 in 1900 than your are with the $42000 in 2000.
To Mark.R:
You wrote: “Your were most likely better off with the In $438 in 1900 than your
are with the $42000 in 2000.”
Oh? Even in the U.S.A., in 1900 the average life expectancy was 47 years.
Infant mortality was 10 times what it is now, with one out of every 10 children
dying before their first birthday. There were no antibiotics, so tuberculosis,
diptheria, pneumonia, and so on were dreaded killers. The average diabetic
in 1900 lived one year post-diagnosis; now that average (in Britain, I don’t
know the U.S. figures) is 18.6 years.
Our quality of life has increased vastly. Yes, our currency has become somewhat
debased, but your speculation is a definite reach.
I don’t believe futurologists. If in 1928 you had asked one how the world would look like today, he would obviously not have been able to tell, though he would have given you an opinion. Think wars, computers, Hitler, etc.
Just consider what a person in 1900 would have envisaged for the year 2000.
Such a person would not have had the necessary information to make a realistic guess.
So it is from 2000 to 2100.
We have no idea.
All we can do is try to do no harm in the meantime.
Anyone who tries to obstruct progress is more likely than not doing harm.
Increased wealth for individuals leads to lower rates of fertility and greater care for the local environment.
Increased authoritarian control leads to higher rates of fertility and less effective care for the local environment.
Get the authoritarians out of the way and let freedom flow unleashed save for a basic rule of law preventing abuses of power by the elites.
At present we have the global elites trying to consolidate their powers via scare stories such as climate change and peak oil amongst other scenarios.
We let them do so at our peril.
The year 2100 could see a global population peak having passed with a managed population decline in progress and technological advances we cannot envisage.
The glass is half full and not half empty.
Cool it.
One real-world example:
In 1908, build a runway and airport for the latest and greatest airplane then flying..
You need: One each grass pasture about 100 feet wide. A tent, and a can of gasoline. Use the fence around the pasture to keep the cows off of the grass. The plane: No canopy, two seats, and cloth wings.
Now, just 40 years later, build an airport.
You need a 300 foot wide runway built of reinforced concrete 3-4 feet thick and 14,000 feet long for a plane with a take-off weight approaching 420,000 lbs, with the B-52 on the drawing boards at 480,000 pounds take-off weight. Add another runway for crosswinds, a few taxiways, and several acres of reinforced concrete for the planes to sit. (This one airport in 1948 will require more concrete than was ever poured prior to the (not-yet finished!) Panama Canal, and more pavement than even existed in 1908 in the entire world!) Add hangers larger and wider than any building in the world for maintenance and rebuilding, with moving doors alone larger than most structures in 1908. Add a couple of Fuel tanks to hold few hundred thousands tons of fuel for the bombers, plus all of their piping. A power plant that exceeds the generating power of most cities.
Throw in housing for 10,000 mechanics, flyers, and crews; plus dependents and office staff. Spares, engine and machinist buildings and electronics shops and radar and ground control and security and fire fighting and sewage and water plants and maintenance facilities. Throw in parking and housing and shopping and base support for all of the above .. (Comes to a few thousand acres by itself. )
And that is just ONE airport in Maine. There are dozens elsewhere in the world like it, and 47 other states in the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii and Canada. Panama Canal ….
Apologies for a mistake in the article. The global average income in 2100 in SSP2 is $60,000, not $100,000, which is for SSP1, so in SSP2 it is a 8-fold increase. I misread the two lines on the graph. The other numbers are correct, including the $42,000 Congolese per capita income in SSP2.
Let me first point out that there is no evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no real evidence in the paleoclimate record. For those who believe in the greenhouse effect, the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere is H2O and it provides ample negative feedbacks to changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases so as to mitigate the effects of these greenhouse gases on climate. The proponents of AGW often for get all what H2O does in response to changes in greenhouse gases. In particular they tend to forget that in addition to being a greenhouse gas, H2O is a major coolant, moving heat from the Earth’s surface to where clouds form. More heat energy is moved by H2O via the heat of vaporization then by both convection and LWIR, absorption band radiation. More H2O entering the atmosphere means that more heat energy gets moved. So there is no real connection between man’s use of fossil fuels and climate change.
We live on a planet of finite extent with finite resources. Our current out of control human population increase is being fueled by the use of fossil fuels, a very finite and non sustaining resource. New technology is making more fossil fuel available but we are currently trying to use it up as fast as possible. It may be many thousands of years before the current interglacial period ends but our fossil fuel resources, especially with an expanding population may run our in only hundreds of years. When it is gone it is gone. Our current sustainable energy resources cannot support such a large population of humans. If man does not control his own population, Nature will, catastrophically. To avoid massive pain and suffering we need to consider what needs to take place on both the relatively short term and the longer term . We need to curb human population and gradually get it down to where sustainable sources of energy will be sufficient just as they were before the advent of the industrial revolution. It has nothing to do with climate change.
Even the 10.9 billion is deemed too high (HERE and HERE.)
Here is some more optimism about the future. I don’t understand why such observations make so many people very angry. Do they dream of calamity? AGW and Warmists are the same.
Economist – 2013
“Crime is plunging in the rich world”
Geocurrents – 2013
“Fertility rates are declining if not plummeting almost everywhere”
And now for some ‘bad’ news. This is what we maybe worrying about a lot more in 2100. Ehrlich and other Malthusians may be a forgotten breed in 2100. Children won’t know who Malthus was.
pottereaton says:
April 21, 2014 at 12:42 pm
“Tom J says:
April 21, 2014 at 11:07 am
While this is not quite an accurate example may I respectfully state that, in 1914, I could’ve envisioned someone saying: “Crossing the Atlantic in 6 hours at 600 mph sounds way too optimistic. The Titanic, if it hadn’t sank, would’ve been about as fast as we’ll ever cross that ocean.”
Or in 1959, saying that men would be landing on the moon in ten years.”
I had completed second year science in 1958 and had a job as a chokerman in Jarvis Inlet in southern British Columbia for the summer. In an argument in which I was the only dissenter, it was roundly believed that man would never head out of the earth’s atmosphere in a rocket. I argued that Sputnik 1 was 100% guarantee that we would indeed depart from this mortal coil by rocket. I was so fervent about it, that I couldn’t get anyone to take my modest bet (I can’t remember how much it was) but my certainty tempered theirs.
I swithched to engineering that fall. I have always been a ‘technology will do whatever we can imagine being done’ type of guy. It is also why I never jump on gloom and doom band wagons. Such folks seem to have something permanently amiss, a kind of sheepy helplessness that would scare the heck out of me. I believed it highly plausible a decade ago that we were having a significant affect on the global temperature, but it didn’t shake my certainty in technology being the solution to such problems. I also didn’t take long to see that the “science” being relied on was political science. I pride myself on this optimistic view of technology as I suspect do sceptics in general. Those not having it cannot by definition be a part of any solution (except a destructive one).
Population control is going to be the problem.
A falling birthrate may seem good, but a rapidly aging population does not.
Soon someone will come-up with a solution to the rapidly aging population.
I doubt that solution will be well-received.
@willhaas
First of all, there is no out of control human population increase whatsoever, the population bomb was defused twenty years ago.
Then, an ever increasing portion of resources needed to improve life is information. A finite resource as well, but we still have plenty of way to go with an upper limit of information storage at 10⁷⁰ bit/m².
Energy is a non-issue. No energy is needed to store or process information, only to delete it (to make room for more), but not too much. According to Landauer’s principle at room temperature one can erease information at a rate of 3×10²⁰ bit/sec using 1 W power input. At CMBR temperature 10 mW is sufficient to do the same.
It is my understanding that the worlds population is continuing to increase yet its surface area and fossil fuel resources are not increasing as well. Where I live, not long ago was all either farm land or open wild land. Now they are filling in the last vestige of farm land and starting to build townhouses. The population density of my community continues to increase Short of a major calamity I do not expect things to change for the foreseeable future.
On the one hand I think it maybe too optimistic, political and social stability are important and we just don’t know how it will pan out this century. Despite the internal strife they just manage to hang in there.
OK, let me set the cat amongst the pigeons. Malthusians, 3,2,1, GO!
But this can’t be true. I saw on the news that they were dying by the millions, starving babies, AIDS, Ebola, starvation, famine, genocide, child soldiers, blood diamonds, failed crops and general nastiness – a no hope continent. These are surely lies.
Tom J says:
April 21, 2014 at 10:58 am
Indeed (as I was saying when the Puppy Blender was in grade school); a common joke in 17th century England was that the Incarnation didn’t happen there because Judas couldn’t have found a tree on which to hang himself. So wood-starved was the island that they burned coal instead. Even that proved to be a short-term palliative; the coal seams ran under the sea, and the mines were continually flooded. Fortunately, Thomas Savery invented a nifty little device called a steam engine…
Bravo – this is great stuff! But I am appalled that not one commenter above mentioned Adam Smith. His ideas (really, his understanding understanding of, and making plain to all, what really drives human development), infuriating as they are to Democrats and other socialists/communists, have fueled this incredible explosion of wealth. It IS hard reading (i.e. The Wealth of Nations) but you are impoverished if you haven’t read it.
More signs of Malthusian gloom. All hope is lost ye who enter here. STAAAAARVE!
OK, I think you get my point. Just like with global warming we are fed [no pun intended] an endless stream of doom and gloom about the world. You could call me a cherry picker which is what I would call the doomers.
Don’t panic, it is self correcting. In 2100 we will not be talking about an “out of control human population increase”. We will be worried about how to get mothers to INCREASE the number of children they give birth to. The finite resources are still available, and when they are about to finish we just find some other alternative. Think copper drainage pipes replaced by PVC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03h8r1j
http://youtu.be/QpdyCJi3Ib4
Thank you for reading my post and commenting. I wish I could share your optimism but those who fail to plan, plan to fail and that goes for mankind. Where I live, the county, not all that long ago was primarily agricultural and they have been gradually paving it over with most of our food being imported. Ours is not the only county where that has been happening. It takes a lot of fossil fuel energy to import food from outside the county and when that energy runs out we will be in trouble. In our state the population keeps outgrowing the state and federal government’s ability to provide water. They have built reservoirs everywhere but it has not been enough. More and more communities end up having to ration water at one time or another. Right now the problems are relatively gradual but they do continue to get worse. If we suddenly run out of fossil fuel which probably will not happen for at least 200 years. then there goes food, trans portion. heating, cooling, and lighting. Few will survive. If we panic and take drastic action it will probably end up causing more problems and suffering then it prevents but we do have to recognize the problem and start doing something about it.