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
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Eco-Worriers please read about the horse manure problem of the late 19th century.
For well over 100 years pessimists have got it wrong about human progress more that optimists. They think human beings look at a looming calamity and are unable to act. They assume things will stay the same while the calamity looms. Bad thinking which leads to being wrong more times than you are right. Sorry, but that is the truth.
Mr. Gommers is quite wrong about Fusion energy progress. We DO know to do it and have Released more Fusion energy than any so-called “renewable”. Like renewables, our fusion is currently intermittant, and of short duration, but unlike them it is not inherently so. We have met and discovered all the ways plasma instabilities can interact and fail. It has been a long and exhausting scientific journey but the end is now in sight
ITER under construction in France is the last scientific Fusion experiment and the first crude Engineering experiment and attempt at commercial scale Fusion generation. About half finished, it will be capable of about 700 MW thermal output for hours on end. Its follow on, likely to be begin construction in the 2020s, will be the first genuine Power Plant prototype to add electric power to the Grid.
Clean, limitless and inexhaustible, Fusion energy will change our world.
.
During the 60s and 70s the Soviet Union trumped the US in every “green” standard…their clean water, clean air and even RF and nuclear radiation standards on the books were far better than ours here in the US. These examples of one-upmanship were crowed by the Soviets at every opportunity.
Except that in reality Soviet air and water were far far more polluted than in the US, especially after automobile catalytic converters came into use. The reason? Americans could afford the cost of keeping their air and water clean. The Soviet standards were so impractical they had to be ignored, resulting in worse pollution than if even a tiny effort had been put forth to control the worst pollution.
Mr. Ridley is absolutely correct. The more prosperous we are, the greener we will be.
Contrariwise, see here:
“THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF STUFF, AND THERE NEVER WILL BE”―E. M. Smith
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
I love citing those two posts by E. M. Smith. Because he is right. Aside from a little gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere, and rockets we have sent out into the Solar System, not a molecule of stuff has left the Earth.
/Mr Lynn
“Economic growth and ecological improvement go together”
Don’t tell the Club of rome.
JJM Gommers says:
April 21, 2014 at 1:21 pm
It all depends on which fusion project you’re watching.
Rossi’s device just finished a several months-long test. It’s unclear when the results will be released, possibily in June. Apparently things went well.
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014/04/19/e-cat-report-watch-thread/
Chris R. says:
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.
Yes Chris.R I was only referring to the currency and yes over all our Our quality of life has increased vastly.
IE Back in the 1970s here in NZ only one person on min wage needed to work to pay for a mortgage on a home. Now you need two persons on min wage.(And pay for rates,food,power and so on.)
The method of projecting of trend, used here by Mr. Ridley, provides one with an unreliable guide to the future. The growing divergency between the projected and the observed global temperature under increases in the CO2 concentration provides us with a recent example of this phenomenon.
This unreliability has a known cause. It is a consequence from neglecting the base rate in assigning numerical values to conditional probabilities.
Hi Mark.R:
Okay, it seems we’re in overall agreement. The changeover of the world’s
currencies from the “Bretton Woods” gold-based system to our “fiat” currencies
has resulted in a lot of debasement of the currency–which shows up in
increased prices all around us.
Jimbo says:
April 21, 2014 at 4:21 pm
Re the Congo
‘Growth should continue, to 8.2% in 2013 and 9.4% in 2014,’
So using the rule of 72, the growth in he Congo should about double in 8 years.
“For the Ehrlichs, language about reducing the ecological footprint tends to be quickly juxtaposed to the real rationale–reducing “social inequities.” Precisely the same aims and means as the OECD’s Great Transition and the UN’s Post-2015 described Agenda.”
Or “wealthy middle class is disastrous for Marxism”? Marxism needs poverty to be the dominant ideology?
The most important wealth distribution problem we will have in the near future, is that the middle class will disappear. There’s a second industrial revolution starting right now, and at the end of it, a very large share of both blue collar and white collar jobs as we know them will be gone. The emerging economies of Asia and Africa has a very short time window to take advantage of their cheap labor force – US companies are already replacing production in China with robot factories at home. The real challenge to political and business leaders is how to ride through this transition with as little social unrest as possible.
Santa Baby says:
April 21, 2014 at 10:47 pm
“Or “wealthy middle class is disastrous for Marxism”? Marxism needs poverty to be the dominant ideology?”
Wealthy middle class people are suckers for Marxism as long as you sell it under a different label. See cultural marxism, Frankfurt School, Critical Theory. Nearly all journalists and newspapers make their money with it. Mostly it’s called environmentalism at the moment.
Matthew R. Epp says:
April 21, 2014 at 10:27 am
In 1900, avg US income was $438, by 2000 it had increased to $42,000 almost a 100 fold increase.
Nonsense, you’re ignoring inflation. I’ll use US BLS’s inflation calculator to show this. It only goes back to 1913, but that’s close enough. It shows that $438 in 1913 dollars is equivalent to $7,618.55 in 2000 dollars. So the increase was 5.37-fold, not 100-fold.
US BLS inflation calculator
Espen says, “US companies are already replacing production in China with robot factories at home.”
You were close. Actually, it is US schools that are already replacing education with robot factories at home. It is a nationalized education program called Common Core.
The destruction of the power sector with worthless, expensive, intermittent renewables has already driven production out of many European countries. For example, the UK just recently shut down its last aluminum plant as a result of its disastrous Climate Change Act. I do not know what would make the US an exception to this unfortunate result of introducing shortage, unreliability, increased expense, and volatility to electricity prices and supply.
Zeke says:
April 22, 2014 at 2:02 am
“You were close. Actually, it is US schools that are already replacing education with robot factories at home. It is a nationalized education program called Common Core.”
You had a compulsory Prussian school system at least since Dewey, how much worse can it get. (As a German schoolkid I had this uneasy feeling all my teachers were assholes delighting in wasting my time. I only found out much later why.
Find
The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto
on youtube. Hope this link works:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/YQiW_l848t8
)
(WOW. Dewey was a Trotzkyite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Commission
)
(So how much worse can it get?)
Titan28 says:
April 21, 2014 at 9:51 am
Someone in the Congo might be earning $42,000 in 2100? I don’t want to throw cold water on such a positive scenario, and I like Ridley, but he’s way too optimistic here.
It implies a 6.2% GDP growth rate. China’s rate has been 10% over the past 30 years. It may be partially fake, and in any case I don’t think it could stay very high for the next 86 years, but it does make the implied Congo rate not utterly absurd. Still, I find it hard to believe. I doubt that any country has ever sustained a very high growth rate for so long as 86 years.
How does Dr. Bohr put it? “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Niels Bohr? I thought it was Yogi Berra’s.
Smoking Frog says:
April 22, 2014 at 2:51 am
“I doubt that any country has ever sustained a very high growth rate for so long as 86 years.”
The 6.2 % are composed of a) the population growth b) the GDP/capita growth (economic advancement – mostly through rising workforce participation rate, which is easy in an economy that starts with a very low rate). So it might actually be achievable and maintainable for quite a while.
DirkH
This is a really terrific video on education so far, esp. the remarks about Open Source education at 9 minutes.* Many thanks DirkH! Yes, I believe that just showing up every day at a school, and sitting at a desk, being given tiny incremental steps to follow, gives the wrong idea to children about what learning is, and what accomplishment is.
*”In Open Source, teaching is a function, not a profession. Every one learns, and any one can teach himself how to learn anything, as well as learning how to teach others. In Open Source, students are the active initiators. You learn that you either write your own script in life, or by default without your input, you become an unwitting actor in someone else’s script.”
DirkH says:
April 22, 2014 at 3:08 am
The 6.2 % are composed of a) the population growth b) the GDP/capita growth (economic advancement – mostly through rising workforce participation rate, which is easy in an economy that starts with a very low rate). So it might actually be achievable and maintainable for quite a while.
Sure, it’s just I doubt so long a while as 86 years.
re comment byferd[pperole: “Third World countries have rubbish lying everywhere because there is not money to clean it up… rats and flies are the norm.” Neither poverty nor affluence should ever be
accepted as an excuse for environmental degradation. I first visited Singapore in 1974 when average
incomes were very low and it was then spotlessly clean. Its high environmental standards have been
a factor in its continuing rapid economic development, making it attractive to industries and
qualified workers.
Below maybe why the Congo projections is not as unrealistic as previously thought. A LOT depends on future stability and good governance. Whatever the numbers this nation has the potential for the average person earning from “$300 a year, will then earn $42,000” as per the OECD middle scenario.
http://www.africanmetals.com/EN/properties/congo_mining.htm
Willhaas – has the study of the history of human civilization taught us anything?
How many times do the Ehrlichs of the world have to be stupendously, galactically wrong in their predictions of doom before people will ever learn?
Ehrlich, perhaps the foremost idiot in this tragic comedy, is by training an Entomologist, and it sometimes appears that he looks upon humans, and values them, as much, or perhaps less that he does insects. Excuse me, but I am not a parasite that is ravaging the earth – I am a human being, the most marvelous creation the entire Universe, and I live on the Earth – a fantastic, bad-@ur momisugly$$ planet the appers to be designed in a Universe especially for us – to something like 1 vs 10 to the 240th power, last I checked. But then again, I don’t have to worry – I live in a part of the planet where I would be largely protected if freaks like Ehrlich have their way and (metaphorically) decide to spread industrial strength Raid on the planet in the attempt to largely rid it of its foremost parasite – us.
With the slaughter of human life in the womb, unborn children are looked upon, not as innocent human life, but like a parasite that can be exterminated at will. The population bomb freaks take it a step further, now we are nothing but parasites after birth as well. And, it’s always the undeveloped, suffering 3rd world – Africa, parts of India/Asia, etc – that are the main target for the “population reduction” – as, for example, in the case of some the bigger idiots in the 1960s and 70s – who championed the withdrawal of food aid from “lost causes” like India and Egypt and the subsequent forced starvation of millions upon millions of innocent people.
When will people EVER learn?
The solution to the rapidly aging population is that, in richer, more medically advanced (and less ageist) societies, many people in their 60s, 70s and 80s are still contributing fully to those societies. In other words, what’s the problem really?
Ric Werme:which fusion? let’s keep it serious, I mean the Tokamak.