Reposted from Climate Scepticism
2018 Sagan Prize winner, Peter Gleick, has written a review of Michael Shellenberger’s new book, Apocalypse Never and it’s been getting a lot of links from Shellenberger’s critics. He starts out with a description of the two opposed philosophies of Cornucopianism and Malthusianism and how they apply to environmentalism. The review is illustrated with side by side drawings of a cornucopia (a horn shaped basket full of goods) and a portrait of Thomas Malthus. A lot of Shellenberger’s criticism of environmentalism is that it’s slipped into an extreme Malthusianism. Malthus is sort of an embarrassment (or should be) for environmentalists. He argued in his famous essay (first published anonymously) that population would grow geometrically and outstrip resources, which only grew arithmetically. One would expect him to be more associated with villains such as Mel Profitt, the Kevin Spacey character in the late ’80s TV series, Wiseguy.
Go to 13 minutes in if it doesn’t start there.
Gleick doesn’t specifically identify as a Malthusian, but he does dismiss Cornucopians with a series of bland links:
Two Cornucopian ideas lie at the heart of this book: The first idea is that there are no real “limits to growth” and environmental problems are the result of poverty and will be solved by having everyone get richer. This idea isn’t original and has long been debunked by others (for a few examples see here, here, here, and here).
The second Cornucopian idea he refers to is Shellenberger’s advocacy of nuclear power. He quotes Shellenberger from the book: “Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat” and “Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint.” He does not make any counter arguments.
While he severely criticizes the book, he does seem a bit uncharacteristically respectful of Shellenberger as opposed to his usual invective against people he disagrees with such as Donna Laframboise. He wields a lot of nitpicking and hairsplitting over distinctions between concepts like natural disasters and increases in extreme weather. Being something of a water expert, he catches Shellenberger in a technical flub of saying gas plants use 25 to 50 times less water than coal plants. He also points out wind and solar not requiring water as an important omission. Of course, the lions share of any backup for this limited share of the electricity mix will require water. He claims the book is riddled with a variety of such simple errors and that their “number and scope” is “problematic”. I doubt it. Shellenberger was an anthropology major, which is not considered a major STEM field, but he has a very good overview and lots of experience in energy and environmental issues. His arguments for higher energy density and availability are very strong and are his main arguments. If Gleick had anything to counter them, he wouldn’t leave them “beyond the scope of this review”.
He has a remarkable paragraph that sums up his views of Malthusianism vs Cornucopianism:
There is uncertainty about the best path forward. Those who believe the evidence shows our current path crosses dangerous planetary limits and may lead to severe environmental and social disruption can’t prove an apocalyptic future will happen – they’re arguing we must do what we can to avoid it. But neither can Cornucopians prove that narrow technological solutions and unconstrained economic growth will avoid those catastrophic futures. The imbalance of these viewpoints is key however: if Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place. If Cornucopians are wrong, apocalyptic outcomes are indeed a real possibility.
If Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place? Really? Does perpetuating energy poverty make the world a better place? If Cornucopians Can’t prevent apocalyptic outcomes, does that mean Malthusians can? I think Malthusians might be likely to cause apocalyptic outcomes. Shellenberger’s Policy prescriptions are based on decades of work and study in the fields of energy and environment. Gleick’s appear to be based on the popular but superficial Joel Pett cartoon.
Gleick quotes H. L. Mencken, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” I’d like to suggest another Mencken quote that Gleick might consider for self examination:
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
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Leftism: The haunting fear that so many out there aren’t victims and don’t need them to be happy.
Communism: We must oppress them to make them understand they’re victims and need us.
Everyone knows There are no Limits to Growth (look up the book, if your nerves are not weak) and the Club of Rome Dr. King’s book was a hoax that even they themselves knew.
Why would Dr. King then publish a hoax?
Dr. Alexander King, a Paris-based British subject, formerly Director of the OECD organization adjunct to NATO, and a principal behind-the-scenes architect of the creation of the Club of Rome. Dr. King volunteered, in a published interview, that his true motives for sponsoring neo-Malthusian propaganda have been racialist. He insisted that the Anglo-Saxon racial stock was becoming dangerously outnumbered on this planet, and that therefore, neo-Malthusian propaganda and programs must be employed to reduce substantially the populations of darker-skinned “races.” Among “darker races,” King included, with some vehemence, “the Mediterranean race,” a term usually understood to signify Arab, Turk, Greek, Italian, and Spain.
Where does Malthus hail from? Pose, and answer the question: What is the distinctive, characteristic philosophy of this social stratum, which prompts them to promote a propaganda doctrine they themselves know to be scientifically absurd?
Begin with the case of the Reverend Professor Thomas Malthus himself. Who and what was behind his writing of his 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population? It was the same stratum of wealthy families behind Malthus then, which has been behind the orchestration of neo-Malthusian propaganda and movements again, today.
During the year 1751 , the leader of the cause of American Independence, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wrote and published a pamphlet, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, in which he argued, on premises of economic principles, for increasing rapidly the population of North America. A friend and admirer of Franklin, Gianbattista Beccaria, translated this pamphlet into Italian, and published it in Italy. The Italian edition of this pamphlet was greeted with an attempted rebuttal published by Gianmaria Ortes, a leading spokesman for the powerful rentier-financier families of Venice. Ortes’s attack on Franklin found its way to Britain, and, at a somewhat later date, an ambitious young graduate of Oxford University’s divinity school, Thomas Malthus, plagiarized and published Ortes’s arguments as his own Essay On the Principles of Population. At that time, Malthus was in the service of the British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger. It was Pitt who sponsored the first, 1798 publication of Malthus’s famous work. As Pitt stated to the British Parliament, it was Malthus’s On Population which was used as pretext for the 1800 reform of the British Poor Law; Britain ceased to give financial assistance to its own “useless eaters.”That was the origin of the name “Malthusianism.”In honor of Malthus’s achievement, the British East India Company created the first professorship in political economy to be established in Britain, appointing Malthus as first occupant of this position, at the Company s Haileybury College, where its own agents were trained. All the notable British economists–excepting the special case of Dr. Karl Marx–from Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, through John Stuart Mill, were, like Malthus, agents of the British East India Company. Most, like Bentham, Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, were associated with and coordinated by Haileybury.
So Britain’s Malthus plagiarized Venice’s Ortes’ attack on Benjamin Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.
Interesting how Americans likely never heard of this. There are No Limits to Growth. The author of that book got the full Mueller treatment meted recently out to President Trump, by exactly the same stooges, for exactly the same reasons.
Narcissistic indulgence is an article of faith for some people. Also, wicked solutions. Whether it’s Her Choice (Natural selection) or her Choice (ritual selection) or his Choice (competition), the population will be Planned.
Some musings from a Kansas electrical engineer.
When my several times removed grandparents pioneered in KS in the 1800’s it was necessary to have a lot of children. If you had seven children, three to four would die before maturity. The remaining children would allow the family to move from a hard scrabble existence to just a hard life by expanding the amount of land that could be worked and increasing productivity. Children in those times were an investment, an expensive investment, in future productivity. But it was necessary to improve life for all.
Things have changed drastically. One family member today can farm as much land as a family of six 50 years ago. There just isn’t the same driver to have big families.
There are all kinds of drivers towards smaller families today, e.g. small, urban apartments with barely enough room for two.These are drivers Malthus could never have imagined. Population growth, like climate, is far too complicated to break down into a simple model.
Family farms are devastated and not just because of the pandemic, in the USA and Germany. Parity pricing is urgently needed to save family farms, just look at the 5 mega WallStreet-darlings food cartel.
They are something Malthus happily endorsed. Malthus’ Oligarchy means a fondi-run economy, General Welfare begone. Exactly the opposite of Benjamin Franklin.
That’s pretty simple.
Gleick is a progressive supremacist.
Dumb, dishonest, wrong about everything and a rabid totalitarian spewing about how everything should be. https://twitter.com/PeterGleick
Agree. He adopts relative moralism, and discards absolute morality. Anything can be justified for an Ends. That is the type of enabler that has allowed all the most horrible atrocities of humanity to have been committed, and to be committed in the coming century.
If the Cornucopians win, we go out into space and inherit the stars. Earth becomes a cared-for garden paradise
If the Malthusians win, we live in breech-clout poverty until the next bolide comes down and blasts us into extinction.
its not a game of belief: it’s a game of fact
“If the Cornucopians win, we go out into space and inherit the stars. Earth becomes a cared-for garden paradise.”
Pat,
I think I know which outcome the plant kingdom is rooting for. 😉
They sure like our CO2, Philip 🙂
Malthus was a hoaxer, like Dr. King, didn’t even believe what he plagiarized from Ortes. The reason for the hoax though, is real dangerous, as Dr. King of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, blurted out in a interview – see my post just above.
So the question for Gleick – does he agree with Dr. King?
And the ultimate green conservationist Sierra Club just exposed its filthy laundry –
Pulling Down Our Monuments
https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club
See the real reason for such hoaxes, jet today.
Wonder what Gleick thinks of the sierra Club?
Well, better for Gleick.
Also, these fellows already have spelled out their solution to poverty: reducing population. No people, no problem. http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
The last sensible book Gleick wrote was Chaos. Unfortunately he failed to apply the theory he wrote about thereafter, thinking that climate is deterministic and that he can project the future of civilisation.