Different Shades of Green
I've noticed recently two pieces on choices that are environmentally friendly that I thought were worth comment. The first is from Jonah Goldberg's National Review Online post, "Oil: The Real Green Fuel." The part that caught my attention was this:
Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.
“If you like wilderness, as I do,” [author Matt] Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”
When you do it right, drilling a hole and pumping out the fuel is a much better way to go than using up the most valuable land at the surface to get your power. Goldberg is making reference to Matt Ridley's new book, The Rational Optimist.
The second piece was this post by Lisa Hymas extolling the greenness of Carrie Bradshaw's lifestyle in Sex and the City 2. In addition to being a Manhattanite, she is happily childless:
Carrie is no GINK (green inclinations, no kids) because she lacks any environmental awareness. But despite her conspicuously consuming ways, she's actually living a greenish lifestyle simply by virtue of choosing not to have children. She could lead a lifestyle that's twice as carbon-intensive as a parent's -- even three, four, five times -- and still come out ahead in the end. According to a 2009 study by researchers at Oregon State University [PDF], each child an American has compounds her or his carbon legacy by about 5.7 times, because that child is likely to have children of their own and so forth.
The problems of overpopulation have a long history in economic thought, and the problems of underpopulation are obvious. But this hypothesis got me wondering -- in the intermediate range in which the Earth and our society can support the population in some form, are additional people necessarily a drag on the environment? The costs are clear, but let's not ignore the benefits. Suppose that one day, some group of people figures out a viable way to address our environmental challenges. I'm going to a venture a guess that all of those people will have had parents. And none of those parents will be GINKs.
When I celebrate Father's Day this weekend, I'll be thinking about compounding my "idea legacy" as much as my "carbon legacy."
Well Put.
Your thoughts on the Lisa Hyman bit are spot-on, in my opinion. Without reading the full source, that paragraph is actually offensive - it stops one step short of saying that if you really gave a damn about this planet, you'd just kill yourself right now.
The Jonah Goldberg piece is a bit thornier - of course it is more optimal to not cut down our forests for fuel, but it would be an accurate reflection of the number of people our planet can support if we did. What we gain in forest-able land from oil, we end up losing a lot of to development and food, because now we can support more people with all this plentiful energy! Wait, what do you mean we don't get more potable water? Additionally, that paragraph ignores the challenge presented by managing the resource effectively; there has to be a group in control of the resource, and society still hasn't figured out how to keep these people in check, apparently. If a country like Afghanistan discovers resources, the vultures swoop in and strike a devil's bargain with anyone who will put ink on their paper, creating nightmares like the oil spills around Nigerian delta, with no compensation for the truly-impacted villagers because their corrupt, incompetent government signed their lot away for personal security.
The point is as it always was - power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One could read that a number of ways through the lens of the energy sector or America's position as energy consumer. Until we've figured out how to keep these behemoths acting on our addiction's behalf in check, it seems jack-foolish to issue any sort of trust to them or anyone they're invested in. I'm surprised that so few people see and understand that our government is most certainly on that list of oil-behemoth-dependents.
Regarding the more-people-as-more-environmental-solutions paragraph of yours, I'm just not sure. There's a lot more questions inside of that box, like... as population increases geometrically, how does the rate of innovation in specifically related fields move? My guess would be that it would grow, but very significantly slower than the poverty rate. How far are we from solutions to these problems? Scientifically, things appear to move in leaps and bounds of innovation, so it would be very difficult to predict if we would even need to encourage overpopulation (if we're going to come up with it next year). The big problem of overpopulation as I understand it is in its geometric growth - the costs also grow geometrically, but the benefits grow significantly less.
Well written, thank you and happy Father's Day from somebody who has a dad.