Many people believe that globalization and its key components have made matters worse for humanity and the environment. Indur M. Goklany exposes this as a complete myth and challenges people to consider how much worse the world would be without them. Goklany confronts foes of globalization and demonstrates that economic growth, technological change and free trade helped to power a cycle of progress that in the last two centuries enabled unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being. His analysis is accompanied by an extensive range of charts, historical data, and statistics. The Improving State of the World represents an important contribution to the environment versus development debate and collects in one volume for the first time the long-term trends in a broad array of the most significant indicators of human and environmental well-being, and their dependence on economic development and technological change. While noting that the record is more complicated on the environmental front, the author shows how innovation, increased affluence and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation. The author notes that the early stages of development can indeed cause environmental problems, but additional development creates greater wealth allowing societies to create and afford cleaner technologies. Development becomes the solution rather than the problem. He maintains that restricting globalization would therefore hamper further progress in improving human and environmental well-being, and surmounting future environmental or natural resource limits to growth. **Key points from the book** * The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China's food supply had gone up 80%, and India's increased by 50%. Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37 to 17%, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations. * Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000. * Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over. * Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent. * Much of the improvements in the United States for the air and water quality indicators preceded the enactment of stringent national environmental laws as the Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. * Between 1897-1902 and 1992-1994, the U.S. retail prices of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to per capita income, dropped by 92, 85, and 82 percent respectively. And, the real global price of food commodities has declined 75% since 1950.
The Improving State of the World
WHY WE'RE LIVING LONGER, HEALTHIER, MORE COMFORTABLE LIVES ON A CLEANER PLANETBy INDUR M. GOKLANYCATO INSTITUTE
Copyright © 2007 Cato Institute
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-930865-98-3Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................................................viiPart A: Economic Development, Technological Change, and the Human Condition1. Introduction......................................................................................................32. The Improving State of Humanity...................................................................................193. Has Globalization Widened the Gaps in Human Well-Being?...........................................................574. The Cycle of Progress: Factors Propelling Humanity's Progress.....................................................79Part B: The Effects of Economic Development and Technological Change on the Environment5. Competing Views Regarding Affluence, Technology, and the Environment..............................................1036. Long-Term Environmental Trends....................................................................................1177. Are Long-Term Trends Consistent with Environmental Transitions?...................................................1878. Factors Affecting Environmental Trends............................................................................207Part C: Reconciling Human Well-Being With Environmental Quality9. The Promise and Peril of Bioengineered Crops......................................................................23710. Climate Change and Sustainable Development.......................................................................289Part D: Sustaining the Human Enterprise11. The Future Sustainability of Human Populations...................................................................35312. Extending the Limits: The Role of Economic Development, Technological Change, and Free Trade.....................373Appendix A...........................................................................................................413Appendix B...........................................................................................................419Notes................................................................................................................421Index................................................................................................................507
Chapter One
Introduction
A long suburb of red brick houses-some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself, ... they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.
On every side, and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.... Then came more of the wrathful monsters ... and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.
But night-time in this dreadful spot!-night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirted up its red flame; and places that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws ... night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy ...) ... night, when some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares ... night, which unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it not peace, nor quiet, nor signs of blessed sleep.... - Charles Dickens (1840-41), The Old Curiosity Shop, pp. 346-481
Dickens's vision of the industrial town as Hell on earth was penned when modern economic growth was still young. With the advent of industrialization and urbanization that initially accompanied such economic growth, mankind's history-until then largely one of constant poverty, hunger, disease, and death, periodically punctuated by epidemics, floods, droughts, famines, war, and other natural and unnatural disasters-seemed destined to take a turn for the worse. But with hindsight, we now know that even as Dickens was chronicling the dark phase of economic development, the forces that would lift Britain from that Stygian gloom had already been set in motion. Those forces gathered steam over the next few decades, and, today, more than a century and a half later, the average Briton has never been richer, better fed, healthier, or longer lived.
The British experience with modern economic growth has been repeated, to one degree or another, in other countries. It first spread to other parts of Western Europe and its mainly white colonies, for example, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It has since diffused broadly to other parts of the globe, albeit with varying degrees of success. And the average inhabitant of planet earth-such as the average Briton today-is also wealthier, freer from hunger and disease, and likely to be longer lived than ever before. And although epidemics, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters still occur, their consequences, while still severe, are generally not as lethal as in times past, except where poverty stalks the land because of war-civil or otherwise-and dysfunctional state policies.
Modern economic growth is characterized by unparalleled technological change, which has transformed the world more in the past two centuries than all the other events put together since the beginning of agriculture 10 millennia ago. This technological change was accompanied by a prodigious increase in the use of inanimate energy, particularly fossil fuels and other renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. The associated industrialization and increases in agricultural productivity, urbanization, population, mobility, trade, and consumption of material goods have transformed the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of societies.
Together, economic growth and technological change have redefined the role of women and children, restructured the workplace, undermined age-old arrangements of caste and class, expanded the middle class, and developed new institutions and organizations. In turn, societies aspiring to faster economic growth are restructuring themselves-freeing economies, bestowing property rights on private parties, giving individuals more latitude, and strengthening education-even as those very factors reinforce economic growth in empowering middle classes to create the basic conditions for democracy in societies that have never tasted it.
Economic development, however, is also changing humanity's relationship to the rest of nature. At first, industrialization and urbanization-in many countries, the first steps in modern economic growth-may have made people wealthier but, as Dickens so vividly depicted, not necessarily better, particularly for the masses. For many urban dwellers, crowding, unsanitary conditions, polluted air, and unsafe water may have led, at least initially, to a life that was nastier, more brutish, and, perhaps, even shorter than for their rural compatriots. The countries that industrialized first were the first to experience those problems. But, by the same token, they were also the first to devise solutions to those problems, which now benefit those who came later to the path of economic growth. But even as old problems were solved, new ones cropped up. Today, with technology enabling us to detect one molecule of a pollutant among a billion other molecules, we feel beset by trace gases and debris of human origin in the atmosphere and the stratosphere, in the Arctic and the Antarctic, at the bottom of the ocean, and even at the top of Mt. Everest.
The twin forces of economic growth and technological change having, first, given us a degraded environment, now have provided, as antidotes, environmentalism, as well as a romanticized view of nature. Despite significant reductions in the past few decades in various forms of pollution, especially in wealthier countries, many Neo-Malthusians and environmentalists remain suspicious of these two forces. They argue that economic growth and technology are among the driving forces behind environmental impacts and natural resource use, which-unless checked-will eventually degrade both human welfare and environmental quality. All the progress to date may yet prove to be ephemeral. In this view, because of economic growth and technology, the world may yet come to resemble Dickens's "cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools...."
Dickens's words-written long before DDT, dioxins, and radiation were discovered and humanity learned to loathe, if not fear, acid rain, ozone depletion, and carbon dioxide-echo throughout Rachel Carson's evocative first chapter of Silent Spring, which imagined a future in which synthetic pesticides and the effluents of civilization would lay waste a bucolic countryside so that neither bird nor bee nor beast would bestir itself in that blighted land.
Similar sentiments, although not always expressed with the same elegance, can be found in several works by Neo-Malthusians that have appeared since Silent Spring. Those works interweave concerns about population growth and food-Malthus's original concerns-with broader concerns about the environment and natural resources. Some contain quite remarkable proposals. Shortly after the first successful manned mission to the moon, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, followed his best-selling book, The Population Bomb, with a manifesto titled, How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Planet Earth (coauthored with Richard Harriman). The book comes complete with a new constitution for the United Republics of America, which is provided as a "model for discussion." The authors declare the following:
Dramatic changes in the living arrangements on Spaceship Earth must commence immediately. The directions in which we must move are clear ... [and] simple:
1. Population control must be achieved in both overdeveloped countries (ODCs) and underdeveloped countries (UDCs).
2. The ODCs must be de-developed.
3. The UDCs must be semi-developed.
4. The procedures must be set up for monitoring and regulating the world system in a continuous effort to maintain an optimum population-resource-environment situation.
Hopefully, [National Congresses on Optimum Population and the Environment] will provide some basis for deciding how far below the present level of 205 million people the population of the United States should be. Final decisions will, of course, depend in part on planetary planning. Strict limits will have to be placed on the resource consumption and pollution output of all nations....
Lester Brown-an agricultural scientist who later conceived The State of the World series, which, each year since 1984, has warned that the state of the world is bad and could get worse-echoed many of Ehrlich's ideas and lamented that "expanding economic activity is rendering our air unfit for breathing, water unfit for drinking, beaches unfit for bathing, and fish unfit for eating. Eco-catastrophes are occurring with increasing frequency."
Those concerns captured the public imagination with the 1972 publication of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth, whose general thesis was reiterated eight years later in the Global 2000 Report to the President (of the United States): "If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today." Others, even more pessimistic, argue that we are already living "beyond the limits" of the earth's carrying capacity. Yet others have argued that technology is at least as culpable as population size and resource consumption for the sorry state of the planet.
The pessimistic Neo-Malthusian world view did not go unchallenged. The dissenters-not all optimists-included the game theorist Herman Kahn who helped develop the doctrine of mutually assured destruction as a strategy to dissuade the Soviet Union from deploying thermonuclear weapons against the United States when he was at the RAND Corporation; Kahn's collaborator on The Resourceful Earth, the economist Julian L. Simon; Wilfred Beckerman, an economist at Oxford University; Ronald Bailey, currently a science correspondent for Reason magazine; Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic; and, more recently, Bjrn Lomborg, a Danish statistician with previously impeccable environmental credentials who set out to discredit Simon with reams of empirical information but ended up writing The Skeptical Environmentalist instead.
Both Easterbrook and Lomborg were viewed as apostates. For that, they were either praised or vilified in book reviews, depending on the reviewer's prior bent. Websites were established to attempt to debunk their books. In one of the more bizarre episodes concerning science and faith since Galileo's conviction for heresy, a complaint was filed against Lomborg with a body having the Orwellian name of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). This committee ruled that Lomborg's book was scientifically dishonest and "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." It did not, however, find that Lomborg misled his readers deliberately. But then the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation rebuked the committee, noting that the DCSD verdict was not backed by documentation, "lacks any arguments" for the claims of dishonesty, and poor scientific practice. It also criticized the DCSD's treatment of Lomborg as unsatisfactory, deserving criticism, and "emotional," and it faulted the DCSD for not permitting Lomborg an opportunity to respond. The DCSD dropped its earlier finding, and Lomborg was cleared of scientific dishonesty.
Despite the empirical data trotted out by the optimists to argue their case, the new millennium has brought forth a new crop of books from Neo-Malthusians essentially reaffirming their original message-that mankind was fast approaching the limits to growth and would face the Apocalypse, unless it changed its ways. In the years since the publication of Limits to Growth, we are told that a new and more terrible specter has matured and joined the ranks of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fifth horseman-climate change-was born out of the crucible of technology and perfected with fire. It feeds on economic and population growth, and where she rides, it is claimed, the other horsemen-hunger, pestilence, destruction of nature, and death-will surely follow.
She is the focus of much of the concerns of the Neo-Malthusians and will be among the horsemen addressed in this book.
The Environmental Impact of Growth and Technology
The general distrust of population growth, economic development, and technology exhibited by most Neo-Malthusians is captured by the identity, I = PAT (IPAT), where I is a measure of environmental impact, P is the population, A stands for affluence-a surrogate for production or consumption per capita, often measured in terms of the gross domestic product per capita-and T, denoting technology, is a measure of the impact per unit of production or consumption.
Technology, as used throughout this book, includes both hardware (e.g., scrubbers, catalytic convertors, and carbon adsorption systems) and software technologies (e.g., policies, management techniques, computer programs to track waste or model environmental quality, and emissions trading). According to the IPAT identity, if all else remains the same, an increase in population, affluence, or technology would act as a multiplier for environmental impact, that is, it would increase that impact. Based partly on this identity, Neo-Malthusians contend that the human enterprise as currently constituted is unsustainable in the long run, unless the population shrinks; we diminish, if not reverse, economic development; and apply the precautionary principle to new technologies, which, in their view, essentially embodies a presumption against further technological change unless the technology involved is proven absolutely safe and clean.
Despite recognizing that technology could reduce some impacts, many Neo-Malthusians argue that, to quote Jared Diamond, a University of California at Los Angeles philosophy professor, it's a mistake to believe that "[t]echnology will solve our problems." In fact, goes this argument, "All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems...." Moreover, for most important activities, new technology would bring diminishing returns because as the best resources are used up (e.g., minerals, fossil fuels, and farm land), society would increasingly have to turn to marginal or less desirable resources to satisfy demand, which would increase energy use and pollution.
This skepticism of economic growth and technological change is manifested, for instance, in the seeming disregard among many advocates of greenhouse gas (GHG) controls of the socioeconomic impact of costs associated with such control schemes. It is also evident in calls to eschew genetically modified foods despite their promise to reduce agriculture's use of land, water, pesticides, and fertilizers, which could result in net benefits to the world's environment and biodiversity even as it increases the quantity and nutritional quality of food supplies for a rapidly growing world population that has yet to be free from hunger and malnutrition. The precautionary principle has sometimes also been used to rationalize the refusal to countenance nuclear or hydroelectric power as substitutes for fossil fuel-generated electricity, despite assertions that there is no greater environmental problem facing the world today than global warming. It was also used in an attempt to justify a global ban on the insecticide DDT despite its obvious benefits in reducing malaria's toll-currently amounting to a million or more deaths annually out of about a half a billion cases worldwide, almost exclusively in poverty-stricken developing countries-until that position became untenable. This last perversion of the precautionary principle was only possible because, in some minds, the principle gives license to cherry pick which public health or environmental risk one wants to focus on. Thus, a global ban makes eminent sense only if one ignores the public health costs of not having access to DDT to reduce malaria (and other insect-borne diseases) in poverty-stricken areas. However, consideration of both public health and environmental impacts of DDT use (and nonuse) leads to a more nuanced policy on DDT, to whit, that its use is appropriate for public health purposes in areas where its use can reduce the burden of disease, but it is unnecessary in other areas. Fortunately, this conclusion was also the one of the international community, and it is now accepted policy under the Stockholm Protocol on Persistent Organic Pollutants, although it did increase the transaction costs of developing countries using DDT even for public health purposes, which could be burdensome, if not counterproductive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Improving State of the Worldby INDUR M. GOKLANY Copyright © 2007 by Cato Institute. Excerpted by permission.
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