No, the world isn’t ending

With the death of Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, we have seen firsthand how alarmism based on science can lead to government overreach.

Even *50 years later, Ehrlich was still sounding the alarm, despite all his predictions failing. The New York Times claimed his predictions were merely “premature,” but no. As the libertarian Reason Magazine* astutely points out, he was just plain wrong, dubbing him “History’s Wrongest Man”. The world, far from declining, showed that both population and standard of living could increase through innovation.

Thanks to Ehrlich and people like him, billions of US dollars flowed into controlling, not so much our own population (although there was some of that), but the population of nations where people were deemed to be less valuable. (Indeed, the population control and eugenics movements are connected.) Through the Office of Population set up in USAID in 1966, the United States government funded contraception, sterilization, and abortion in the developing world. Speaking to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1977, its founder, Dr. Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt, argued that

If sterilization services were made readily available world-wide… about one quarter of the world’s… fertile women… would accept sterilization.

The article summarized this as a fertility target, although Ravenholt later claimed this was an uptake estimate and not a target. In testimony to the US Congress later that year, he claimed to have been misrepresented, and the US Government denied having sterilization targets.

That said, Ravenholt clearly believed in the false premise that there was a fixed-size pie when he said, “resources divided by population equals well-being… we’re trying to lower the denominator.” This included exporting sterilization programs by training foreign doctors. All of this was ostensibly in support of US commercial interests, not any humanitarian reason. These policies led to the sterilization of millions of women across the developing world.

Although there is no evidence that Ehrlich directly influenced China’s disastrous one-child policy, Song Jian and his colleagues in the 1970s applied systems engineering and control theory models to argue that China could not hit certain economic targets without strict fertility controls. For this work, they relied heavily on The Limits of Growth (1972) by the Club of Rome, a global think tank founded in 1968, at the same time Ehrlich was reaping the rewards of population panic. This work led to Soviet-style top-down planning and potentially millions of deaths of female babies in a silent holocaust.

The Limits of Growth is still cited as predicting catastrophic collapse by left-leaning newspapers like The Guardian, but it actually suggested several possible outcomes depending on hidden factors. Its system dynamics model looked at interactions between population, industrial output, food production, pollution, and nonrenewable resources to create several possible futures. The most famous of these is the business-as-usual scenario, and subsequent studies by Graham Turner in 2008 and 2014 and by Gaya Herrington in 2020 show that the global population is following that model quite well. Both show growth slowing and potential decline later this century.

The reality, however, is that even The Limits of Growth failed to model scarcity accurately. So-called “fixed” resources have increased because of discoveries, fluctuating prices, and technological substitution. Technological efficiency was underestimated, and the effects of the computer revolution were underappreciated. Collapse predictions failed to account for human ingenuity.

Even in recent years, this Malthusian argument that there is a fixed-size pie and that human growth is going to use it all up sells books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Although the book, intended for popular consumption, popularized many of the systemic reasons societies collapse, its commitment to environmental determinism, that the environment is the primary constraint on society, is misguided. Much of the scholarship in the book is overly simplified, and historical claims, such as Easter Island society falling apart because of deforestation, are contested.

Remarkably, he makes this environmental argument in one book, while in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, about the conquest of the Americas, he puts two critical human innovations, guns and steel, in its title as major causes! It is not as if these technologies just grew on trees.

Although there are many older people now who have no grandchildren because they chose not to reproduce in the face of this panic, who may now regret their decision as the world has shown it can increase population and standard of living at the same time, that was at least their own choice. If people choose to install solar panels, drive electric cars, buy energy-efficient appliances, or any of the many other ways that may (or may not) reduce dependency on fossil fuels, that is their choice, and they are free to make it. When it comes to government coercion, alarmism is no excuse.

Yet, calls to government overreach have proliferated on the left (while outright denial has become the norm on the right). And many of the same kinds of arguments are being made for controlling CO2 that were made for controlling population back in the 1970s, based on the assumption that the world was heading towards collapse. Now as then, we underestimate human ingenuity at our peril.

That is not to say that there aren’t good reasons to control pollution. Only an idiot (or someone who stood to benefit) would point to a factory dumping waste into a river and claim that it is their sovereign right. The problem comes when governments make laws to control people based on perceived future catastrophes.

Pollution isn’t something that we have to worry about happening sometime in the future, after all. It is something we can observe affecting people in the here and now.

And let’s be clear, the models show catastrophic effects from climate change if things continue as they are. But is that not what models showed back in the 1970s from population increase? Catastrophe?

Could it be that we are just selling ourselves short? It turns out to be complicated.

But let’s look at the two and compare them:

Firstly, both the population scare of the 1970s and the climate scare of today rely heavily on models that predict nonlinear growth. That nonlinearity fed the urgency of the problem because it was seen as exponential, and by the time the problem became obvious, it would be too late. A linear problem is easy to solve linearly, so the solution can be delayed as long as it can be scaled, but an exponential problem has to be nipped in the bud. Thus, it could justify major outlays of spending and draconian measures to solve a perceived but not realized problem.

These models are necessarily simplifying complex systems. They depend heavily on assumptions, and worst-case scenarios are often the ones that make the news, so people perceive the problem as being worse than it likely is. This is definitely true of both.

Both are based on the Malthusian intuition: growth in demand outstripping supply capacity. In the 1970s, this was about food and resources. Now it is about the atmospheric capacity to absorb CO2.

Both debates have been used to justify coercive measures such as China’s one-child policy in the ‘70’s and more recently heavy-handed government quotas, like for EVs, and narrow incentives, like for producing biofuels.

The more existential the risk appears, the more likely governments will deploy strong interventions. Widespread famine was the risk with population growth. Climate change includes sea-level rise, desertification, extreme heat waves, water shortages, and potentially other extreme weather. A lot of the effects are debatable, and certainly not as clear-cut as a shortage of food, but clearly, warming cannot go on forever with only mild effects.

There are some differences. Resource scarcity was mitigated by technological substitution, discovery, and efficiency, but CO2 accumulation is just basic physics.

The effects of population alarmism, such as widespread famines in the 70s and 80s didn’t happen. Food production increased dramatically instead, in what is dubbed the Green Revolution.

Climate projections, on the other hand, in terms of temperatures, sea level, and heat events, have been largely on track. We aren’t seeing predictions just not happen.

In the case of the population crisis, innovation decisively solved the problem, but it isn’t clear in the climate crisis that innovation is happening fast enough. Renewables, storage, nuclear, carbon capture, and carbon-neutral fuels have to replace an entrenched global infrastructure dependent on fossil fuels. There are also feedback loops. Embracing some technologies can backfire, causing more problems than they solve, which is why government incentives are so dangerous. Meanwhile, CO2 emissions will persist for centuries. Even zero emissions won’t immediately solve the problem.

CO2 is a global phenomenon, whereas population growth was always local, even in a global economy. China’s CO2 output will affect the future weather in the United States, no matter what policies are put in place. The crisis requires global cooperation.

This suggests that any solutions to the climate crisis will at best offset it and mitigate its risks because the underlying system is constrained by the thermodynamics of the global climate. Innovation does not have the time or capacity to completely offset it, like the population crisis.

Another point is that whereas population control focused on deeply personal decisions, such as whether to have children and how many, emissions control is almost exclusively focused on sources of energy. I think most people don’t care if their car runs on fossil fuel or some carbon-neutral energy source as long as it works the way they like at a reasonable price.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the population crisis and climate change is the role of the free market. Food as a commodity is subject to market forces. As food becomes scarce, the market innovates to create new, cheaper sources of food. This helps undercut the expensive sources of food and grow market share. For hungry populations and food producers, this is a win-win.

Groceries may seem expensive now, but in 1968, people on a median income spent about 15% of their income on food, whereas in 2023, it was only about 10%. (And by comparison, in 1903, when records started, it was a whopping 42%.) Thus, food is significantly more affordable now for the average American. Mostly, this abundance came from technologies such as mechanized farming, transport, and refrigeration, as well as better agricultural practices.

Markets are good at overcoming resource constraint problems and outpace centralized planning. Food production increases from the green revolution solved the population problem long before sterilization programs would ever have made a dent.

The problem with fossil fuel usage is that there is no resource constraint, at least not until fossil fuels start running out. Emitting CO2 (like emitting any other pollutant) is underpriced as long as it doesn’t affect the emitter in the here and now. Therefore, markets will not work to mitigate it until it is priced in. That is why most economists have argued in favor of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade policies. These would effectively nudge the market in the right direction without more coercive measures.

Real solutions to CO2 emissions require the free market

Given that something has to be done on a global scale to slow CO2 emissions. Let’s look at solutions that work and ones that don’t.

Command-and-control style regulation is far less likely to help mitigate CO2 emissions than economic policies that enforce a cost on emissions or an incentive for lowering emissions. If governments, like the state government of California, mandate quotas for cars, phase-outs, and bans, automakers will just work to meet the target. There is no incentive to exceed it. But an emissions tax is broad, and businesses can juggle those taxes amid different aspects of the business. Thus, they can optimize the policy in a way that is best for themselves without centralized planners guessing what path they ought to take.

Regulators will never know a firm’s business better than the firm, so their guesses as to what is best will always fall short. Rigid targets will just encourage gaming and metric optimization at the expense of real benefits.

A good example of where a coercive climate policy backfired is biofuel mandates. The U.S. renewable fuel standard and similar EU polices required ethanol/biodiesel blending. These policies backfired as more and more farmers started growing corn and soy for fuel instead of leaving land fallow as grassland or growing food crops. Land that could have been used for food was being burned up to meet a policy. Fertilizer runoff increased as well, ironically causing more pollution.

The net emissions benefit, meanwhile, was small or even negative when land use was taken into account.

This kind of policy has all the hallmarks of top-down planning:

1. The government picked a technology to support instead of letting the market choose.
2. It created a market of compliance rather than innovation (meet this target and get a benefit; exceeding it or innovating around it gets no benefit).
3. It chose a path that seemed beneficial on its face, but actually failed to meet its intended goal.

Other examples include Germany’s nuclear phase-out and focus on renewables, which led to more coal burning for stability, high electricity prices, and slow emissions reductions. Also, California’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate of the ’90s, which forced automakers to produce a certain quota of ZEVs. They did so. Nobody bought them.

Now, let’s look at how the market has been used to solve pollution problems.

The United States established, in 1990, a cap-and-trade scheme for acid rain (sulfur dioxide). This essentially told businesses that there was a cap on sulfur dioxide emissions, but they could trade surpluses to other businesses so they could produce more. This created a robust trading system that reduced emissions faster and more cheaply than expected. Compliance costs were lower than predicted, and there was significant innovation in scrubbers and fuels.

This is the kind of policy that has all the hallmarks of an innovative, market-based solution:

1. Firms, not the government, picked the technologies to support their own businesses.
2. It created a market of innovation as firms sought to decrease their emissions.
3. Firms, not the government, chose the path that was beneficial. The government only chose the overall goal.

Other examples are the British Columbia carbon tax and the (most recent) EU cap-and-trade system.

Without the government, the market would have done nothing about the problem, so laissez-faire is not an option, but neither should the government decide how to solve the problem.

The main downside to these schemes is that they are not deployed globally. This means that businesses that are subject to, for example, cap-and-trade and carbon tax schemes may have issues competing with imports and certainly exporting. Nevertheless, such schemes could be applied to imported goods as well. There are some fragmented international mechanisms for cap-and-trade, but the level of international governance required for a global cap-and-trade system is probably beyond the human species at the moment. At best, there can be voluntary agreements.

In addition, because climate change has become a political football, firms can’t depend on the rules and regulations being the same from decade to decade. This makes it hard to invest in innovation when you don’t know if your product is going to be worth anything in ten years because the collective will of the people has changed its mind.

Quotas, narrow compliance targets, and other such schemes are a mistake that tends not only to be overly coercive but also often fails to have its intended effect. Broad incentives will trump narrow coercion every time, but it takes long-term commitment and global cooperation to make it work.

So, it seems that the population bomb never went off, but the climate crisis still can. How bad that will actually be is up for debate, but as with any pollutant, it is best not to find out what CO2 unchecked will do for the next century.

Originally published at https://timandersen.substack.com.