(2020-07-09) Ridley Against Environmental Pessimism

Matt Ridley: Against Environmental Pessimism ...Example of things going right in the environment... Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants.

In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961

Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife.

As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land.

One way of measuring such progress is to look at forests. Forests are still being cut down in poor countries, but they are expanding in rich ones. It turns out that when a country reaches a certain level of income, around $5,000 per person per year, it starts reforesting. This is because people become wealthy enough to stop relying on wood fires for cooking and to use electricity or gas instead.

In 2013, I caught wind of an interesting study being done by NASA in conjunction with Boston and Beijing Universities. A team of researchers had found a way of measuring the quantity of green vegetation on the surface of the planet using satellite data. It was increasing: There were more green leaves each year

Zhu and his colleagues were able to tease out why it was happening. Some of it was due to the use of fertilizer, some to increased rainfall caused by the slight warming of the seas, and some to reforestation. But the greatest cause, responsible for 70 percent of the greening, was the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels.

The amount of oil spilled in the seas has fallen by 80 percent since 1980

If only we could stop relying on wild caught fish, they too could recover to fill the seas again. Fortunately, we are making progress here as well. Today, about half of our seafood now comes from farmed fish and shrimp. But to feed these farmed animals, we still need to catch wild fish, and if we can alter that, perhaps with biotech crops, then maybe we can go back to a time when vast shoals of huge tuna and swordfish roamed the oceans.

Invasive species are the biggest cause of extinction of mammals and birds on islands.

There is, however, one thing that worries me, and it is this: Some environmentalists, as steeped in pessimism today as I was 40 years ago, are determined to push policies that actually harm the environment.

While climate change is real and man-made, it will not cause catastrophe by 2060. The current rate of warming over the past three decades is about half what scientists predicted in 1990: 0.17ºC per decade compared with 0.30ºC. And, as predicted, the warming is happening more at night, in cold areas, and in winter than in the daytime, in warm areas, and in summer.

Glaciers are retreating, as they have been since the mid-1800s.

I suspect that we will ultimately solve the problem by substituting nuclear fusion for fossil fuels long before its consequences turn catastrophic