Figure 10-3: Pollution, energy, and growth, US, 1970–2015
Sources: US Environmental Protection Agency 2016, based on the following sources. GDP: Bureau of Economic Analysis. Vehicle miles traveled: Federal Highway Administration. Population: US Census Bureau. Energy Consumption: US Department of Energy. CO2: US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report. Emissions (carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds): EPA, https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-pollutant-emissions-trends-data.
Many of the improvements can be seen with the naked eye. Cities are less often shrouded in purple-brown haze, and London no longer has the fog—actually coal smoke—that was immortalized in Impressionist paintings, gothic novels, the Gershwin song, and the brand of raincoats. Urban waterways that had been left for dead—including Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Boston Harbor, Lake Erie, and the Hudson, Potomac, Chicago, Charles, Seine, Rhine, and Thames rivers (the last described by Disraeli as “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”)—have been recolonized by fish, birds, marine mammals, and sometimes swimmers. Suburbanites are seeing wolves, foxes, bears, bobcats, badgers, deer, ospreys, wild turkeys, and bald eagles. As agriculture becomes more efficient (chapter 7), farmland returns to temperate forest, as any hiker knows who has stumbled upon a stone wall incongruously running through a New England woodland. Though tropical forests are still, alarmingly, being cut down, between the middle of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st the rate fell by two-thirds (figure 10-4).24 Deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, peaked in 1995, and from 2004 to 2013 the rate fell by four-fifths.25
The time-lagged decline of deforestation in the tropics is one sign that environmental protection is spreading from developed countries to the rest of the world. The world’s progress can be tracked in a report card called the Environmental Performance Index, a composite of indicators of the quality of air, water, forests, fisheries, farms, and natural habitats. Out of 180 countries that have been tracked for a decade or more, all but two show an improvement.26 The wealthier the country, on average, the cleaner its environment: the Nordic countries were cleanest; Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and several sub-Saharan African countries, the most compromised. Two of the deadliest forms of pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor cooking smoke—are afflictions of poor countries.27 But as poor countries have gotten richer in recent decades, they are escaping these blights: the proportion of the world’s population that drinks tainted water has fallen by five-eighths, the proportion breathing cooking smoke by a third.28 As Indira Gandhi said, “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”29
Figure 10-4: Deforestation, 1700–2010
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 2012, p. 9.
The epitome of environmental insults is the oil spill from tanker ships, which coats pristine beaches with toxic black sludge and fouls the plumage of seabirds and the fur of otters and seals. The most notorious accidents, such as the breakup of the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, linger in our collective memory, and few people are aware that seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer. Figure 10-5 shows that the annual number of oil spills has fallen from more than a hundred in 1973 to just five in 2016 (and the number of major spills fell from thirty-two in 1978 to one in 2016). The graph also shows that even as less oil was spilled, more oil was shipped; the crossing curves provide additional evidence that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth. It’s no mystery that oil companies should want to reduce tanker accidents, because their interests and those of the environment coincide: oil spills are a public-relations disaster (especially when the name of the company is emblazoned on a cracked-up ship), bring on huge fines, and of course waste valuable oil. More interesting is the fact that the companies have largely succeeded. Technologies follow a learning curve and become less hazardous over time as the boffins design out the most dangerous vulnerabilities (a point we’ll return to in chapter 12). But people remember the accidents and are unaware of the incremental improvements. The improvements in different technologies unfold on different timetables: in 2010, when seaborne oil spills had fallen to an all-time low, the third-worst spill from stationary rigs took place. The Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico led in turn to new regulations for blowout preventers, well design, monitoring, and containment.30
Figure 10-5: Oil spills, 1970–2016
Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016r, based on data (updated) from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, http://www.itopf.com/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/. Oil spills include all those that result in the loss of at least 7 metric tons of oil. Oil shipped consists of “total crude oil, petroleum product, and gas loaded.”
In another advance, entire swaths of land and ocean have been protected from human use altogether. Conservation experts are unanimous in their assessment that the protected areas are still inadequate, but the momentum is impressive. Figure 10-6 shows that the proportion of the Earth’s land set aside as national parks, wildlife reserves, and other protected areas has grown from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.8 percent in 2014—an area double the size of the United States. Marine conservation areas have grown as well, more than doubling during this period and now protecting more than 12 percent of the world’s oceans.
Figure 10-6: Protected areas, 1990–2014
Source: World Bank 2016h and 2017, based on data from the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, compiled by the World Resources Institute.
Thanks to habitat protection and targeted conservation efforts, many beloved species have been pulled from the brink of extinction, including albatrosses, condors, manatees, oryxes, pandas, rhinoceroses, Tasmanian devils, and tigers; according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent.31 Though many species remain in precarious straits, a number of ecologists and paleontologists believe that the claim that humans are causing a mass extinction like the Permian and Cretaceous is hyperbolic. As Brand notes, “No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but describing them too often as extinction crises has led to a general panic that nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was—maybe more so. . . . Working with that robustness is how conservation’s goals get reached.”32
Other improvements are global in scope. The 1963 treaty banning atmospheric nuclear testing eliminated the most terrifying form of pollution of all, radioactive fallout, and proved that the world’s nations could agree on measures to protect the planet even in the absence of a world government. Global cooperation has dealt with several other challenges since. International treaties on the reduction of sulfur emissions and other forms of “long-range transboundary air pollution” signed in the 1980s and 1990s have helped to eliminate the scare of acid rain.33 Thanks to the 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons ratified by 197 countries, the ozone layer is expected to heal by the middle of the 21st century.34 These successes, as we will see, set the stage for the historic Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015.
* * *
Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we
shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.
But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature. Instead, we can treat environmental protection as a problem to be solved: how can people live safe, comfortable, and stimulating lives with the least possible pollution and loss of natural habitats? Far from licensing complacency, our progress so far at solving this problem emboldens us to strive for more. It also points to the forces that pushed this progress along.
One key is to decouple productivity from resources: to get more human benefit from less matter and energy. This puts a premium on density.36 As agriculture becomes more intensive by growing crops that are bred or engineered to produce more protein, calories, and fiber with less land, water, and fertilizer, farmland is spared, and it can morph back to natural habitats. (Ecomodernists point out that organic farming, which needs far more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.) As people move to cities, they not only free up land in the countryside but need fewer resources for commuting, building, and heating, because one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. As trees are harvested from dense plantations, which have five to ten times the yield of natural forests, forest land is spared, together with its feathered, furry, and scaly inhabitants.
All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level.
Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status.37 The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs. Social media have encouraged younger people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in beer, coffee, and music. The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.38
The expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular after the energy crises of the 1970s, refers to the year that the world would reach its maximum extraction of petroleum. Ausubel notes that because of the demographic transition, densification, and dematerialization, we may have reached Peak Children, Peak Farmland, Peak Timber, Peak Paper, and Peak Car. Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop (including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.39
These remarkable trends required no coercion, legislation, or moralization; they spontaneously unfolded as people made choices about how to live their lives. The trends certainly don’t show that environmental legislation is dispensable—by all accounts, environmental protection agencies, mandated energy standards, endangered species protection, and national and international clean air and water acts have had enormously beneficial effects.40 But they suggest that the tide of modernity does not sweep humanity headlong toward ever more unsustainable use of resources. Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.
* * *
Just as we must not accept the narrative that humanity inexorably despoils every part of the environment, we must not accept the narrative that every part of the environment will rebound under our current practices. An enlightened environmentalism must face the facts, hopeful or alarming, and one set of facts is unquestionably alarming: the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate.41
Whenever we burn wood, coal, oil, or gas, the carbon in the fuel is oxidized to form carbon dioxide (CO2), which wafts into the atmosphere. Though some of the CO2 dissolves in the ocean, chemically combines with rocks, or is taken up by photosynthesizing plants, these natural sinks cannot keep up with the 38 billion tons we dump into the atmosphere each year. As gigatons of carbon laid down during the Carboniferous Period have gone up in smoke, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from about 270 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to more than 400 parts today. Since CO2, like the glass in a greenhouse, traps heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, the global average temperature has risen as well, by about .8° Celsius (1.4° Fahrenheit), and 2016 was the hottest year on record, with 2015 coming in second and 2014 coming in third. The atmosphere has also been warmed by the clearing of carbon-eating forests and by the release of methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas) from leaky gas wells, melting permafrost, and the orifices at both ends of cattle. It could become warmer still in a runaway feedback loop if white, heat-reflecting snow and ice are replaced by dark, heat-absorbing land and water, if the melting of permafrost accelerates, and if more water vapor (yet another greenhouse gas) is sent into the air.
If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the preindustrial level by the end of the 21st century, and perhaps to 4°C (7.2°F) above that level or more. That will cause more frequent and more severe heat waves, more floods in wet regions, more droughts in dry regions, heavier storms, more severe hurricanes, lower crop yields in warm regions, the extinction of more species, the loss of coral reefs (because the oceans will be both warmer and more acidic), and an average rise in sea level of between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (2 and 4 feet) from both the melting of land ice and the expansion of seawater. (Sea level has already risen almost eight inches since 1870, and the rate of the rise appears to be accelerating.) Low-lying areas would be flooded, island nations would disappear beneath the waves, large stretches of farmland would no longer be arable, and millions of people would be displaced. The effects could get still worse in the 22nd century and beyond, and in theory could trigger upheavals such as a diversion of the Gulf Stream (which would turn Europe into Siberia) or a collapse of Antarctic ice sheets. A rise of 2°C is considered the most that the world could reasonably adapt to, and a rise of 4°C, in the words of a 2012 World Bank report, “simply must not be allowed to occur.”42
To keep the rise to 2°C or less, the world would, at a minimum, have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half or more by the middle of the 21st century and eliminate them altogether before the turn of the 22nd.43 The challenge is daunting. Fossil fuels provide 86 percent of the world’s energy, powering almost every car, truck, train, plane, ship, tractor, furnace, and factory on the planet, together with most of its electricity plants.44 Humanity has never faced a problem like it.
One response to the prospect of cli
mate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It’s completely appropriate, of course, to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will, in the long run, withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges—such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only because the sun is getting hotter—have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced.45 A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”46
Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for itself.48 (And it’s precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.)