Unfounded hysteria about resources
Population growth, far from exhausting our planet’s resources, seems to be making them more plentiful
It was in Malaysia that I first experienced what I now dub “anti-human environmentalism”. Sitting in the country’s ministry of energy, technology, science, climate change and environment, a government scientist presented us with a two-axis diagram. The lines represented “the natural world” and “human activity.” As he laboured over all the environmental depletion we were purportedly responsible for, I tentatively asked: “Do you assume, then, that human beings are just not part of the natural world?” The silence spoke volumes.
Humanity faces huge challenges relating to our coexistence with wildlife, forms of pollution and risks associated with a changing climate. But doomsday anti-human thinkers, who see us as mere leeches on Earth, have been utterly wrong in one crucial respect: the idea that growth is rapidly depleting natural resources.
The biologist Paul Ehrlich is perhaps the most famous proponent of this idea. In his 1968 best-selling book, The Population Bomb, he advanced the idea of resource depletion. He renewed this attack at a 2017 Vatican conference, saying: “You can’t go on growing forever on a finite planet. The biggest problem we face is the continued expansion of the human enterprise ... Perpetual growth is the creed of a cancer cell.”
This notion is intuitive. The Earth, logically, appears to have limited natural reserves. The implications are obvious: first, infinite growth is impossible due to these constraints on physical resources; second, to avoid the rapid depletion of the Earth’s resources, we must limit population growth, reduce consumption, or both.
Capacity of human ingenuity
Such thinking is remarkably common among scientists. But it is uneconomic. What it ignores, as the great University of Maryland economist Julian Simon highlighted, is the capacity of human ingenuity to find new recipes and ideas. Anti-human thinkers fail to appreciate that our brains are also a resource. When toiling under the right institutions and market-based incentives — i.e. prices — we constantly dream up new ways of making or doing things, including new methods of discovery or means of excavating raw materials. That is exactly what my Cato colleague Marian L Tupy, and Gale L Pooley of Brigham Young University, find in a fascinating new paper. The facts speak for themselves. Looking at a basket of 50 global commodities between 1980 and 2017, they find real prices fell by an average of 36pc. That happened despite the global population increasing by 69pc over the same period.
This utterly refutes the anti-human narrative and shows that Julian Simon was right. Population growth, far from exhausting resources, seems to be making them more plentiful.
How does this make sense, physically, on a planet of notionally fixed resources? Tupy and Pooley use a beautiful analogy. They state: “The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.”