Road to Survival

"I don’t know that it’s necessary . I do think we need optimists and pessimists, we really do. Pessimists alert us to the problems, and optimists come up with some solutions. Paul Ehrlich was wrong to say, as he did in his 1968 book, that billions would be starving by the 1980s. In fact, hunger retreated during that time, and has not never been as bad as it was in the 1960s. There are lots of reasons for that, some political and some economical, but undoubtedly a large factor was the Green Revolution crops, whatever their faults. They are undoubted resource guzzlers, taking huge amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticides; nonetheless they more or less doubled crop yields on millions of acres of fields around the world, for small farmers as well as big farmers. So that was a technical fix of huge proportions. Paul Ehrlich mentions this in his book as being a possibility that people, including American crop scientist Norman Borlaug , were talking about at the time, but he did not think they’d be able to deliver. He was wrong about that, and therefore wrong in his predictions. Nonetheless, perhaps we needed Ehrlich and his ilk to warn us of the catastrophe that could face us, at a time when the world’s population was doubling every thirty years. How could we double food production in thirty years? It didn’t seem possible. So we need the pessimists, although some of them—Vogt in particular—I think of as a malign influence, because of the political thinking that went behind what he was saying. We do need pessimists to, at the very least, warn us of the risks that we face. But we need optimists too, and I think we are short of optimism now, which is why I wrote Despite It All. By saying ‘despite it all,’ I’m not denying any of the risks that we face, or the problems that we have. As I say, I’ve been writing about them for forty years, and climate change has just become a bigger and bigger issue throughout that time. It was just one among many environmental issues back in the 1980s and 1990s, and even a little later. But now it’s almost synonymous. When you talk about the environment today, you’re almost always talking about climate change. It’s not the only environmental issue, by any means, but wow is it important. It’s a problem we absolutely have to fix, there’s no way around it. But the good news is that the technology has come on at an extraordinary rate. In 1992 when I went to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro , where they signed the Convention on Climate Change. People signed without knowing quite how they were going to fix this problem, only that they had to do it. Then, wind power was literally a few turbines on a hill north of San Francisco. Solar power was just so expensive; it had been developed for satellites in space. Electric vehicles weren’t really on the horizon at all; they’d been discussed, but there was no technology being developed. All these things, plus battery storage, which is becoming much, much cheaper now, are helping to solve the problem. There’s push back in the US, quite a lot of it, but I think it’s just going to leave the US out of the loop as the rest of the world pushes on. China, in particular, has moved from being an environmental villain to pushing forward solar and wind power at an extraordinary rate, both through investing in manufacturing and through research and development. It is now selling and indeed donating via its aid programs this technology around the world. In the last couple of years, some African countries have got the fastest take up of renewable energy anywhere in the world. I remember writing, as recently as the Paris Climate Conference ten years ago, that whatever China did, India was a real problem, but India too is now investing hugely in solar power. It’s a good place to do it. And in the UK, where at the time of the Earth Summit we got two thirds of our energy from burning coal, we shut down our last coal-fired power station two years ago and we have been filling the North Sea with offshore wind turbines. It can be done, and it is being done. So I have a message for the US, which is: Boy, you are losing out if you back off this one, because it’s the technology of the 21st-century. Not to engage in it is just crazy."