Ten Billion, by Stephen Emmott

I'm sure Stephen Emmott is really smart.  Way, way smarter than I am.  Maybe smarter than most people. But in his new book Ten Billion, Emmott resorts to scare tactics, exaggeration, and misleading interpretations of facts and trends to try to stir his readers into a frenzied panic.

Emmott's basic premise is that as the Earth's population approaches ten billion, the planet will get to a point at which it can no longer sustain the population.  We will soon run out of arable land for agriculture sufficient to grow enough food, and we will run out of fuel to power our homes and lifestyles.  "In short," he writes, "we urgently need to consume less.  A lot less.  And we need to conserve more.  A lot more." We will have to see a "radical change in behavior" which will require "radical government action."

Without offering a counterargument to his every point, which would probably be fruitless anyway, I just want to point out a couple of large, overarching issues on which I disagree with Emmott.  First of all, Emmott is deeply skeptical of the power of human ingenuity to solve the world's problems.  He says the "rational optimist" believes, falsely, that "our cleverness and inventiveness mean we don't have to worry: we will invent our way out of our current predicament." The problem is that "our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face."

He seems to dismiss past inventiveness as wholly inadequate.  I was struck by his description of the Green Revolution.  He reduces the Green Revolution to increasing use of pesticides and chemical fertilizer and the industrialization of food production.  He makes no mention of Norman Borlaug, water-efficient hybrid plants, and disease-resistant strains of wheat.  What other, future developments might great men and women come up with in the realm of energy, agriculture, and transportation?  We can't even imagine, just as Malthus and Ehrlich couldn't imagine Borlaug's innovations.

Part of Emmott's problem with the Green Revolution is that, as a result, fewer people starved and the population boomed.  His attitude reflects a view of people as primarily consumers, not producers.  When Emmott sees the population grow, he sees more mouths to feed.  When the rational optimist sees the population grow, she sees more producers, more creators, more innovators.  As Julian Simon wrote, people are the "ultimate resource." This is my second fundamental problem with Emmott, his low view of humanity.  He says "the worst thing we can do--globally--is have children at the current rate." He reminds me of the villain in that Tom Clancy novel whose objective was to decimate the world's population so that the Earth (in his view) could survive.

Are there environmental problems?  Yes.  Are there problems to be solved tied to a booming population?  Yes.  But do we have to agree with Emmott that "Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support"?  Not necessarily.  I am confident that like Malthus, Ehrlich, Carson, and Gore, his forecasts will be proven wrong and fundamentally tied to ideology.  In the meantime, I'm sure, like his forebears, he will try to milk the induced panic for all it's worth.



Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy.