Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Economic growth bends the environmental Kuznets curve by advances not just in technology but in values. Some environmental concerns are entirely practical: people complain about smog in their city, or green space getting paved over. But other concerns are more spiritual. The fate of the black rhinoceros and the well-being of our descendants in the year 2525 are significant moral concerns, but worrying about them now is something of a luxury. As societies get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table or a roof over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs, and the scope of their concern expands in space and time. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, using data from the World Values Survey, have found that people with stronger emancipative values—tolerance, equality, freedom of thought and speech—which tend to go with affluence and education, are also more likely to recycle and to pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment.¹⁰

Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us—that knowledge will be frozen in its current state and people will robotically persist in their current behavior regardless of circumstances. Indeed, a naïve faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

The first is the “population bomb,” which (as we saw in chapter 7) defused itself. When countries get richer and better educated, they pass through what demographers call the demographic transition.¹¹ First, death rates decline as nutrition and health improve. This does swell the population, but that is hardly something to bewail: as Johan Norberg notes, it happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies. In any case, the increase is temporary: birth rates peak and then decline, for at least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline. Fertility rates have fallen most noticeably in developed regions like Europe and Japan, but they can suddenly collapse, often to demographers’ surprise, in other parts of the world. Despite the widespread belief that Muslim societies are resistant to the social changes that have transformed the West and will be indefinitely rocked by youthquakes, Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.¹²

Figure 10-1: Population and population growth, 1750–2015 and projected to 2100

Sources:Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016d. 1750–2015: United Nations Population Division and History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (undated). Post-2015 projections: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Medium Projection (aggregate of country-specific estimates, taking education into account), Lutz, Butz, & Samir 2014.

The other scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth and similar philippics, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. (In 1980 Paul Ehrlich famously bet the economist Julian Simon that five of these metals would become scarcer and hence more expensive by the end of the decade; he lost all five bets. Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in 1960.)¹³ From the 1970s to the early 2000s newsmagazines periodically illustrated cover stories on the world’s oil supply with a gas gauge pointing to Empty. In 2013 The Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.”