I mentioned one of the most famous bets in environmental history here – the wager by Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich on the future of resource scarcity. New York Times business writer David Leonhardt interviews author Paul Sabin on his new book “The Bet” here about the larger lessons.
Relevant quote:
… environmentalists are right to sound the alarm over global warming, but Ehrlich-style warnings that civilization is about to collapse in a paroxysm of warfare, disease and starvation just aren’t that persuasive or helpful. I think that environmentalists would find a more solid foundation to advocate action if they made their case based on social values, rather than apocalyptic fear.
What kind of world do we want to live in? Humans might survive, and even prosper economically, in a warmer and more populated world. But are the risks associated with climate change worth taking? (The answer, I think, is clearly “no.”) Do we want to live on a more biologically impoverished, albeit economically productive, planet? These are profound social questions that, I might point out (as a historian), cannot be answered by economics or biology alone but rather depend on the humanities and can only be resolved through politics.
To be read in conjunction with a book from Canadian authors on the left that deserves more recognition: Catastrophism: The Apolocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth. Video by one of the authors here.
Civilizations have collapsed before due to resource shortages. Why not ours? Remember, civilization collapse is not the same as extinction of the human species.
Besides, the nuanced approach doesn’t seem to have convinced the powers that be about the urgency of the problem. Why shy away from talking about the possibility of warfare, disease, and starvation? Nobody is saying they are a certainty, but they certainly are a possibility. (And indeed we are already seeing stronger and stronger portents. Witness the droughts causing crop failures in a massive way.)