Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (16 page)

In this chapter, I explore a contrarian perspective on one of the more overhyped propositions in the history of civilization, namely the idea of anthropomorphic global warming. For reasons I spell out, prosperity is more at risk from a turn toward colder, rather than warmer, weather. Unhappily, there is credible evidence that the world is turning toward another Little Ice Age. As was reported at the annual American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting of solar physicists:

All the findings indicate a decrease in solar activity. . . . Several scientists at the venue strongly believe that we are near the start of a Maunder Minimum, a period of solar activity that lasts for decades also known as prolonged sunspot minimum. . . .

In 1645 to 1715, experts believed the last Maunder Minimum triggered the Little Ice Age that hit Europe and North America.
6

The Maunder Minimum is named after E.F. Maunder, an English astronomer who died in 1928. By comparing temperature records from the depths of the Little Ice Age with contemporary seventeenth-century observations of sunspots, Maunder noticed that the coldest period coincided with an almost total 70-year cessation of sunspot activity. In fact, the total number of sunspots observed over the whole 70-year period was less than occurred in a single year during the heyday of Al Gore's global warming party in the 1990s.

This was more than just an astrophysical curiosity. Sunspots are a visual proxy for solar activity. When there were lots of sunspots, as there were in the 1990s, it gets warmer. When sunspots trail off to the vanishing point, as they did in the Maunder Minimum, the earth can get much colder. People suffer from famine, disease, and mass insanity as the plunging marginal returns on maintaining complex systems like ancient empires or modern industrial governments precipitate their collapse. The famine is easy to understand. With colder weather, crops are more difficult to grow. Or if they grow, they barely ripen. Wheat, in particular, is vulnerable to cold. Recurring crop failures lead to starvation. People weakened by malnutrition were easy prey to disease and often reluctant taxpayers. More than once, famine caused by suddenly colder weather has led to collapse, followed by Dark Ages.

The Bronze Age prosperity in antiquity coincided with an exceptionally warm period. This was followed by an era of extended cold, between 1300 and 500 B.C., now known to historians as the Dark Centuries.

Equally, the growth and prosperity of the Roman Empire coincided with much warmer climate, known as the Roman Warming, when it was so much warmer than today that wine grapes and citrus trees grew in England as far north as Hadrian's Wall. Temperatures during the heyday of the Roman Empire were 2 degrees Celsius to 6 degrees Celsius warmer than today's allegedly unprecedented Global Warming.

The collapse of the Roman Empire reflected fiscal exhaustion and a lot of bad policy—such as punitive taxes that forced abandonment of up to 50 percent of farmland in some provinces. Remember, 90 percent of the economy of the Roman Empire was based upon agriculture. Rather than seeking to cushion or offset the impact of cold weather in suppressing their economy, the Roman state adopted counterproductive policies that amplified the damage done by colder weather.

As Joseph Tainter observed in
The Collapse of Complex Societies
,

The collection of taxes and rents was so unvarying that, however poor [the] crop, the amount due was seized even if the cultivators were left without enough. People couldn't meet taxes and so were jailed, sold their children into slavery, or abandoned their homes and fields.
7

The predatory policy of the state was aggravated by a sharp drop in global temperatures that led to a long, bitterly cold spell now remembered as the Dark Ages.

It was so cold in the Dark Ages that the Nile River froze. Food production plunged along with temperatures. Plagues and pandemics joined with malnutrition to sharply reduce human population. These became major contributing factors to the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the seventh century, as the Byzantine Empire was weakened by crop failures and disease before the Muslims invaded.

Footnotes from the history of economics provide us with the storied work of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, one of the pioneers of population studies. Malthus was not the first to recognize that humanity was at risk of multiplying itself more rapidly than the means of supporting itself. Most of the Malthusian perspective on population was set out in the sixteenth century by Giovanni Botero, a Jesuit scholar. Writing in
On the Cause of the Greatness of Cities
(1588), Botero anticipated Malthus's dismal theorem of two centuries later, arguing that because
virtus generativa
was stronger than
virtus nutritiva
, there was a danger of subsistence crises.
8
He argued that the ultimate cause limiting population is provision of the means of subsistence.

Malthus came at this another way, through a dispute with William Godwin over the latter's contention that a more egalitarian economy could end poverty. Malthus argued otherwise. He thought that a more egalitarian society might lead to greater misery if it nullified the signals that lead people to keep population under control. Malthus thought checks on population growth arising from insecurity over sustenance were crucial to preventing overpopulation. He built his argument on two postulates,

First, that food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.

What Malthus meant has often been misconstrued. Consider these passages from
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
:

Noting that while food production tends to increase arithmetically, population tends to increase naturally at a (faster) geometric rate, Malthus argued that it is no surprise that people thus choose to reduce (or “check”) population growth. . . . Malthus was fascinated not with the inevitability of human demise, but with why humans do not die off in the face of such overwhelming odds. As an economist, he studied responses to incentives. . . .

. . . Malthus is arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented economist of all time. The adjective “Malthusian” is used today to describe a pessimistic prediction of the lock step demise of humanity doomed to starvation via overpopulation. When his hypothesis was first stated in his best-selling
An Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798), the uproar it caused among non-economists overshadowed the instant respect it inspired among his fellow economists. So irrefutable and simple was his illustrative side-by-side comparison of an arithmetic and a geometric series—food increases more slowly than population—that it was often taken out of context and highlighted as his main observation. The observation is, indeed, so stark that it is still easy to lose sight of Malthus's actual conclusion: that because humans have not all starved, economic choices must be at work, and it is the job of an economist to study those choices.”
9

While Malthus' argument may have been often taken out of context, there is no doubt that his name is linked in modern political economy with almost any pessimistic projection about the adequacy of resources in the future.

As Walter Russell Mead observes, Malthusian panics are sometimes incongruous. He quips that most of the Chicken Little's earnest followers

. . .are simultaneously running two Malthusian horror movies in their heads that have incompatible plots. One is the Peak Oil horror film, predicting havoc as our doomed and destructive dependence on hydrocarbons exhausts the natural supply, despoiling the environment and driving the prices to ruinous levels. The other is the Mass Burning horror movie, in which non-renewable hydrocarbons remain so cheap and abundant that we burn them in such accelerating, vast quantities that the CO
2
they release dooms the planet. A graceless old reptile like me can't help reflecting that one of these two ideas might be right, but they can't possibly both be. If we run out of fossil fuels, we will stop emitting as much CO
2
. If we keep emitting ghastly quantities of CO
2
, then fossil fuel must be pretty damn abundant, given the projected increase in developing world industrial activity.
10

Not only is the global warming panic apparently incoherent with the concept of peak oil, but opponents of industrial society often get it tangled in another profound confusion. You have certainly heard the well-worn cliché that the United States and other advanced economies need to wean themselves from their addiction to oil. This is fantasy on the same level as the millennial hope from Isaiah that “the lion will eat straw like the ox.” It won't happen, because short of a holy miracle, it can't happen.

Oil is the lifeblood of advanced economies. Expecting them to overcome this “addiction” is equivalent to expecting humans or animals to wean themselves from reliance on blood flow. BTU-dense energy is not a recreational drug, but the lifeblood of a modern economy. The attempt to simply dispense with oil, natural gas, and coal in favor of “alternative” noncarbon forms of energy would rapidly lead to economic collapse.

This is implicit, or even explicit, in the works of some stalwarts of the Malthusian perspective, such as Richard Heinberg, author of
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
. He essentially argues that modern economies are the equivalent of a house of cards, and that peak oil will precipitate calamitous declines in the output and consumption of practically every measure of living standards. He recommends “transitioning gracefully from the ‘Age of Excess' to the ‘Era of Modesty.'”

If you think closely about the obvious contradiction between apprehensions about peak oil and the global warming scare blamed on the burning of hydrocarbon fuels, the real reason for this ill-grounded, cynical campaign may come into focus. It involves the difficulty of using price alone to ration what is bound to be diminishing access to world petroleum supplies. The basic problem, faced most acutely by economies that consume the greatest amount of energy per capita is that the marginal value of oil use is highest in emerging economies that do not have imbedded demand for oil in systems designed when oil was cheap. If the United States, and Western Europe, for example, through heroic effort, were able to reduce their annual oil consumption by five billion barrels, roughly the annual exhaustion of legacy supplies of cheap oil, there is no guarantee that energy-dense hydrocarbons saved thereby would be available at a later time to the North American and European users. To the contrary, it is more likely that new users in China, India, and other emerging economies would bid this oil away.

Hence the appeal of the global warming scare, as a rationalization for imposing limits on hydrocarbon use enforced through mechanisms of global governance. Such limits have the appeal from the perspective of the advanced economies, of promising to stifle growth in emerging economies, and help prevent them from increasing their downstream consumption of ever-diminishing supplies of cheap oil. Global warming remedies are not about protecting the climate, but about forestalling growth in emerging economies, and thereby preserving as far as possible the current proportions in the consumption of hydrocarbons between economies. As we explore next, the use of emission limits and carbon trading would effectively cap use at current levels and even drive it down. In other words, global warming remedies and policies meant to enforce a shift to the Era of Modesty can best be understood as cynical rationalizations for permitting the so-called advanced economies to continue consuming a disproportionately large share of global hydrocarbons, even after they could otherwise no longer afford to do so.

In this sense, Malthusian perspectives on resource limitation are not solely limited to food supply and population. In a broader sense, they encompass other concerns about outstripping available resources and the economic consequences that follow.

When Malthus first published his
Essay on Population
in 1798, the total population of the world was about 900 million. Today, it is about 7 billion. We have succeeded in feeding a population more than seven times larger than that in Malthus's day. While that is impressive progress, and seems to discount the dynamic that Malthus set out, it does not. If, on one level, Malthus can be supposed to have been proven wrong because humanity has not been devastated by mass starvation, on another, more basic level, his underlying proposition is indisputable, as when he says: “I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.”

The danger of Malthus' Dismal Theorem coming true does not arise from the prospect that billions of couples will suddenly reverse the trend of the past two centuries and arbitrarily decide to have 17 children apiece. That is logically possible, but it isn't going to happen. The danger of a subsistence crisis arises almost entirely from the prospect of a discontinuity that abruptly reduces food supplies.

The relatively successful matching of population growth with the growth of the means of sustenance that produced a sevenfold multiplication of human population since 1798 shows successful economic choices at work. It also helps explain the impatience of economists such as Joseph Schumpeter with Malthus. Schumpeter wrote, “There is of course no point whatever in trying to formulate independent ‘laws' for the behavior of two interdependent quantities.”
11
Essentially, Schumpeter was complaining that Malthus' Dismal Theorem was redundant and unnecessary because population growth and food production do not operate independently of one another—at least under what we have come to view as “normal” climate conditions.

Yet climate historian Brian Fagan suggests an important amendment to Socrates' view that the whole history of civilization is “a story of gradually increasing human control over contingency.”
12
This may indeed be true in one sense. Humans have gained greater control over likely and frequent contingencies but at the expense of making ourselves more vulnerable to the rarer and larger ones. As Fagan put it, the “course of civilization” over the past two centuries may indeed “be seen as a process of trading up on the scale of vulnerability.”
13
A larger population than ever awaits its Malthusian moment.