El optimista racional. Matt Ridley. 2010

Después de leer el libro de Matt Ridley, y tras haberme informado mucho sobre él, la conclusión es que es uno de los que debe leerse. Lo incluyo entre mis libros.

El libro es una defensa de la mejora en las condiciones de vida para los humanos a lo largo de toda la historia, y muy especialmente en los últimos dos siglos. La tesis principal es que esa mejora se ha dado gracias al intercambio, tanto de ideas como de materias.

Arcadi Espada destaca el libro en una reseña muy esclarecedora. Y que acaba con este párrafo:

Estas mañanas, mientras escribo solo y en silencio, oigo cómo llora el bebé reciente de unos vecinos. Sus lágrimas me traen una considerable melancolía del futuro. Como Armstrong, como la cita que abre el último capítulo del gran libro de Ridley, pienso que el bebé aprenderá mucho más de lo que yo sabré jamás. What a wonderful world. Eso es lo que pienso, como una tierna pava panglossiana.

No puedo estar más de acuerdo con lo escrito por Arcadi, y con el libro de Ridley.

El libro es un recorrido histórico, no se centra en ninguna época, donde analiza el progreso humano desde épocas prehistóricas hasta la actualidad, en todo el planeta, no en una localización geográfica concreta.

El autor indica (pp. 44-45) como casi todo lo que usamos a diario proviene de distintos lugares del mundo: "mermelada española...algodón de la India y lana de Australia...teclado de plástico tailandés".

La prosperidad se ha dado gracias a una seria de mecanismos, uno de ellos la especialización (p. 136): "La marca distintiva de la prosperidad es el aumento de la especialización. La marca distintiva de la pobreza es el regreso a la autosuficiencia".

Asusta pensar que hubiera pasado si no se hubieran inventado las máquinas que sustituyeron a los animales de carga, por ejemplo (p. 143): "La población de caballos en Estados Unidos llegó a su máximo de 21 millones de animales en 1915; en aquel tiempo, una tercera parte de la tierra de cultivo estaba dedicada a alimentarlos".

Norman Borlaug, persona desconocida para mí, es alabado (p. 145) como el responsable directo de la salvación de la vida de millones de personas. Gracias a sus investigaciones para la mejora de la agricultura y su implementación en países como India y Pakistán.

El autor destaca como la biodiversidad es protegida por la intensificación de la agricultura y la urbanización. Según investigaciones de Indur Goklany (p. 146) "si la productividad promedio de 1961 hubiera perdurado hasta 1998, entonces para alimentar a seis mil millones de personas se hubiera requerido ciltivar 7,9 millardos de hectáreas, en lugar de los 3,7 millardos que de hecho se sembraron en 1998. [...] Hoy en día las tierras agrícolas (de cultivo, cosecha o pastura) comprenden el 38% del área terrestre del planeta, mientras que con la productividad de 1961 tendría que ocuparse el 82%".

Los fenicios son admirados por el autor (pp. 170-171), muy por encima de otros pueblos más belicosos como los romanos  o los cartaginenses. No hace un retrato angelical de los fenicios porque "comerciaban con esclavos, algunas veces recurrían a la guerra y hacían tratos con los 'pueblos marítimos' filisteos, dados a la piratería". Pero el autor valora su predisposición al comercio y como supieron vencer la tentación de tener un emperador, "de volverse ladrones, sacerdotes y autoridades".

Aunque el progreso ha sido continuo, no se ha dado en todas las regiones por igual e incluso hay alguna que ha estado estancada durante cientos de años. Según estudios de Angus Maddison (p. 180) China "fue la única región en el mundo con un PIB más bajo en 1950 que en el año 1000, y son los gobiernos chinos los que cargan con la responsabilidad de ello".

Una reflexión muy interesante del autor es la referente a los gobiernos, y su relación con la prosperidad, (p. 182) que "tienden a ser algo bueno en sus comienzos, haciéndose peores conforme más perduren. Primero impulsan el florecimiento de la sociedad al proveer servicios centrales y retirar las trabas al comercio y la especialización. (...) Pero después (...) los gobiernos dan trabajo a más y más élites ambiciosas que captan cada vez más ingresos de la sociedad al inferir cada vez más en las vidas de las personas estableciendo más y más reglas que hacer cumplir (...) Los economistas, con razón, hablan con facilidad del 'fracaso del mercado', pero hay una mayor amenaza del 'fracaso del gobierno'. Al ser un monopolio, el gobierno trae consigo ineficiencia y estancamiento a casi todo lo que dirige; (...) Y, sin embargo, a pesar de todo esto, las personas inteligentes aún piden al gobierno dirigir más instancias; por alguna razón asumen que, de hacerlo, lo haría de algún modo más perfecto y desinteresado la siguiente vez".

El factor geográfico tiene su importancia, por eso (p. 184) "debido a sus penínsulas y cordilleras, Europa es mucho más difícil de unificar que China: pregunten a Carlos V, Luis XIV, Napoleón o Hitler. Hubo una época en que los romanos lograron una especie de unidad europea, y el resultado fue igual al de la dinastía Ming: estancamiento y burocracia".

La migración a las ciudades otro tema fundamental en el desarrollo mundial, tal y como explica el autor sobre el caso de la India, (p. 188) "la ciudad, a pesar de todos sus peligros y miseria, representa oportunidades, la oportunidad de escapar de la aldea (...), en donde hay trabajo pesado sin sueldo y la asfixia del control familiar, y donde el trabajo tiene que hacerse bajo el inmisericorde calor del sol o el insoportable aguacero del monzón". En otra parte del libro (pp. 216-217) se indica que "bajo los parámetros modernos, los trabajadores de las fábricas de 1800 en Inglaterra trabajaban durante una cantidad inhumana de horas, desde una edad demasiado temprana, en condiciones de terrible peligro, ruido y suciedad; regresaban a través de calles contaminadas a hogares hacinados y poco higiénicos, y tenían terribles condiciones de seguridad laboral, dieta, servicios de salud y educación. Sin embargo, también es cierto que vivían mejores vidas que sus abuelos agricultores y sus abuelas hiladoras. Es por ello que se movilizaban en desbandada del campo a las fábricas (...) Es también por ello que los trabajos en las fábricas se les negaban a los irlandeses en Nueva Inglaterra y a los negros en Carolina del Norte".

Para explicar el despegue de Gran Bretaña a comienzos del siglo XIX las cifras son esclarecedoras (p. 201) "en 1830, Gran Bretaña tenía 17 millones de hectáreas de tierra arable, 25 millones de ha. de pastizales y menos de dos millones de ha. de bosque. Pero consumían azúcar de las Indias occidentales equivalente (en calorías) a la producción de por lo menos otros dos millones de ha. de trigo; madera de Canada equivalente a otro millón de ha. de bosque; algodón de las Américas equivalente a la lana producida en la impresionante cantidad de 23 millones de ha. de pastizales, y carbón de las minas equivalente a  15 millones de ha. de bosque". Todo ello fundamental para dar impulso a la Revolución Industrial incipiente.

Desde el año 1804 en el que se alcanzaron los 1000 millones de habitantes (p. 205) se ha ido incrementando la población mundial hasta los 7000 millones actuales. Siempre consiguiendo alimentar a una gran mayoría de la población. El ritmo de crecimiento se ha ralentizado en los últimos años.

En definitiva un libro rico en detalles, cifras y hechos que confirman la tesis principal del mismo, el mundo está mejor que nunca, pero peor de lo que está por venir.

Otro tema de interés es la multitud de referencias que hay en las notas, por ejemplo:

An African Success Story: Botswana. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson.

Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show? Raghuram G. Rajan and Arvind Subramanian.

Un último comentario del libro, la relación de la ciencia con los inicios de la prosperidad. Por ejemplo (p. 251): "La industria que más se estaba transformando, la del hilado y el tejido de algodón, era de poco interés para los científicos, y viceversa. Las máquinas de hilar de husos múltiples, hidráulica, híbrida y los telares que revolucionaron el trabajo del algodón fueron inventadas por hombres de negocios hábiles, no por cerebritos pensantes: "por cabezas duras y dedos astutos". Se ha dicho que nada en sus diseños hubiera desconcertado a Arquímedes". Aunque el autor indica que (p. 252): "Posteriormente, la ciencia sí contribuiría al creciente ritmo de invención, y la línea entre el descubrimiento e invención se volvería más difusa conforme avanzaba el siglo XIX".

Red tape hobbles a harvest of life-saving rice

Matt Ridley. 

This week saw the announcement of the latest conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, a project founded by Bjørn Lomborg in which expert economists write detailed papers every four years and then gather to vote on the answer to a simple question: Imagine you had $75 billion to donate to worthwhile causes. What would you do, and where should we start?

This is the third time the consensus has spoken. Though such agreements should always be treated with caution-after all, a consensus of global experts in 1920 would probably have prioritized eugenics-the three pronouncements are remarkable for their consistency and yet also for their capacity to surprise. At the top of the list this year, as in 2008 (it was second only to HIV in 2004), comes the unsexy topic of micronutrients. The smartest way to benefit the most disadvantaged people is to get them vitamins and minerals. 

On three different occasions now, three different groups of experts, with no ax to grind and no stake in vitamin firms, have reached the same answer. Enhancing nutrients, they calculate, yields benefits 30 times greater than costs. The readers of Slate magazine, given the chance to vote on the Copenhagen Consensus in recent weeks, mostly agreed-putting micronutrients second only to family planning. 

The evidence for micronutrients has been getting stronger. Studies from Guatemala, following up children for 30 years, find that good early nutrition not only combats stunting and increases intelligence but, says Dr. Lomborg, "also translates into higher education and substantially higher (23.8%) incomes in adult life, which not only matters to the individuals but also starts a virtuous circle." 

I asked him if he was surprised that micronutrients became the consistent top priority among his experts. He replied: "I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this, and I'm gratified that we got it right, way before it became obvious that it really is one of the best ways forward." 

Another person who spotted the importance of micronutrients a long time ago is a Swiss geneticist, Ingo Potrykus. Realizing that insufficient calories was not the only form of malnutrition, he concluded that vitamin A deficiency, for those living on a monotonous diet of rice, was the most tractable of the big problems facing the world. He and Peter Beyer designed a new variety of rice plant that could be given away free to help the poorest people in the world. 

Vitamin A deficiency affects the immune system, leading to illness and frequently to blindness. It probably causes more deaths than malaria, HIV or tuberculosis each year, killing as many people as the Fukushima tsunami every single day. It can be solved by eating green vegetables and meat, but for many poor Asians, who can afford only rice, that remains an impossible dream. But "biofortification" with genetically modified plant food (such as golden rice) is 1/10th as costly as dietary supplements. 

"Golden rice"-with two extra genes to make beta-carotene, the raw material for vitamin A-was a technical triumph, identical to ordinary rice except in color. Painstaking negotiations led to companies waiving their patent rights so the plant could be grown and regrown free by anybody. 

Yet today, 14 years later, it still has not been licensed to growers anywhere in the world. The reason is regulatory red tape deliberately imposed to appease the opponents of genetic modification, which Adrian Dubock, head of the Golden Rice project, describes as "a witch-hunt for suspected theoretical environmental problems ... [because] many activist NGOs thought that genetically engineered crops should be opposed as part of their anti-globalization agenda." 

It is surprising to find that an effective solution to the problem consistently rated by experts as the poor world's highest priority has been stubbornly opposed by so many pressure groups supposedly acting on behalf of the poor.

Nature's dynamic non-balance

Matt Ridley.

In her remarkable new book "The Rambunctious Garden," Emma Marris explores a paradox that is increasingly vexing the science of ecology, namely that the only way to have a pristine wilderness is to manage it intensively. Left unmanaged, a natural habitat will become dominated by certain species, often invasive aliens introduced by human beings. "A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem," she writes. "The ecosystems that look the most pristine are perhaps the least likely to be truly wild."

In the Netherlands, for example, cattle are being used to re-create a simulacrum of a Pleistocene woodland, because their aurochs ancestors would have been vital in keeping forest patchy. To keep African national parks from deforestation, elephant control is sometimes needed. To let aspen, willow and beaver return to Yellowstone, it was necessary to reintroduce the wolf, which reduced elk numbers. To preserve Mojave Desert tortoises, it is essential to control native ravens, whose numbers have been boosted by distant landfill sites.

Some ecosystems are enriched and made more productive by invasive species. In terms of "ecosystem services"-the provision of clean water, the absorption of carbon, the creation of soil, the prevention of erosion-Hawaiian forests dominated by alien tree species can perform better than the pristine habitats they replace. Though many invasive aliens are notorious for the harm they bring (pythons in Florida, cane toads in Australia, brown tree snakes in Guam), many others enhance the local nature scene.

Where I live, in the U.K., American gray squirrels are exterminating native red squirrels with the help of a parapox virus and a better ability to digest acorns. Aesthetically, this is a pity: The red is nicer to look at and part of local culture. But ecologically, one has to admit that the gray is better at filling the squirrel niche in our broadleaf woodland. Reds are really a pine-adapted species that had responded to a broadleaf vacancy after the most recent ice age.

Ms. Marris's book goes further, challenging the very idea of a balance of nature. In the first half of the 20th century, ecologists came to believe in equilibrium-that natural systems tended toward a steady state. So, for example, a bare patch of ground would be colonized by a succession of species-annual weeds, then grasses, then shrubs, then trees-until it reached its "climax" state. Conservation, therefore, was a matter of restoring this climax.

Academic ecologists have abandoned such a static way of thinking for something much more dynamic. For a start, they now appreciate that climate has always changed, and with it, ecology. Twenty thousand years ago the spot where I live was under a mile of ice. Then it was tundra, then birch forest, then pine forest, then alder, linden, elm and ash, then most recently oak, but beech was coming.

Which is its climax? We now know that oak seedlings rarely thrive under mature oaks (which rain caterpillars on them), so the oak climax was just a passing phase.

Yet even as academic ecologists have abandoned balance-of-nature thinking, it still dominates practical conservation management. Ms. Marris quotes the ecologist Daniel Botkin: "If you ask an ecologist if nature never changes, he will almost always say no. But if you ask that same ecologist to design a policy, it is almost always a balance-of-nature policy": preserve this rare species, maintain this habitat structure, freeze in time this ecological moment, return this degraded land to a particular state, whatever the weather and whatever the novel arrivals of exotic species. Just as in our management of the economy, we think of states, not processes.

So what's a good conservationist to do? Ms. Marris sets you free: "In a nutshell: Give up romantic notions of a stable Eden, be honest about goals and costs, keep land from mindless development and try just about everything."

17 Reasons to be cheerful

Reader's Digest summarises rational optimism.

April's Reader's Digest carries an article based on excerpts from my book and an interview with me:

"The world has never been a better place to live in," says science writer Matt Ridley, "and it will keep on getting better." Today, in a world gripped by global economic crisis and afflicted with poverty, disease, and war, them's fightin' words in some quarters. Ridley's critics have called him a "denialist" and "shameful" and have accused him of "playing fast and loose with the truth" for his views on climate change and the free market.

Yet Ridley, 54, author most recently of The Rational Optimist, sticks to his guns. "It is not insane to believe in a happy future for people and the planet," he says. Ridley, who's been a foreign correspondent, a zoologist, an economist, and a financier, brings a broad perspective to his sunny outlook. "People say I'm bonkers to claim the world will go on getting better, yet I can't stop myself," he says. Read on to see how Ridley makes his case. Brilliant or bonkers? You decide.

1. We're better off now

Compared with 50 years ago, when I was just four years old, the average human now earns nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), eats one third more calories, buries two thirds fewer children, and can expect to live one third longer. In fact, it's hard to find any region of the world that's worse off now than it was then, even though the global population has more than doubled over that period.

2. Urban living is a good thing

City dwellers take up less space, use less energy, and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers. The world's cities now contain over half its people, but they occupy less than 3 percent of its land area. Urban growth may disgust environmentalists, but living in the country is not the best way to care for the earth. The best thing we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

3. Poverty is nose-diving

The rich get richer, but the poor do even better. Between 1980 and 2000, the poor doubled their consumption. The Chinese are ten times richer and live about 25 years longer than they did 50 years ago. Nigerians are twice as rich and live nine more years. The percentage of the world's people living in absolute poverty has dropped by over half. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500.

4. The important stuff costs less

One reason we are richer, healthier, taller, cleverer, longer-lived, and freer than ever before is that the four most basic human needs-food, clothing, fuel, and shelter-have grown markedly cheaper. Take one example: In 1800, a candle providing one hour's light cost six hours' work. In the 1880s, the same light from a kerosene lamp took 15 minutes' work to pay for. In 1950, it was eight seconds. Today, it's half a second. In these terms, we are 43,200 times better off than in 1800.

5. The environment is better than you think

In the United States, rivers, lakes, seas, and air are getting cleaner all the time. A car today emits less pollution traveling at full speed than a parked car did from leaks in 1970.

6. Shopping fuels innovation

Even allowing for the many people who still live in abject poverty, our own generation has access to more calories, watts, horsepower, gigabytes, megahertz, square feet, air miles, food per acre, miles per gallon, and, of course, money than any who lived before us. This will continue as long as we use these things to make other things. The more we specialize and exchange, the better off we'll be.

7. Global trade enriches our lives

By 9 a.m., I have shaved with an American razor, eaten bread made with French wheat and spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, brewed tea from Sri Lanka, dressed in clothes made from Indian cotton and Australian wool, put on shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper printed on Finnish paper with Chinese ink. I have consumed minuscule fractions of the productive labor of hundreds of people. This is the magic of trade and specialization. Self-sufficiency is poverty.

8. More farm production = more wilderness

While world population has increased more than fourfold since 1900, other things have increased, too-the area of crops by 30 percent, harvests by 600 percent. At the same time, more than two billion acres of "secondary" tropical forest are now regrowing since farmers left them to head for cities, and it is already rich in biodiversity. In fact, I will make an outrageous prediction: The world will feed itself to a higher and higher standard throughout this century without plowing any new land.

9. The good old days weren't

Some people argue that in the past there was a simplicity, tranquillity, sociability, and spirituality that's now been lost. This rose-tinted nostalgia is generally confined to the wealthy. It's easier to wax elegiac for the life of a pioneer when you don't have to use an outhouse. The biggest-ever experiment in back-to-the-land hippie lifestyle is now known as the Dark Ages.

10. Population growth is not a threat

Although the world population is growing, the rate of increase has been falling for 50 years. Across the globe, national birth rates are lower now than in 1960, and in the less developed world, the birth rate has approximately halved. This is happening despite people living longer and infant-mortality rates dropping. According to an estimate from the United Nations, population will start falling once it peaks at 9.2 billion in 2075-so there is every prospect of feeding the world forever. After all, there are already seven billion people on earth, and they are eating better and better every decade.

11. Oil is not running out

In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world, and in the 20 years that followed, the world used 600 billion.

So by 1990, reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels. Instead, they amounted to 900 billion-not counting tar sands and oil shale that between them contain about 20 times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. Oil, coal, and gas are finite, but they will last for decades, perhaps centuries, and people will find alternatives long before they run out.

12. We are the luckiest generation

This generation has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, and travel than any in history. Yet it laps up gloom at every opportunity. Consumers do not celebrate their wonderful field of choice and, according to psychologists, say they are "overwhelmed." When I go to my local superstore, I do not see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.

13. Storms are not getting worse

Not at all. While the climate warmed slightly last century, the incidence of hurricanes and cyclones fell. Since the 1920s, the global annual death rate from weather-related natural disasters (that is, the proportion of the world's population killed rather than simply the overall number) has declined by a staggering 99 percent.

The killing power of hurricanes depends more on wealth than on wind speed. A big hurricane struck the well-prepared Yucatán in Mexico in 2007 and killed nobody. A similar storm struck impoverished Burma the next year and killed 200,000. The best defenses against disaster are prosperity and freedom.

14. Great ideas keep coming

The more we prosper, the more we can prosper. The more we invent, the more inventions become possible. The world of things is often subject to diminishing returns. The world of ideas is not: The ever-increasing exchange of ideas causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world. There isn't even a theoretical possibility of exhausting our supply of ideas, discoveries, and inventions.

15. We can solve all our problems

If you say the world will go on getting better, you are considered mad. If you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect the Nobel Peace Prize. Bookshops groan with pessimism; airwaves are crammed with doom. I cannot recall a time when I was not being told by somebody that the world could survive only if it abandoned economic growth. But the world will not continue as it is. The human race has become a problem-solving machine: It solves those problems by changing its ways. The real danger comes from slowing change.

16. This depression is not depressing

The Great Depression of the 1930s was just a dip in the upward slope of human living standards. By 1939, even the worst-affected countries, America and Germany, were richer than they'd been in 1930. All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression. So growth will resume unless prevented by wrong policies. Someone, somewhere, is tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring the gene that will make life easier or more fun.

17. Optimists are right

For 200 years, pessimists have had all the headlines-even though optimists have far more often been right. There is immense vested interest in pessimism. No charity ever raised money by saying things are getting better. No journalist ever got the front page writing a story about how disaster was now less likely. Pressure groups and their customers in the media search even the most cheerful statistics for glimmers of doom. Don't be browbeaten-dare to be an optimist!

The beginning of the end of wind

Matt Ridley.

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.  

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.

Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.

Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?

One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.

The big conservation organisations have been disgracefully silent on the subject, like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which until last year took generous contributions from the wind industry through a venture called RSPB Energy. Even journalists: at a time when advertising is in short supply, British newspapers have been crammed full of specious but lucrative ‘debates’ and supplements on renewable energy sponsored by advertising from a cohort of interest groups.

And just as the scam dies, I find I am now part of it. A family trust has signed a deal to receive £8,500 a year from a wind company, which is building a turbine on land that once belonged to my grandfather. He was canny enough not to sell the mineral rights, and the foundations of the turbine disturbs those mineral rights, so the trustees are owed compensation. I will not get the money, because I am not a beneficiary of the trust. Nonetheless, the idea of any part of my family receiving ‘wind-gelt’ is so abhorrent that I have decided to act. The real enemy is not wind farms per se, but groupthink and hysteria which allowed such a flawed idea to progress — with a minimum of intellectual opposition. So I shall be writing a cheque for £8,500, which The Spectator will give as a prize to the best article devoted to rational, fact-based environmental journalism.

It will be called the Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy. Barring bankruptcy, I shall donate the money as long as the wind-gelt flows — so the quicker Dave cancels the subsidy altogether, the sooner he will have me and the prizewinners off his back.

Entrants are invited forthwith, and a panel of judges will reward the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

My donation, though significant for me, is a drop in the ocean compared with the money that pours into the green movement every hour. Jeremy Grantham, a hedge-fund plutocrat, wrote a cheque for £12 million to the London School of Economics to found an institute named after him, which has since become notorious for its aggressive stance and extreme green statements. Between them, Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) spend nearly a billion a year. WWF spends $68 million a year on ‘public education’ alone. All of this is judged uncontroversial: a matter of education, not propaganda.

By contrast, a storm of protest broke recently over the news that one small conservative think-tank called Heartland was proposing to spend just $200,000 in a year on influencing education against climate alarmism. A day later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with assets of $7.2 billion, gave a grant of $100 million to something called the ClimateWorks Foundation, a pro-wind power organisation, on top of $481 million it gave to the same recipient in 2008. The deep green Sierra Club recently admitted that it took $26 million from the gas industry to lobby against coal. But money is not the only reason that the entire political establishment came to believe in wind fairies. Psychologists have a term for the wishful thinking by which we accept any means if the end seems virtuous: ‘noble-cause corruption’. The phrase was first used by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcock in 1992 to explain miscarriages of justice. ‘It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned,’ said the late Lord Denning, referring to the Birmingham Six.

Politicians are especially susceptible to this condition. In a wish to be seen as modern, they will embrace all manner of fashionable causes. When this sets in — groupthink grips political parties, and the media therefore decide there is no debate — the gravest of errors can take root. The subsidising of useless wind turbines was born of a deep intellectual error, one incubated by failure to challenge conventional wisdom.

It is precisely this consensus-worshipping, heretic-hunting environment where the greatest errors can be made. There are some 3,500 wind turbines in Britain, with hundreds more under construction. It would be a shame for them all to be dismantled. The biggest one should remain, like a crane on an abandoned quay, for future generations to marvel at. They will never be an efficient way to generate power. But there can be no better monument to the folly of mankind.

In America, the shale gas revolution is creating jobs and growth. It can here too

Matt Ridley.


15th December 2011.

WHEN is a job not a job? Answer: when it is a green job. Jobs in an industry that raises the price of energy effectively destroy jobs elsewhere; jobs in an industry that cuts the cost of energy create extra jobs elsewhere.

The entire argument for green jobs is a version of Frederic Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy. The great nineteenth century French economist pointed out that breaking a window may provide work for the glazier, but takes work from the tailor, because the window owner has to postpone ordering a new suit because he has to pay for the window.

You will hear claims from Chris Huhne, the anti-energy secretary, and the green-greed brigade that trousers his subsidies for their wind and solar farms, about how many jobs they are creating in renewable energy. But since every one of these jobs is subsidised by higher electricity bills and extra taxes, the creation of those jobs is a cost to the rest of us. The anti-carbon and renewable agenda is not only killing jobs by closing steel mills, aluminium smelters and power stations, but preventing the creation of new jobs at hairdressers, restaurants and electricians by putting up their costs and taking money from their customers’ pockets.

We now have an estimate, from meticulous work in a new report by the Renewable Energy Foundation, of just how costly those subsidies are going to get in a few years’ time: £15bn a year, or 1 per cent of GDP. Ouch. That’s more than this year’s growth.

Contrast that with news from the United States that, according to a report from IHS Global Insight, the cheap shale gas revolution now in full flow has created 148,000 jobs directly within the gas industry and – by making energy cheaper – has created at least another 450,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy. By 2015, the total impact of shale gas will be 870,000 new jobs, says the report.

Shale gas now provides more than a quarter of American gas from a standing start about five years ago. Its effect has been dramatic. Whereas gas prices rose sharply here in the last two years, pushed up by oil prices, the Libyan civil war (which constricted supply) and the Japanese earthquake (which boosted demand), by contrast they stayed low in the United States.

This is the first time in decades gas prices on opposite sides of the Atlantic have diverged so sharply. Cheap gas in America has caused a rush into using gas for electricity generation, the cancellation of coal and nuclear plants, the mothballing of gas import terminals, the revival of the US chemical industry, a fall in the price of farmers’ input costs (nitrogen fertiliser is made with natural gas) and the beginning of the conversion of some urban transport fleets to running on natural gas.

Oh, and by the way, with one exception in Wyoming, shale gas drilling has still not caused any verified cases of groundwater contamination. The environmental risks of gas are real but small compared with the documented impact that wind power has on eagles, bats, landscapes and pollution in Inner Mongolia (where the metals that go into their magnets are mined and refined), or that biofuels have on hunger and rainforest destruction.

Britain can get some of these benefits of the shale gas revolution whatever happens. We already have. Last Christmas, when all wind turbines stood helplessly still during the great freeze, three cargoes of liquefied natural gas heading for the United States from Qatar actually turned around and came to the Isle of Grain instead; that kept our boilers going, kept prices from rising faster than they did and in the long run staved off job losses.

Thus, if we were the only country – or part of the only continent – not to exploit the new resource of shale gas within our own borders, we might still get some of the indirect benefits. But we would also lose the revenues and the direct jobs that come with gas drilling. We would also lose competitiveness to countries with cheaper energy.

Back in 1800, Britain was becoming the richest country in the world with the fastest economic growth and the fastest job creation – the China of its day. That was not because we had suddenly become cleverer than everybody else at inventing things. It was because we had stumbled upon limitless, dense and above all cheap energy in the form of coal, and harnessed it to mechanise industry, cheaply amplifying the labour productivity of each person so much that he could be paid high wages.

That lesson – that cheap energy is an employment multiplier, while costly energy is an employment divider – has been forgotten. Please let us recall it before the green jobs myth causes more unemployment.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist. www.rationaloptimist.com

After just five years, shale gas provides more than a quarter of American gas

Dematerialising and deflating the future

Matt Ridley:

"Economic growth is a form of deflation. If the cost of, say, computing power goes down, then the users of computing power acquire more of it for less—and thus attain a higher standard of living. One thing that makes such deflation possible is dematerialization, the reduction in the quantity of stuff needed to produce a product. An iPhone, for example, weighs 1/100th and costs 1/10th as much as an Osborne Executive computer did in 1982, but it has 150 times the processing speed and 100,000 times the memory.

Dematerialization is occurring with all sorts of products. Banking has shrunk to a handful of electrons moving on a cellphone, as have maps, encyclopedias, cameras, books, card games, music, records and letters—none of which now need to occupy physical space of their own. And it's happening to food, too. In recent decades, wheat straw has shrunk as grain production has grown, because breeders have persuaded the plant to devote more of its energy to making the thing that we value most. Future dematerialization includes the possibility of synthetic meat—produced in a lab without brains, legs or guts."

When less means more

By Matt Ridley.

Which American city has more inhabitants: San Antonio or San Diego? More Germans than Americans get the answer right (San Diego). What about Hanover or Bielefeld? More Americans than Germans get the answer right (Hanover). In each case, the foreigners pick the right answer by choosing the city they have heard more about, assuming that it's bigger. The natives know too much and let the excess information get in the way.

This is an example of a "heuristic," a highfalutin name for a "rule of thumb" or "gut feeling." Most business people and physicians privately admit that many of their decisions are based on intuition rather than on detailed cost-benefit analysis. In public, of course, it's different. To stand up in court and say you made a decision based on what your thumb or gut told you is to invite damages. So both business people and doctors go to some lengths to suppress or disguise the role that intuition plays in their work.

Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, thinks that instead they should boast about using heuristics. In articles and books over the past five years, Dr. Gigerenzer has developed the startling claim that intuition makes our decisions not just quicker but better. He rejects the notion that hunches are second best, trading off accuracy for effort to achieve decisions that are "good enough" but not perfect.

As Dr. Gigerenzer sees it, complex problems do not necessarily need complex solutions, and more detailed analysis does not necessarily improve a decision, but often makes it worse. He believes, in effect, that less is more: Extra information distracts you from focusing on the few simple aspects of a problem that matter most.

A baseball player running to catch a fly ball is not behaving, even unconsciously, as if he were solving differential equations to work out where the ball will land. He is following a simple rule: Keep the angle of the falling ball constant in your vision and adjust your running speed accordingly. It's the same trick used by dragonflies catching flies.

When Jeffrey Skiles, the co-pilot of the plane that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January 2009, explained how he and his captain decided that an airport landing was impossible, he described the same "gaze heuristic": The angle of the plane's descending glide made the airport appear to rise in their windscreen view—clearly signaling that a landing there was doomed.

The economist Harry Markowitz won the Nobel prize for designing a complex mathematical formula for picking fund managers. Yet when he retired, he himself, like most people, used a simpler heuristic that generally works better: He divided his retirement funds equally among a number of fund managers.

A few years ago, a Michigan hospital saw that doctors, concerned with liability, were sending too many patients with chest pains straight to the coronary-care unit, where they both cost the hospital more and ran higher risks of infection if they were not suffering a heart attack. The hospital introduced a complex logistical model to sift patients more efficiently, but the doctors hated it and went back to defensive decision-making.

As an alternative, Dr. Gigerenzer and his colleagues came up with a "fast-and-frugal" tree that asked the doctors just three sequential yes-no questions about each patient's electrocardiographs and other data. Compared with both the complex logistical model and the defensive status quo, this heuristic helped the doctors to send more patients to the coronary-care unit who belonged there and fewer who did not.

It is no surprise that in the wake of the great financial crisis, financial regulators are beating a path to Dr. Gigerenzer's door. The complex algorithms that gave AAA ratings to debts that should not have passed the smell test demonstrated all too well the futility of knowing too much. 

For a video showing Gigerenzer presenting his ideas in a lecture, see here.

Bioenergy versus the planet

By Matt Ridley.

Prospect has published my essay on bioenergy, in which my research left me astonished at the environmental and economic harm that is being perpetrated. Biomass and biofuels are not carbon neutral, can't displace much fossil fuel, require huge subsidies, increase hunger and directly or indirectly cause rain forest destruction. Apart from that, they're fine... Here's the text:

From a satellite, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic looks like the edge of a carpet. While the Dominican Republic is green with forest, Haiti is brown: 98 per cent deforested. One of the chief reasons is that Haiti depends on bioenergy. Wood—mostly in the form of charcoal—is used not just for cooking but for industry as well, providing 70 per cent of Haiti’s energy. In contrast, in the Dominican Republic, the government imports oil and subsidises propane gas for cooking, which takes the pressure off forests.

Haiti’s plight is a reminder there is nothing new about bioenergy. A few centuries ago, Britain got most of its energy from firewood and hay. Over the years the iron industry moved from Sussex to the Welsh borders to Cumberland and then Sweden in an increasingly desperate search for wood to fire its furnaces. Cheap coal and oil then effectively allowed the gradual reforestation of the country. Britain’s forest cover—12 per cent—is three times what it was in 1919 and will soon rival the levels recorded in the Doomsday Book of 1086.

Yet if the government has its way, we will instead emulate Haiti. In 2007, Tony Blair signed up to a European Union commitment that Britain would get 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Apparently neither he nor his officials noticed this target was for “energy” not “electricity.” Since much energy is used for heating, which wind, solar, hydro and the like cannot supply, this effectively committed Britain to using lots of wood and crops for both heat and electricity to hit that target. David Cameron and Chris Huhne, anxious to seem the “greenest of them all,” dare not weaken the target, despite its unattainability. Biomass consumption in power stations was up 27 per cent in 2010 and “co-firing” (burning biomass alongside coal) was up 39 per cent. To replace coal, the government projects that by 2020 Britain will be generating electricity from burning up to 60m tonnes of biomass, mainly wood, about five times the timber harvest that Britain could conceivably produce. To replace oil, the European Union has set a target of making 10 per cent of our transport fuel renewable by 2020, which will mean mainly biodiesel made from rape, soybean and imported palm oil. To replace gas, a gold rush of developers is trying to build anaerobic digesters on farms, where they will turn whole crops into methane.

All this is driven by subsidies that are mouth-wateringly generous to energy producers and eye-wateringly costly to consumers and drivers. According to the pressure group Biofuelwatch, the biomass power stations proposed for Britain would attract over £3bn a year through “renewable obligation certificates.” Drax power station alone gets £43m a year to “co-fire” biomass alongside coal, much of it imported—for example in the form of olive pits, sunflower husks and peanut shells.

For all the furore that wind farms attract, bioenergy is a much bigger drain on the public purse than wind. Bioenergy currently supplies 83 per cent of all renewable energy used in Britain, while wind, solar, hydro, tide, wave, geothermal and heat pumps manage just 17 per cent, or 1 per cent of total energy. About half of that bioenergy is from waste incineration, sewage and landfill gas. The rest comes from timber or crops. The uncomfortable truth is that more than four-fifths of all “renewable” energy involves burning something.

If you mention biomass crops to an environmentalist, he or she will usually agree they are a bad thing—for reasons I will come to—but claim that they have little to do with the green movement, being driven instead by American electoral politics. (Iowa, a key state for presidential candidates to win early support, benefits from subsidies when the maize grown there is turned into ethanol.) Inconveniently for this thesis, the amount of Britain’s primary energy supply from biomass (3 per cent) is about the same as America’s (4 per cent).

It was not US politics that caused a subsidised wheat ethanol plant to open on Teesside in 2009 (and then close in May because the smell was a nuisance and the wheat price had become too high). As Robert Palgrave of Biofuelwatch says: “In America, bioenergy’s supporters stress energy security; here the big driver has been climate change and in particular the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive.”

Whether they admit it or not, the green movement caused this policy, the sole justification being to address climate change. Yet bioenergy is not just doing nothing to help cut carbon emissions— like wind; it is actually making the problem worse.

Here is why. A carbon atom is a carbon atom, wherever it comes from. Oxidise (burn) it and you get carbon dioxide. That is true whether it is in a hydrocarbon (like coal, oil or gas), a carbohydrate (like sugar in sugar cane or starch in maize), or a lipid (like oil from palm oil). Roughly one-third of the atoms we oxidise to liberate energy are carbon and two-thirds hydrogen. (Oxidised hydrogen is better known as water.)

As Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has calculated, wood has a higher ratio of carbon to hydrogen (10) than coal (1), oil (0.5) and gas (0.25). Burn wood and you make 40 times more carbon dioxide for each unit of energy than if you burn gas. It’s the worst thing you can do in carbon terms.

However, a carbon atom in wood was absorbed from the air a few years before when the tree grew, whereas a carbon atom in coal or gas was absorbed from the air hundreds of millions of years before. Since a felled tree can be fairly quickly replaced by a new one, wood is said by its supporters to be “carbon neutral” whereas gas is not.

The trouble with this argument is that it fails to take into account the fact that burning the timber oxidises carbon atoms decades before they would be released naturally. According to a report from Joanneum Research, this up-front carbon debt could take two or three centuries to be paid back in the case of timber. Harvesting also denies the carbon atoms to other species, such as beetles and woodpeckers (whereas almost nothing eats coal or gas).

In the case of crops grown for liquid fuel, a bigger problem emerges: the carbon oxidised in planting, harvesting, transporting and drying the grain turns out to be about as much as the carbon content of the plant itself. That is to say, almost as many carbon atoms (and almost as much energy) are burned in making the fuel as are in it. This is the case for maize grown for ethanol in the US, for example. By contrast drilling for, transporting and refining petrol has a 600 per cent energy gain.

Some biofuels are better. Brazilian sugar cane, which supplies a third of all fuel used by cars in that country, contains more carbon atoms than were burned in growing it. But don’t celebrate too soon. The reason is that Brazilian sugar cane is mostly cut by poor labourers on piece rates, some of them children, rather than by machinery.

It gets worse. When a forest is felled to make way for a biofuel crop, the carbon stored in the trees and soil leaks into the atmosphere through decay. The crop is then grown with nitrogen fertiliser, some of which turns to nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In Borneo vast areas of forest have been cleared to grow palm oil to make into biodiesel to sell to Europeans striving to meet their renewable targets. Much of this forest grew on waterlogged peat with high carbon content. When this is drained, the peat oxidises. Researchers at the University of Leicester have calculated that the carbon emissions from the drained peat are double the previous estimates of carbon emitted in the clearing of forests, so the policy of clearing forest for palm oil can “actually increase emissions relative to petroleum fuels.” It would take 423 years to pay back the up-front carbon debt.

This is to say nothing of the orangutans whose habitat is eroded and fragmented. The European Environment Agency (EEA) says that “accelerated destruction of rainforest due to increasing biofuel production can already be witnessed.”

Even if you do not clear rainforest to grow biofuels, you usually displace a food crop. This pushes up food prices, as a total of 17 independent reports have concluded. In August the UN Committee on World Food Security said biofuels had been a bigger cause of recent food price increases than the growth of the Asian middle class. The independent scholar Indur Goklany has estimated that biofuels killed 192,000 people in 2010 by increasing hunger.

Higher prices encourage farmers to cultivate more virgin land, so biofuels encourage the destruction of rainforest to grow food, even if they did not directly replace forest. Such “indirect land use change” is impossible to measure. The European Commission promised to come up with an estimate, but in September Reuters obtained a leaked report in which the commission admitted it could not put a number on the problem. A few days later the EEA issued a statement that because biofuels displace food crops, the assumption that they are carbon neutral is “not correct.”

An American study published in Science in 2008 concluded that because maize made into ethanol could not be exported as food, some virgin land would be cleared and ploughed elsewhere in the world for every acre of ethanol maize grown, which meant that ethanol had effectively double the carbon footprint of petroleum.

Britain gets most of its biofuel from Argentinian soybeans. A recent report commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change concluded that if bioenergy grows to 20 per cent of primary energy by 2020 as envisaged, we will be importing 67 per cent of it. So not only is the impact on hunger and rainforest destruction directly on our conscience; there is also no prospect of energy security from bioenergy. This import dependence is causing second thoughts about how “sustainable” Britain’s rush to biomass really is, and that is frightening off the banks that would need to lend to such projects.

At this point, biofuel’s supporters argue  that the second generation of biofuels, consisting of “cellulosic” miscanthus grass and jatropha plants, will be grown on marginal land not used for farming and not covered in rainforest. When asked where this land is, and how it can be made fertile enough to grow biofuels, they point to degraded and abandoned farmland. The trouble is, they forgot to tell the people who live there. Göran Berndes of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden co-authored a report that studied 17 bioenergy feasibility studies. Its conclusion was that “land reported to be degraded is often the base of subsistence for the rural population.”

In Andhra Pradesh, Berndes did find that jatropha planting helped retain water and didn’t prevent land being grazed, so its impact was “generally positive, creating a complementary source of income to the farmers.” But elsewhere things are not so rosy. Fatou Mbaye, food rights co-ordinator for Action Aid Senegal, told the New Internationalist recently: “At first, we were told that [jatropha] would be grown on marginal land. But it’s being grown on the best arable land with the highest rainfall, or where good irrigation is possible, to make it economically profitable.”

While the impact of bioenergy on food prices has been severe, the reduction in oil use has been minuscule. In 2010, America turned 40 per cent of its maize crop into fuel, displacing just 3 per cent of its oil consumption. Worldwide, 5 per cent of grain was turned into fuel, displacing just 0.6 per cent of oil. To cut say 20 per cent of world oil use would require such a gigantic land grab that starvation would be widespread and rainforest a distant memory.

The land grab is huge because of bioenergy’s low power density. According to Jesse Ausubel, an American ethanol farm generates about 0.047 watts per square metre, once the energy inputs are deducted; a New England forest can provide wood at the rate of about 0.1 watts per square metre; and a Brazilian sugar cane field, ignoring human toil, manages about 3.7.

The energy expert Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba says a realistic estimate of the energy density of bioenergy worldwide is less than 0.5 watts per square metre. The world economy uses energy at the rate of 15,000 gigawatts (474 exajoules per year). To supply that from bioenergy would require 30 million square km, a territory the size of China, Brazil, India and Australia put together. Or “Renewistan” as engineer Saul Griffith calls this fabled land.

The champions of biofuels are left with one card to play: algae. In theory, by growing algae in closed bioreactors in salty water in sunny places, you can achieve much higher power densities. In practice, many engineering hurdles remain before first-generation algal farms go commercial.

The conclusion is stark. There is no way to run even a fraction of the world economy on bioenergy without severely damaging the planet. For the environment’s sake we must use a much denser form of energy, such as fossil fuel or nuclear, whose footprints I estimate to be about 100 and 10,000 times smaller than biofuel’s respectively. The same applies to other forms of renewable energy, with the possible exception of solar power, whose density could one day be better than the rest (except in cloudy Britain). So by all means install a wood-burning stove or use biodiesel in your car. But don’t pretend you are doing the planet a favour.

A declaration of interest. As a landowner I benefit from the recent increases in prices of wheat and wood caused by bioenergy. Recently I turned down a proposal to establish an anaerobic digester on my farm, even though it would have guaranteed a good income. So the views expressed here are against my financial interest.