A good model can be seductive
Many Doomers I chat with today have inherited a way of thinking that – whether they know it or not – is based on a specific model. I like models – especially simple ones that help me grasp a concept. The model I’m about to unpack is a good model for a very basic overview of the subject. Sadly, the simplifying power of this model is not so much the simplistic equation – but the vision it inspires. The power of that vision becomes seductive – and even blinded the founder of this mode into making some truly awful predictions that have embarrassed the environmental movement and damaged our credibility for decades!
The real world is incredibly complex. A model can be so overpowering that it predetermines what we can even see in the first place! Indeed – some see predictive power in this model almost like Psychohistory from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. But just because someone understands that the biosphere is finite and currently hurting in a really bad way does not mean they’re necessarily across enough different disciplines to begin to guess at the trends ahead.
I=PAT – an important model in its time
It was developed by Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s training is as a zoologist specialising in etymology. But then he delivered stark warnings about overpopulation on the radio in 1967 – which culminated in the 1968 book The Population Bomb. This is where a zoologist started writing outside his field, and became the archetypal Doomer.
Impact = Population times Affluence times Technology.
Our environmental Impact is multiplied by these 3 factors.
Population – How many people are there? 8 billion now. And still rising! Think of how the oceans are over-fished and the forests have been ploughed and how many species have been wiped out by just 8 billion of us. Yet in a few decades demographers predict 9 or 10 billion. If 8 billion are unsustainable – why add more? We are still adding 75 million people a year to the world – more people than the UK.
Affluence: Aka consumption. We’re not called ‘citizens’ any more – the Corporations like us to think of ourselves as ‘Consumers’. For that is what we do – especially in the first world. Huge suburban homes, Humvee’s to drive us into town, and that all important holiday or two each year to fly somewhere – burning more carbon before our plane leaves the runway than we saved driving a Prius all year. Of course – we are all entitled to eat huge beef stakes every night of the week if we want. And the largest fresh ocean caught Tuna. Why not? Isn’t that what success is all about? So if there are 8 billion of us, what happens if we all become first world consumers with attitudes like this?
Technology: And if these first two are bad, what persistent chemicals are we flushing into the oceans every day? The modern world is currently powered by burning 14 billion tons of carbon each year, causing climate change. How is the hole in the Ozone layer? What happens to ecosystems when we clear-fell them with giant chains between two bulldozers? What about the oceans becoming more and more acidic as they soak up that CO2? What are the impacts on our lakes and oceans from biocheochemical flows as our excess farmland fertilisers wash out to sea? If there are too many of us, using too much stuff, what happens if we multiply THOSE TWO out with the third multiplier of harm – the wrong technologies?
You can see it’s a rather unsettling picture. It’s the multiplication of all these factors that some call the 3 E’s (Energy, Economy and Environment – see my summary page for a lightning fast introduction) and others with a more ecological background simply call overshoot. Planetary Boundaries are being threatened. Is crossing them all now inevitable?
A good concept – but a lousy oracle
Being seduced by the clunky sounding I=PAT is less about the letters in the equation, and more about the image of too many people using too much stuff too fast. And the whole thing growing, like some kind of terminal cancer. To the doomer there’s nothing to be done – we’re like bacteria growing exponentially through the nutrients in a petri dish, only to suddenly die off in our billions as the nutrients run out.
Paul Ehrlich burned with this vision when, in 1980, he made a bet with a techno-optimist. He bet that 5 key metals would cost a lot more in a decade. He had the power of his formula on his side! The rising population and rising affluence (consumption of metals) meant these metals just had to cost more in the future! The bet was against technological optimist and economist Julian Simon. The result? The technological optimist won! These metal prices were lower in 1990! So what happened?
How did Ehrlich lose the bet?
What happened? I=PAT only describes the basic reality of the earth we live on being finite. There are so many things it does not tell us about what’s happening within a population, impacting affluence, and trending with technology. Ehrlich forgot we are still living in an age of incredible technological change, and a complex adapting economy with dry subjects like “Economies of scale” to cover. To even begin to think like a futurist and extrapolate trends in a society, you must dig deeper. (See the last paragraph)
Nature Magazine 2013 on Paul Ehrlich’s other failed predictions
For instance, Ehrlich famously predicted in his 1968 book The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books) that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the coming years. A year later he said, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Nature – 2013.
The awful legacy of the Ehrlich vs Simon debate
Ehrlich’s embarrassing doomerism and the legacy of this debate is that it has fuelled irrational counter-environmental movements – and even given glazed eyed techno-utopians some fuel! Simon’s wiki explains:
“Simon focused on lasting economic benefits from continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, empowered primarily by human ingenuity which would create substitutes, and technological progress…
Simon was one of the founders of free-market environmentalism. An article entitled “The Doomslayer” profiling Julian Simon in Wired magazine inspired Danish Bjørn Lomborg to write the book The Skeptical Environmentalist.”
Ehrlich was right – there are of course natural boundaries – both local and global – and we’re currently breaking many of them.
But Ehrlich is also wrong – in that he thought he could predict how bad things would get due to population growth alone. Yes, there are limits. But so many things can slow down when we hit those limits, or how we adapt to them, that the crudeness of I=PAT is almost meaningless.
When the model works for us!
So what about 10 billion of us by 2050? Surely the biosphere will implode – taking civilisation with it. It’s so obvious Eclipse! Why can’t you see it? But slow down a moment. This blog is a collection of technologies and cultural changes that as they grow will convert multipliers of technological harm into dividers of harm.
Environmental headlines can be so negative. All the time. And I get it – the threats are real! But also remember with the media – “If it bleeds, it leads!” In a hypothetical environmental harm dial – it’s easy to assume all the I=PAT factors are dialled up to 10 – and 10 multiplied by itself 3 times is 1000 units of harm to the environment by 2050! Let’s assume 1000 is a completely cooked planet – like 10 degrees or something apocalyptic – and Mad Max road warriors roam the deserts. But isn’t that the blunt application of Paul Ehrlich’s mistake in 1968? Don’t we need to zoom out a bit and measure other headlines – like where clean energy and ‘clean food’ technology is heading?
Let’s try some other settings on the I=PAT dial – just for illustration. If today’s Population is at 5 on the harm dial, let’s put 2050 at say 6. Now, with the developing world catching up to us in us in Affluence (all those consumer goods!) – let’s set it at 7. What about Technology? I personally see so many new technological trends coming that it should be a divider of harm – so I’m setting that at 1! Now we have 6 times 7 times 1 = 42. We went from 1000 units of assumed harm above down to 42 – something vastly more sustainable and the “Meaning of Life” to environmentalists. (And yes I tweaked those numbers to reference the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
A few other disciplines that might help…
The disciplines below describe some of the other disciplines that might influence how much damage a population, their affluence, and their technology does – or does not do.
Culture: What are their education levels, legal systems, understanding of human rights – especially women’s rights and education and empowerment? Do women have access to the workforce, health services, legal rights, and contraception? What appreciation do they have of the environment, from national parks and threatened species breeding programs and zoos through to recycling laws? Do they appreciate public transport and walkable town plans or are they addicted to the car and suburbia? What do young people feel about the car based lifestyle in that State?
Economy: Does it empower and respect workers, have the money to properly fund education, have high consumption trends, have recycling laws built into various sectors, give time off for women to have children, encourage childcare, properly fund healthcare, and fully fund retirement through superannuation schemes or even pensions?
Industry: Are they just starting to industrialise – requiring all that extra steel for bridges and battleships – or are they further down the development pathway and getting vastly more metals from recycling streams? How is their industry powered? What energy resources do they have – and are fossil fuels there cheaper than their renewable or nuclear competitors?
Economies of scale: One of the first things Ehrlich forgot that as an industry scales up, technologies can be tweaked to make processes more efficient, getting more product from each input, especially it earns more money and scales up even more. Economics and industrial systems and adoption curves must be understood to even have a glimpse of how some industries over time can do more with less. Even Planetary Boundaries expert Johan Rockstrom has hope because wind and solar are so cheap that they are doubling every 4 years. (See Planetary Boundaries) Many environmentalists automatically hate economists and economics itself – blaming it them for a variety of woes. Yet being broadly read and appreciating how things actually work might help avoid the tradition of Doomers as false prophets listed above.
Technology: what stage of the technology tree have they reached, what are they researching, and what new tech is just about to reach scale, become cheaper, and go through an exponential adoption curve? What essential resources can these new technologies substitute for?
Environmental laws and culture and pressure: what mistakes have the nation made? What pests and predators are loose? How rich is the gene pool in various ecosystems? What are the trends? Can they be repaired? What new tech might help all these? Have they outlawed hunting whales and other threatened species? Do they fund biologists studying threatened ecosystems? National parks are great – but too large to adequately protect from various pests within them. Have they funded large fenced of safe zones where all feral pests like cats and dogs and foxes and pigs have been eradicated, leaving a more viable ecosystem for threatened native species to grow? What about all those school students striking for climate justice from the inspiration of Greta Thunberg? What about how in August 2023, Ecuador held a referendum and voted against their own economic interests to ban drilling for oil in their area of the Amazon? There are so many things activists can do in so many ways. Read the letters by George Monbiot to doomers. (See Doomers). Get inspired. Join a local group.
ALL of these disciplines and activities are important towards understanding a more global picture of where a society is heading, what chance the biosphere has, and what we should do.
A little humility: and reading all these disciplines might actually make an environmental activist more reluctant to predict what is going to happen, but to embrace certain goals they work towards and hope will happen.
And the great news? When people have a mix of these disciplines and understand the cultural, economic, industrial, technological, and social justice laws – amazing things happen. The human race can be made to shrink without even demanding some kind of degrowth dictator be installed in government. First it will grow a little bit more – but we can even reduce that. Then it will shrink. How much? It depends how involved we all get in promoting the policies that actually work, and are actually attractive and praiseworthy in their own right! Indeed – these causes are so important on their own – we don’t even have to mention the “P” word to radically reduce population growth. Now there’s a population strategy I can actually get my head around!
Eclipse Now 