…he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic intellectuals actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. (from the novel “Dark Star” by Alan Furst)
Modern politicians and pundits of the left treat Republican politicians of the past differently than the active Republican politicians of today. In this framework, Ronald Reagan and the two George’s may have been misguided, bumbling liars, but at least they weren’t so extreme as Trump and DeSantis and whoever else is a current threat to the enlightened, intellectual leadership that modern progressives believe only they can provide. Funny. That’s about how I feel about the old Malthusians as compared to the new ones. At least the old ones weren’t so committed. The new ones have plans.
Who are the old Malthusians? Well, Thomas Malthus himself, of course. The patriarch was an English economist, cleric, and scholar and lived from 1766 to 1834. His main contention was that the human population would inevitably grow faster than its food supply, leading to hunger, privation, and death. In Malthus’s view, humanity was not so different from a population of rabbits, who, if given the chance to live in a world without predators, would multiply explosively and overwhelm their food supply. Then they would starve until the population and the food supply achieved balance. Malthus discounted the creativity and ingenuity afforded to us by our big brains.
Old Malthusians of the modern day include Paul Ehrlich, most famous for his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” which declared, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Ehrlich’s gloomy prediction was undone by men like Norman Borlaug, who brought modern agricultural methods to India and other places and engineered the Green Revolution. Despite over 50 years of evidence contradicting his claim, Ehrlich, now age 91, doubled down on a 60 Minutes episode at the beginning of this year. He said this: “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to.” He may be right, but it won’t be for the reasons he imagines.
Other old-school Malthusians include Maurice Strong (1929-2015), a successful Canadian oilman who never finished high school and ultimately morphed into a famous UN diplomat who organized the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. And we can’t forget the Club of Rome, which organized in 1968. They published The Limits to Growth in 1972, which used the results of computer models developed by scientists at MIT to declare that economic and population growth could not continue unabated because the world would run out of everything—oil, natural gas, copper, coal, everything. Their predictions have proved as valid as Professor Ehrlich’s.
The nice thing about these old Malthusians, the thing that gets them the same generosity of spirit reserved for old, retired, right-wing politicians, is that they were largely content to warn us we were headed for destruction. Not so the new Malthusians. Today, new-schoolers like Al Gore and John Kerry and Antonio Guterres (Secretary-General of the United Nations), apparently disheartened by humanity’s continued ability to feed billions, stay cool in the heat and warm in the cold, and mitigate the worst effects of dangerous natural phenomena like hurricanes, have decided to tip the scales in their favor.
Here are some examples. In Ireland, the Agricultural Minister Charlie McConalogue has proposed culling 200,000 cows from the nation’s livestock in an effort to help the agricultural industry reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% in the next seven years. In the Netherlands, the Dutch parliament introduced legislation to reduce the country’s livestock by 30% and restrict the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers. John Kerry, U.S. Climate Czar and frequent user of private jets not owned by him (but by his wife), recently commented that “agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world, depending a little bit on how you count it, but it’s anywhere from 26 to 33, and we can’t get to net zero, we don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution.”
Just so you know what’s at stake. At its core, farming is a thermodynamic process. Energy and nutrients in the form of calories are determined by the energy and nutrients provided to plants as they grow. Around the world today, much of the nutrient input is provided by synthetic fertilizer. Multiple sources indicate that the food supply of about half the world’s population is dependent on the crop yields that are boosted by these fertilizers. The following is a quote from a Financial Policy Magazine article that is linked a couple of paragraphs down.
The benefits of synthetic fertilizers though go far beyond simply feeding people. It’s no exaggeration to say that without synthetic fertilizers and other agricultural innovations, there is no urbanization, no industrialization, no global working or middle class, and no secondary education for most people. This is because fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals have substituted human labor, liberating enormous populations from needing to dedicate most of their lifetime labor to growing food.
So far, massive pushback and protest from farmers and their supporters has slowed the progress of self-destructive plans like the ones outlined above. But make no mistake. If invested with real power, these ideologues, like the Bolsheviks described in the passage from Alan Furst at the top of this essay, would not hesitate to fashion their countries of the mind. They would do it. Oh wait, someone already has.
In 2019 Sri Lanka, an island nation of about 22 million people off the southeast coast of India, achieved “upper middle-income status” according to classifications used by the World Bank. The achievement of this classification was hard fought, with Sri Lanka having to overcome a disastrous tsunami in 2004, and a decades long civil war, among other challenges. In 2019, during his election campaign, Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former army officer with a penchant for authoritarian solutions to the challenges of governing, made a point of declaring that he would transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. In April 2021, he decided to speed the transition and imposed a ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, effective immediately. The results were predictable, and disastrous. Foreign Policy Magazine article on Sri Lanka's organic farming disaster
Within six months, rice yields were down 20%. Sri Lanka has long been self-sufficient in rice, but the new policy forced the government to spend $450 million importing rice to feed the citizens. The tea crop, which is Sri Lanka’s primary export and source of foreign exchange, was also devastated. On the human side of the equation, 500,000 people fell back into poverty as inflation and a weak currency forced people to cut back on food and fuel purchases. In the end, any foreign exchange and expense advantage associated with canceling the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides was far outweighed by the massive blow to the economy dealt by a failing agricultural sector.
Energy, especially of the sort that powers machines that are just as important to the production of food as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, is another sector that is leveraged by the new Malthusians. Everywhere you look, the messaging is relentless. UN head Guterres recently declared that the era of global warming is over, and the era of global boiling (seriously?) has begun. The culprit, as always, is energy supplied by hydrocarbon fuels. We’re told that we must “Just Stop Oil,” and move rapidly toward the electrification of everything, while simultaneously trading reliable, dispatchable sources of electricity for intermittent, unreliable, and vulnerable solar and wind installations that despoil orders of magnitude more land. My substack essay on wind installations near our family farm
My ancestors are European families that homesteaded on the Canadian prairies in the early days of the 20th century. Today, the land they originally secured in homestead agreements is largely owned and cultivated by my first cousins. In my youth I used to go and help my uncles at harvest time. When conditions are right, the giant, diesel powered combines that are a fixture of modern farming run almost continuously. This is not an industry that can be electrified anytime soon. Diesel fuel, like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, is needed to feed the modern world.
The tentacles of the modern Malthusians reach right into our households. The latest addition to the list of household appliances subject to strict regulations or bans is the gas-powered generator. Regulations are proposed that would require smaller gas generators to cut carbon monoxide emissions by 50%, and larger models to cut their emissions by up to 95%. Manufacturers will have six months to design and build new models that will meet the requirements, a process that usually takes much longer. One can expect that the new designs will certainly achieve two things: they’ll be more expensive, and they won’t work as well.
Power outages were not much of a thing while I was growing up in western Canada. Living on the gulf coast of Louisiana, as I do now, is a different thing. I experienced my first real hurricane in 2002. The night before Hurricane Lili’s landfall, my wife and I, along with our young son, nervously watched the television at my in-law’s house. Hurricane Lili was categorized as a destructive, category IV storm, and the centerline of the forecast cone lay right over the city of Lafayette, our home. “What should we do?” Irene asked. The in-laws were staying, but we had a toddler son, and Irene was pregnant. I thought about it. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to wake up at three in the morning and check the intensity and the track forecast again. If it’s the same, we’ll just get in the car and drive away. Everyone who was planning to evacuate has already gone. We have a full tank of gas. The highways are clear.” She agreed to the plan.
At three in the morning, things had changed. Shear, or other factors had degraded the storm from category IV to category II, with further weakening expected. Since Lafayette is 45 miles from the coast, we decided to stay. The storm passed over us all that day. We experienced hurricane force wind gusts, and trees and powerlines were downed in every neighborhood. On our street the power was out for three days. On the third day we were invited to take a shower and have dinner at a friend’s house that had electricity. When we drove out of our dark neighborhood that evening we turned onto a commercial street. The lights were on, and the traffic was flowing. Business at gas stations and restaurants was brisk. We felt sincere gratitude for the restoration of the life-easing energy that coursed through the wires above the street. When we drove back into our neighborhood later that evening to find the lights on and the air-conditioner humming, our eyes misted from the relief.
We spent three hot days, and two hot nights without power. We got by of course. We cooked food on a Coleman camp stove, and a portable generator kept a refrigerator running, powered a few lamps, and spun our fans at night. By coastal hurricane standards our experience was mild. In 2020, Hurricane Laura wrecked several communities and knocked out the power in parts of southwest Louisiana for weeks. Once again, portable generators contributed greatly to the ability of people to meet the challenge of life in a community with severely damaged infrastructure. It is typical of the new Malthusians to restrict and remove the ability of humans to master their environment. God help anyone who tries to take a gas stove from a Cajun cook.
I tend to be optimistic about the future, but sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and think, “what if these people get their way?” Are we like the Jews in Germany in the early 1930s who thought, “these people are crazy, surely they’ll be stopped.” I can’t answer, but I am sure that the right answer for the future of humanity, and for the planet, is not to engineer privation and starvation such that the human population of the planet is reduced to some pre-determined carrying capacity decided upon by experts. The warnings of the old Malthusians were ignored. The plans of the new Malthusians should be rejected.
Trevor excellent writing and on point. I enjoy the points you make and the methods you are using to make them. You are not just giving us your opinion but illustrating how it’s relevant. Keep writing and I will keep reading.
Great post, Treavor. I posted an article on my Substack, Thoughts on Energy and Economics," on July 30, "Gasoline generators are next to be banned" (https://edireland.substack.com/p/portable-gasoline-generators-are). I didn't think about the Malthusian aspect of the ban on generators, so thanks for pointing it out in a well written article. By the way, my article is one of my top read articles, so the subject is of great interest. Ed