Sample: The Climate Paradox by Peter van Druenen (prologue)

The problem: deniers and believers
The climate debate is badly in need of a synthesis between belief in the existence of the crisis, scepticism regarding the expectation that it can be solved and pragmatism about what therefore needs to happen.

In the current polarized debate about the climate crisis, in which believers are becoming firmer in their faith and sceptics increasingly sceptical, I am ambivalent, or rather, a pragmatist. For a start, I recognize the full extent of the climate crisis. In fact having studied the recent scientific literature on the subject I am convinced that the situation is even worse than we are generally led to think. To confirm that the polar ice caps are melting you no longer need sophisticated equipment. The naked eye is enough. Hurricanes are growing noticeably stronger, heatwaves hotter, monsoons wetter, droughts dryer and smog thicker. At the same time I acknowledge the impossibility of halting the crisis, let alone of reversing it. We are probably too late, although few people seem to appreciate the fact. My fellow believers murmur in unison the mantras of problems and solutions. The internal combustion engine? Ditch it! Electric cars are the future. LED lighting versus the incandescent lightbulb is another such good-and-evil pairing, as are windmills and coal-fired power stations, tofu and beef, workmanship and industrial manufacture, tree planting and deforestation, fish farming and overfishing or recycling and landfill, to name just a few examples. Well-meant, all of it, and the solutions certainly contribute to a better environment, but the question is whether any of this can prevent rising sea levels and other disasters.

Mao’s sparrows, lightbulbs and windmills; today's fight against light bulbs

All the same, the believers and their proposed solutions are gaining ground. We are deluged with climate accords and objectives. The world is malleable, the environment too. No matter how serious in intent, many of the resulting measures evoke disbelief and astonishment on my part. Disbelief and astonishment are also the feelings that came over me when I read that in 1958, at the time of the Great Leap Forward, Mao decided to eradicate the sparrow in China. The aim was to combat famine; the birds were eating the grain intended for the starving population. ¹ That image of the battle of Maoists against sparrows came to mind many years later, when hundreds of millions of citizens worldwide swapped the polluting incandescent bulbs in their lights for low-energy equivalents. The world was saved!
The measure was part of the Four Pests Campaign, which also targeted rats, flies and mosquitoes. Film has survived of large numbers of Chinese people running across the fields together, shouting, banging metal pots and pans to force the sparrows to stay in the air until they literally fall down dead. Their little corpses were collected and handed in. Ultimately more than two billion birds were killed. The result was catastrophic; the country was hit by a huge increase in other damaging pests, including locusts, so the harvest was even worse than before.

Windmills: not an answer to Climate Change

On a rather larger scale, there has for years been a widespread conviction that wind farms must be built to arrest climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels. Tens of thousands of hectares of land and water are being sacrificed to them, although the yield per windmill is relatively low. True, innovation may yet increase the returns considerably, but the fact remains that to meet Dutch energy needs in full, a wind turbine would have to be built on every square kilometre of land and sea, some 40,000 in total. The number will remain stable over coming decades, because the increasing efficiency of energy technology will be offset by a further rise in demand. Internet use alone, the fastest growing energy guzzler, will guarantee a rise. The effect is known as the Jevons paradox: technological progress aimed at increasing the efficiency of a given product will to an equal degree cause an increase in the consumption of that product.² Meanwhile, billions are being spent on wind farms and we may wonder which industrial complexes, allied to which public bodies, are behind these initiatives. Note that in the Netherlands windmills are the cleanest producers of electricity by a wide margin, even taking into account the CO2 emissions created during the production, maintenance and dismantling of turbines. It is just that you need so many of them.³ We hear little these days about landscape disfigurement, but in the already crowded Netherlands another 40,000 wind turbines would give the country a profoundly different look.⁴ For comparison: in 2016 there were a total of 2,034, of which 650 were in the province of Flevoland.⁵ Anyone who has visited that province will recall that it is completely dominated by windmills. And this is to say nothing of the noise they make, which many people find nerve-jangling.

Biomass

Since 2008 the Dutch have invested 9.3 billion euro in power stations that generate energy by burning biomass. After wind energy, costing 14.6 billion euro, it was the second most expensive alternative energy project. A long way behind come investments in solar energy, green gas and geothermics, which have cost the country around 2 billion euro. Already in that first year, 2008, there was international criticism of the alternative sources. In the short term the burning of biomass would release more greenhouse gases than burning coal or natural gas. At best it would take decades to achieve any benefits for the climate.⁶ Yet further billions have been budgeted for the burning of wood, household waste, plant oils and dung over the next few years.

Malleability 
The guiding principle of the Great Leap Forward was that society is malleable. The failure of Mao’s policies, acknowledged decades ago in China, argues strongly against this idea. In Europe, too, most experiments turned out badly. Dictatorship as the ultimate attempt to shape society dug its own grave with Hitler and Stalin, and the subsequent faith in a liberal Western society, lauded by Fukuyama in 1990, is itself now on the retreat.⁷

The concept of malleability is also prominent in the debate as to whether humanity is in fact capable of bending the climate to its will with LED bulbs, meat substitutes, tree-planting events and wind turbines. Believers answer in the affirmative, sceptics and pragmatists in the negative. I have already said that I do not doubt a climate crisis is underway. But at the same time I am sceptical of the assumption that we can do much about it: of course we cannot, or not much, anyhow. I therefore share neither the absolutist belief of the faithful in solutions, nor the denial by sceptics that there is a crisis at all. Taking such a position requires me to go in search of the underlying cause of the climate crisis. I believe it does not lie in environmental pollution, the exhaustion of farmland and the depletion of fossil fuels; those are merely symptoms of a far greater and more dangerous development.

The Limits to Growth, the Report of the Club of Rome

For the key to any analysis of the current climate crisis we need to go back to the main recommendations of The Limits to Growth, the Report of the Club of Rome in 1972: the curbing of global population growth and with it the damage done to the environment by human beings. Simply put, more people cause more destruction than fewer people do. The source of the climate crisis is us. Not only are we reproducing in ever greater numbers, we are living longer, taking better care of ourselves and offering a helping hand more often and on a larger scale in cases of natural disaster, famine and war. Modern media keep us informed of almost every homicide worldwide, so it seems as if there is more and more violence. The opposite is in fact the case. Despite frequent terror attacks in the West and wars in the Middle East and Africa, the world has never been so safe.⁸ Dying is less accepted as part of life, so every death is one too many. The preservation of the species by means of unlimited reproduction and measures aimed at helping us to live as long as possible have become a Darwinian goal.

We invest in climate control and humanitarianism, thereby feeding the monster that stems from them, the monster of overpopulation, of excessive pressure on supplies of raw materials and food, and of pollution. That is the climate paradox.

Evolutionary and irreversible 
The proposition I intend to substantiate on the pages that follow is that these paradoxical developments are powered by evolution and irreversible, and that they require us to look for radically different solutions. Since it is not in our nature – leaving aside war and bloodlust – to limit the magnitude of our own species, we have to accept that the population worldwide will keep on growing and damage to the environment will continue. At the same time we must create a world capable of building up resistance to the dangers that arise as a result. LED bulbs and turbines come later, first we need to arm ourselves against rising sea levels, withstand hurricanes and adapt to droughts. The climate debate is badly in need of a synthesis between belief in the existence of the crisis, scepticism regarding the expectation that it can be solved and pragmatism about what therefore needs to happen.

The taboo on limiting population growth 

My argument is constructed as follows. In Chapter One I provide evidence for my claim that overpopulation is the most important independent – and therefore modifiable – variable in The Limits to Growth of 1972, and that the other four (industrialization, food production, consumption of natural resources and pollution) are secondary to it. In Chapter Two I look at the degree to which the predictions of that 1972 report to the Club of Rome have come to pass and show that the theme of population growth has virtually disappeared from the current climate debate. In Chapter Three, based on a number of recent cases, I demonstrate that this is wrong and even dangerous, and that the subject ought to be restored to a prominent place on the climate agenda. In Chapter Four I explore more deeply what I see as the most important cause of current silence on the subject: the taboo on the acceptance of death. I do so with reference to the work of eighteenth-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus and criticism of it. One incidental product of this analysis is the observation that the conclusions of the Club of Rome are entirely in line with Malthus’ ideas, which have been reviled and proscribed for more than two centuries. Finally, in Chapter Five, using practical examples, I demonstrate the degree to which the taboo on limiting population growth has become embedded in our society like a Gordian knot.

The myth teaches us that a Gordian knot can be unfastened only by cutting through it – or, like Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, by opting, with a slash of the sword, for pragmatism.

Notes

1. Meadows, D.H., ‘Seeing the Population Issue Whole’ in Mazur, L.A., Beyond the Numbers. A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment (1994), p. 32.
2. For a recent publication, see Haar, B.J. ter, Het hemels mandaat. De geschiedenis van het Chinese keizerrijk (2009), p. 541. Historic film is available on the internet, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehqmmIef6_w and www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjRZIW_hRlM.
3. See for example Alcott, B., ‘Jevons’ paradox’ in Ecological Economics (2005) vol. 54, pp. 9-21.
4. For example, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (2011), p. 19.
5. The calculation is as follows. In the Netherlands an average of 3,000,000 kWh is generated per wind turbine. The country’s total land surface is 41,543 km2 and its total energy needs are 120 billion kWh. The sum is therefore (41,543 : (120.000.000.000 : 3.000.000)) = 41,543 : 40,000 wind turbines = 1.03 km2 = the number of wind turbines per km2. Source: Statistics Netherlands, Elektriciteit in Nederland (2015).
6. Statistics Netherlands, Statline, Windenergie op land; productie en capaciteit per provincie 2015 and 2016, accessed 12 November 2017.
7. Dupont-Nivet, D., E. Woutersen, ‘Onderzoek Bezwaren tegen biomassa’ in De Groene Amsterdammer, 22 November 2017.
8. Fukuyama, F., ‘The End of History?’ in The National Interest, summer edition 1989.