{"id":969,"date":"2020-04-29T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2020-04-29T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/?p=969"},"modified":"2020-05-12T01:43:31","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T00:43:31","slug":"capitalism-and-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/2020\/04\/29\/capitalism-and-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism and climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The student organisation <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bca.eco\/\">British Conservation Alliance<\/a> held an online webinar on 28th April 2020, entitled: \u201cCapitalism and Climate Change \u2014 How Markets Can Protect the Environment\u201d. The event was co-hosted by the Vienna-based <a href=\"https:\/\/www.austriancenter.com\/\">Austrian Economic Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The panel was composed of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daniel_Hannan\">Daniel Hannan<\/a>, former Member of the European Parliament and founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade,<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Matt_Ridley\">Lord Matt Ridley<\/a>, journalist and author of best selling book The Rational Optimist,<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.perc.org\/people\/holly-fretwell\/\">Holly Fretwell<\/a>, researcher at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) ;<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/profile\/kai-weiss\">Kai Weiss<\/a>, researcher at the Austrian Economic Center.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The contributions were followed by a debate with the audience, which you can watch below via the full video recording. Below is a transcript of some meaningful interventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Capitalism and Climate Change: Live Webinar\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tvKx0No5A8c?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/z3Ww2Jyo0lLP-uJ8O0u51CM4AjR7HkUWXSsaG6EIprxAJV2oaz7VnsNt9MB2bG6pHuLI5SG3G97FjNXy_ZECAB8_Dup6Klyos5y2dUmYU1M8NvsQda7YmRAj_aEU9WPblprrKOsc\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tvKx0No5A8c\"><strong>[00:00]<\/strong><\/a><strong> Chris Barnard. <\/strong>Good afternoon everyone. First of all, thank you to our star-studded panel for being here with us to discuss a very important topic. Thank you to everyone at home tuning in as well. We had over 4,000 views on our last webinar last week, so I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll have even more this time. My name is Chris Barnard, I\u2019m the president and founder of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bca.eco\/\">the British Conservation Alliance<\/a>. The BCA is an organization dedicated to promoting free enterprise and multi-based solutions to environmental problems, and to giving young conservatives and libertarians a voice on these issues. We have the largest environmental campus network in the UK, at thirty universities across all four countries, which you can apply for if you\u2019re a student. We\u2019ve also spoken at conferences in over ten countries in the last six months about these issues. We are co-hosting tonight\u2019s webinar with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.austriancenter.com\/\">Austrian Economic Center<\/a>, based in Vienna, and their yearly free-market roadshow. We\u2019re also publishing a book together in June, called <a href=\"http:\/\/greenmarketrevolution.eco\/\">\u201cGreen Market Revolution\u201d<\/a>, to which several of the panelists today contributed. But we\u2019ll get to that a tiny bit later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today\u2019s topic is often presented as an oxymoron. The dominant narrative is that climate change is a direct result of capitalism, and that only the dismantlement of our capitalist system will save us and the planet from chaos. This is why for example the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Stuart Basden, admits freely that <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/extinction-rebellion\/extinction-rebellion-isnt-about-the-climate-42a0a73d9d49\">the movement was never actually about the planet but about overthrowing capitalism<\/a>. So despite lifting billions out of poverty in the last six decades, capitalism is seen as the root of all evils, especially environmental evils. This is partly because conservatives and libertarians have failed to provide a unified alternative to this narrative. In many ways, this is what this webinar today is about, to show that we too care about the environment and that we actually believe that market solutions are better solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The way tonight\u2019s going to go is that we\u2019re going to have each speaker give a short introduction of their perspective on the topic before we delve into a more general discussion, including a Q&amp;A from you, the audience. So feel free to submit your questions, but please use the Zoom Q&amp;A box. Or you can submit questions on the Facebook live stream as well. So I\u2019ll introduce our first speaker now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daniel_Hannan\">Daniel Hannan<\/a>, also known as \u201cthe man who brought you Brexit\u201d, and I\u2019m sure the vast majority of you know who he is. He is a former Conservative member of the European Parliament for the Southeast of England, where I live, and he is the founding president of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ifreetrade.org\/\">the Initiative for Free Trade<\/a>, a research foundation based in London. Dan, the floor is yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Clue in the name<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/J2QzAwKBFBtTGfav51hOFA54s7POWFfkzms_fdsMqCsBzLmrKbMUaAYCN9H30QmtvNnkMkAJ2ztNVoGd6qeH0wylL0AWjXImklmx3VVJK_i7XlrwTjO2tNO_SLWF64KnyiHNL69f\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tvKx0No5A8c&amp;t=172s\"><strong>[02:52]<\/strong><\/a><strong> Daniel Hannan.<\/strong> Chris, thank you very much, thank you for putting this together and thank you for framing the discussion so well. In a sense, we\u2019re living through the Extinction Rebellion dream right now. We\u2019re getting exactly what the Greta Thunbergs of the world said they wanted: lower GDP, less consumerism, less trade, grounded airlines, sharp falling carbon emissions. And you know how people are enjoying it, because you\u2019re exactly pointing to the reality, which is that behind a lot of this rhetoric lies the idea that, as some Extinction Rebellion posters put it here, <a href=\"https:\/\/metro.co.uk\/2020\/03\/25\/extinction-rebellion-posters-says-corona-cure-humans-disease-12457392\/\">humanity is the virus, Corona is the cure<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s the naturalistic fallacy. There\u2019s a line in an old missionary hymn, where <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikiquote.org\/wiki\/Reginald_Heber\">every prospect pleases and only man is vile<\/a>. That\u2019s a lot of what we\u2019re up against. But we need to tackle this idea that there is a tension between economic growth and environmental protection. That is a hundred and eighty degrees the opposite of reality. If you\u2019re an endangered species, you want to live in a rich country. If you want reforestation, you want to have rich people near you, who don\u2019t need firewood, and don\u2019t need primitive forms of agriculture, and so on. You mentioned that we both live in the Southeast of England. I\u2019ve been listening, as a lot of people have during the last months, to the most amazing variety of birdsong. I sat in trance listening to the call of a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eurasian_blackcap\">blackcap<\/a> this morning. Part of the reason why we have such a variety of birdsong is because we are a rich country. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Red_kite\">red kite<\/a> in the wild until I was in my 30s. Now they are more common in this part of the world than <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Magpie\">magpies<\/a>. [\u2026] Beavers are returning after centuries of extinction. The Thames was declared biologically dead in the 1950s. It is now teeming with life. You can fish for salmon from its banks. And why is that true? For the same reason that you breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water in London than in <a href=\"https:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lahore\">Lahore<\/a>, namely that Britain is a wealthy capitalist country.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have passed the point where people need to shoot animals with guns rather than with cameras. We\u2019ve passed the point where nature is treated as a resource to be exploited. Of course it was Karl Marx who taught that nature was there as an exploitable resource, a doctrine that found brutal realization in the smokestack economies of the Eastern Bloc. Soviet Communism created, according to the UN, the filthiest environmental calamity anywhere on the planet. It turned the Aral Sea into a desert, it turned Lake Baikal into a sewer, it poured so much oil into the Volga that ferry passengers had to be warned not to throw lighted cigarettes overboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s an extraordinary thing, in a way that we even have to be having this conversation. The best thing that has happened to the environment in my lifetime was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Why? Because property rights are the best friend of environmental protection. It\u2019s this basic old Aristotelian wisdom that if you don\u2019t own anything, if nobody owns anything, then nobody will look after it \u2014 the tragedy of the commons. And extending ownership is one of the ways in which you give people a stake in protecting renewable resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was still a member of the European Parliament, I had a couple of the current panelists at an event in Brussels called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecrparty.eu\/event\/blue_green_summit_2017\">the Blue-Green Summit<\/a>. One of the speakers we had there, who sadly died since, was an Icelandic conservationist called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Orri_Vigf%C3%BAsson\">Orri Vigf\u00fasson<\/a>. Orri got very worried because he could see a decline in the number of salmon that were being fished. He then behaved, it seems to me, in a model way. He didn\u2019t go bleating to governments. He didn\u2019t demand legislation. He didn\u2019t demand subsidies. He simply started buying up and not exercising the rights to fish in certain streams and he got a consortium of other enthusiasts to do it with him, until the numbers started to recover. A perfect and neat demonstration of how property rights are the best way to secure a renewable resource.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The basis of conservatism,&nbsp; the intellectual foundation of the conservative tradition was Edmund Burke\u2019s understanding of society as organic. That a nation is not just a random set of individuals born to a different random set of individuals. That the children born in a country are heirs to a shared tradition or, as Burke put it, that society is a partnership between the living and the dead, and the people who haven\u2019t yet been born. I can\u2019t think of a more vivid illustration of the importance of that principle, the realization of that principle, than environmental protectionism. So conservatism, which is rooted in love of home and love of homeland, is a naturally environmentalist creed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As we come out of this crisis, whenever we do, we need to be clear that the priority is to grow, to get our economy back, so that we can again have the luxury of looking after endangered species and endangered landscapes, so that we can bring back biodiversity, reforestation, all the things that happen in rich countries but don\u2019t happen in poor countries. If you like, we\u2019ve tried the Greta Thunberg alternative. We can see that that\u2019s pretty unpleasant to live with. It\u2019s time to give market capitalism its turn. Clue in the name: conservatives make the best conservationists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[&#8230;]\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Environmental quality as a \u201cnormal good\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/-0oXnFaJugUm3H-GSBXIQz5RjXn09I-CD9gjooo_X3BlzSJTOfyMtWF95LgkBTDxlS8afFSTaSKgyG9mUL1cT3UanJPCqaAbn3AlRIm-axGbbVhEpWfg4EkkyLw8PMvO7sKxdDkm\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tvKx0No5A8c&amp;t=784s\"><strong>[13:04]<\/strong><\/a><strong> Holly Fretwell. <\/strong>If we look at the world today, it demonstrates that we can close the global economy and reduce air pollutants in many areas. But that is not a long-term environmental solution. I\u2019m going to repeat a little bit here of what Dan just said. We have these huge costs of closing our economy, that\u2019s demonstrated by lost jobs, reduced production of the goods and services that we need and that we desire and this forgone income. And one thing that we know about the environment is that we take better care of it when we are wealthier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Environmental quality is what we call <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Normal_good\">a normal good<\/a>, that is, as we increase our wealth and prosperity, we invest more in our environment. We can afford to invest more and we\u2019re interested in that long-term environmental quality. So the bottom line is that government actors don\u2019t have the proper incentives to ensure that we have good conservation and environmental quality, and nor do they have the needed information \u2014 information that is signaled through market behavior. It\u2019s often missing from government regulations and government decision-making. In the market for example, we know scarcity exists when resource prices are high. That motivates innovation, it motivates efficiency and it motivates reduced consumption. Government ownership however often precludes that information. When the price of water is artificially low, as it is in many nations, there\u2019s less water conservation, there\u2019s less efficiency in use, and shortages are often the result of that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let me finish here with this thought, that hopefully we can discuss as we move forward. Environmental problems result from insecure property rights. And the role government should play is to help us secure those property rights, so the market can resolve the allocation problems that we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The world is getting better<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/oeGzaBewEYYtg6eVltPol54qVFlxgWY6u4xom2QdF93acQrJNexrHyHT73AhH52yNUukmMWFw_mNBSw57XZrBit_YtkWzmyTVsj7OFx8u2e3slyZ-Vc8mT_ZiUsxEnEzGkQnBqee\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tvKx0No5A8c&amp;t=1019s\"><strong>[16:59]<\/strong><\/a><strong> Matt Ridley. <\/strong>[In the 20th century,] the rate of growth of population, which is the top line, had been shooting up particularly rapidly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/kJW-wHM-nTdczJZUFlsrKt2ql_sfYrMK22yw2ee53FRSRYsw4GJ5629_qCuEjoFM0-RcByqzcu8JWIGtX5SthLvPKr3bZbWDhBZ3hsncxaCgibFQFXfKX87A21LoZNfqeqfRplCE\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>What happened next? The rate of growth halved. It halved between the early 1960s and today, and the absolute number of people added to the world population started falling in the 1980s. And we are headed for zero population growth sometime by the end of this century. In a sense, that problem solved itself. We won\u2019t even have doubled the world population in the 21st century, whereas we quadrupled it in the 20th century and we coped with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/OLgxeKSJzjKTvDXkvwfTGVkCg5wcfA3FAmJ31FbebRSUeFKbHWZMCDzTpwoMpZeneiyTUI9EHQ6wULyu4JacQbP_bU0utofSnvebvkfyrvOJdrb59MdeCzTAKi18XV6icb1YpFTc\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the side implications of this was that we were going to starve to death because of the population explosion. Another of these pessimists, Paul Ehrlich, wrote in 1969 : \u00ab In the 1970s hundreds of millions will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. \u00bb He said there really was no hope, we couldn\u2019t help but starve to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/lNTXRionXVUjER9S2b367D8lVPAbelsNLj4yNZKWFmX8ai4GZf4oFjOTg6YXhQ_8oiX39QN3PHm0SftPScasUVPQnbKL4NE_-kCCJetUVW8mocJdBeqqaKCN7ZTNgj56j7KIIKFX\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But the story is that famine went extinct. Famine is now an incredibly rare form of death. It only happens in a few communist countries like North Korea occasionally or some terrorist countries like Somalia. Otherwise, it just doesn\u2019t kill anyone, whereas it used to be a routine thing every year that there would be a famine somewhere in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/2viScoW1BsxVQ8t6EjWJAmlqmckiSOvnFmH_c8fBtGUg2U8_HE4ezeOZf7TdMCiRMTBXNh5u2HK1KFjmfST1-szruJvj2ZyRoX2o5JphzAx161MOOXtW4ZsfK4FIl5Heu3pTF5OD\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, we\u2019re feeding seven and a half billion people today from less land than we fed three billion people from in the 1960s. And that\u2019s because the amount of land we need to produce a given quantity of food, averaged over all crops according to their contribution to human diets, is 68 percent lower than it was in 1961. That\u2019s because of mechanization, genetics, fertilizer, pesticides, all the improvements in agriculture. So the footprint of agriculture has shrunk. It hasn\u2019t gone up. It shrunk, even though the population has gone up. And that is spared land for nature. It would have shrunk even more if we hadn\u2019t decided to turn 5% of the world\u2019s grain crop into fuel for motorcars, in a vain attempt to think that this might have some impact on the climate \u2014 but I will not get dwell on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/0V6rp0RWd3d6ht32UQOZ8Q7cSu2aCf-pDL-webimRHaCJ7scikq15Rt0gU8A6ok57jWs82eVliS3SPwuKU9cvwMookftRrHZmZ6Ffefjln3-yLYGhy7Wihh0Pw8gkdVuZ7ZOD0fs\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Malaria is a good example of a pessimism that did persist for quite a lot longer. By the end of the 1990s, it was true that malaria was getting worse in the world. It was killing more people every year, and particularly in Africa, which is the blue section of this chart. This was partly because of drug resistance. But it was also possibly to do with climate change, scientists thought. And if you read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports up to the 1990s, they particularly emphasized the problem that malaria was likely to cause in the 21st century. It was going to spread to more countries, it was going to kill more people, it was going to go to higher altitudes, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/caDzxxqTa_GCBGFg7w02Zc3QK9iUFd15RoPfEKPK2usvDnjNDeefxNEGTjNVEG-X3jV4XsPUyaEE17h5HZpu7X7SHxCC_MLAxTZ3nJ7SHagZYlptqmW65SLuZpgbq530ux3LzJ7B\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact, what happened after 2003? The malaria mortality in the world began to decline steeply. What happened in 2003? The Gates Foundation did something that all the aid programs from governments had failed to do. They picked up on a technology that had been available since the mid 1980s: the insecticide treated bed nets, which turns out to work even if it\u2019s got holes in it, and they disseminated this all across Africa, with spectacular effects on malaria. It\u2019s responsible for about 70 percent of that decline that you see, that one simple cheap technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[&#8230;]\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/8qHWRVdcB6GFNotOGtUnx3p1H8XyA7lbH0HMtZfrtJJkEkN_rLheDJxInbR1UvRIxpBekB4fPI38Bc7OVDZQXGhYoh1UzOcha_fU41UF4-yTkzLsevfniT9XNYcXxC3M4lgn-9rw\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>As Dan mentioned, there are some interesting trends in wildlife. Why are lions getting scarcer, wolves getting more common and tigers roughly now holding their own numbers in the world? And the answer is very simple. Lions live in poor countries, wolves live in rich countries and tigers live in middle-income countries. And this is true of wildlife, wherever you look, that in rich countries wildlife is coming back in many cases, not in every species of course, but it\u2019s in poor countries that wildlife is under stress because people go out into the forest to kill wildlife for food, or they chopped down trees which are habitats for wildlife in order to burn for their own fuel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/vOCTnMcws4lv-JLvQx6IOKfOlE4AWMbDHpii07xavcy7PoE_Kv1hqDWnKZ8m_KU-m1rubPLs7WggT39MKIwtPTW2y7ZqntlD_b94VcuMSzhF5bwY3hMWz7cm1JBsrnAZSlBjVy0o\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was young, there were 5,000 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Humpback_whale\">humpback whales<\/a> left in the world, and even fewer than that of blue whales and other species. I never expected to see a humpback whale. I knew they were gonna go extinct at some point in my lifetime. I was very depressed, worried about that.&nbsp; I didn\u2019t know where you could go to see them. They were so scarce. There are now 80,000 humpback whales in the world and I\u2019ve seen them off Iceland, I\u2019ve seen them off Hawaii. They\u2019re almost routine now, to go whale watching. In all&nbsp; parts of the oceans you can now see gatherings of up to 200 humpback whales together at one time. This picture was taken off Southwest Africa I believe. An extraordinary change in the fortunes of wildlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/QfRZZKJmGBBJqgdQSP28NOuyyEBzkW7sFmznyFAfYcdbF-PuCbHknzjyC8twMikPVKq5QYeqF1gYHQznfVFiNLN80o6iohR8Fwk6_lKjmstKCqExFs6LkUxLMEbFFsD94mzEMPYd\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Wildlife species are still going extinct every year and every one is an absolute tragedy. Most of it is caused by invasive species released onto islands but it is still an absolute tragedy. But the number of species going extinct every decade is now going down and has been for a number of decades. It peaked actually quite a long time ago. This is partly because of the efforts of conservationists. I\u2019m not here to deny that, and a lot of them have been funded by government. But a lot has also been funded by private initiatives as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>\u201cDe-extinction\u201d and environmental optimism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/ckIFe8pUa8Zv_lZbDqUl1BdU6Z4JfuTit3q49OTaOC7bYUeIfIABoowxhFJQTHtWxfDPnEoDrZxviXhw7k7ILxG5pNQ8EvlYNoe41WsTYQdXEuaMi8FA60VuwXUV-tL_kTCzax8Q\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>To end, I was asked by Kai to talk about environmental optimism. So I would just like to say that for any young person out there who is as depressed by the litany of pessimism that they hear every day about the environment from the likes of Extinction Rebellion and other parts of the green movement. It\u2019s worth just thinking about what might be possible in your lifetime if you\u2019re a young person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hosted a meeting four years ago to discuss the possibility of de-extinguishing a bird called the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Great_auk\">great auk<\/a>, which used to live in the North Atlantic. It was the last European breeding species of bird to go extinct. It went extinct about 1850 and there are four steps we need to do to de-extinguish this species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The first is to sequence its genome. It turned out we\u2019ve done that. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Marcus_Thomas_Pius_Gilbert\">Tom Gilbert<\/a> turned up at the meeting from Copenhagen to say, \u201cI\u2019ve just finished doing it. We\u2019ve got the species.\u201d He\u2019s done it from the guts of a specimen that was in the Copenhagen Museum.<\/li><li>The second thing we have to do is to edit an existing genome till it looks like a great old genome. And for that we\u2019d go to the nearest living species, which is called the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Razorbill\">razorbill<\/a>. There are about a million base-pairs difference. So we need a gene editing tool that can make a million changes. We\u2019re not there yet, we can probably make about twenty changes at the moment in one go. But I wouldn\u2019t put it past us. We now have gene editing tools that can be that precise, I wouldn\u2019t put it past us to be able to do that within a few years, maybe a decade or two.<\/li><li>The third step would be to somehow coax a cell with this genome into it and turn it into an organism. And there came to our meeting somebody called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ed.ac.uk\/profile\/mike-mcgrew\">Mike McGrew<\/a> who had just done this brilliant experiment of putting chicken cells into a duck embryo, so that what he grew was a perfectly normal duck, but it produced chicken babies. In theory, you could have a goose that gave great auk sperm to another goose that gave great auk eggs, and you would then have the first great auk.<\/li><li>The fourth step would be to reintroduce this creature into the wild and see it reoccupy its niche. And people say: \u201cBut if it went extinct, the niche is not going to be there anymore.\u201d That\u2019s nonsense. The reason it went extinct is because we turned it into stuffing and pillowcases. That\u2019s why we wiped it out.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>So let\u2019s be optimistic about the future, there are all sorts of things we can achieve if we harness economic growth and people\u2019s ingenuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n[\u2026]\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Green dream unveiled<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/ZqEbcg2pBxKGwTV5on1Z6zneG2yqOEOP951SUQ1n4zJ38PmTkXOEESIfy5xwKFmwbNGbPkeaeMy18Emz1WPjGNVknt8GHEC8l-PP4PxvQgBn7fb62nnd-Py7Ih5tgd1_NruxdqGA\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tvKx0No5A8c&amp;t=41m8s\"><strong>[41:08]<\/strong><\/a><strong> Daniel Hannan.<\/strong> This idea of technology solving would make greens deeply unhappy. Holly mentioned the artificial leaf. It\u2019s at a very early stage. It is not yet commercially viable. But the idea of a chemical process that can take carbon out of the air, carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into energy, you would think it is the \u201cgreen dream\u201d. But of course it wouldn\u2019t be. You\u2019d have all the Paul Ehrlich\u2019s of today, all the graduates: \u201cOh no, but this is terrible, it\u2019s advancing capitalism, it\u2019s giving it a new lease of life.\u201d And fundamentally one of the things that I\u2019ve really learned in the last month watching the debate about how we respond to the epidemic is, there seems to be among a huge number of people, not just on the far left, a basic misunderstanding of what the economy is, and what business is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Very often you hear people saying: \u201cHow can you be putting the economy before human lives, how can you want to reopen shops, and schools, and so on, when that\u2019s putting profit before people?\u201d That\u2019s an extraordinary view of the economy because it envisages the economy as this kind of numinous disembodied entity that somehow exists separately from human endeavor, whereas of course, as we know, the economy actually is the name we give to the transactions that people make freely one with another in order to maximize their wealth, and health, and happiness. And yet it\u2019s a perennially popular slug: \u201cYou\u2019re putting profits before people.\u201d Although profits can\u2019t exist without people. And just as profits have lifted people out of poverty, just as profits translated into real life means schoolbooks and vaccines and better health care and better nutrition and so on, so it means better environmental outcomes. And I suspect that that is precisely the thing that the Greenies are so upset about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/0L4K8C2QQnOLEeIiIG5VF8-e_zg7MZwiS8BaDJH6Bvbi9_I8AfFgApJsToRa828E1iccq3eVYpcT51A8WjnddwNU9pt0aHER89d7Jo6PH9OWBTcaZnt-iV3PnTKFIv3mpwmcsEtj\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt Ridley. <\/strong>I think it\u2019s absolutely right that you find this again and again. If&nbsp; you come up with what they call a technical fix, the environmentalists get very upset. \u201cThat wasn\u2019t what we meant by solving the problem. We meant you have to go back and be monks in the Middle Ages with only one meal of water and bread a day,.That\u2019s what we mean by a solution. And this is most clear in the case of nuclear power. Both nuclear fission and the prospect of nuclear fusion, which is getting somewhat closer although it\u2019s always been quite close and never gets close enough, both those technologies are viscerally opposed by the very people who are most concerned about carbon dioxide in the air. And yet those are the only two technologies that can deliver carbon free power on sufficient scale. You simply cannot run a modern economy on wind or solar because there just isn\u2019t enough space for putting up the panels or the windmills. And there aren\u2019t enough resources. You need a huge amount of coal, and steel, and rare earths and all these other things that are mined, in order to make windmills and solar panels. This point was very well made in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE\">a new documentary by Michael Moore<\/a>, which is extremely critical of the green renewable energy industry, saying it\u2019s just as industrial as the fossil fuel industry. In fact it\u2019s dependent on it. They\u2019re trying to get this documentary banned at the moment because it\u2019s very uncomfortable, through all their people who\u2019ve invested in renewable energy. But actually of course they are making the point that they\u2019d rather have us have no energy at all. This shows that the only technologies that are going to work are going to be the ones that are hugely concentrated, that use relatively few resources. A coke cans worth of fish and fuel per person per lifetime, that\u2019s what nuclear power can do for you, with a tiny footprint. And yet they oppose this technology, and I find that very peculiar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The student organisation British Conservation Alliance held an online webinar on 28th April 2020, entitled: \u201cCapitalism and Climate Change \u2014 How Markets Can Protect the Environment\u201d. The event was co-hosted by the Vienna-based Austrian Economic Center. The panel was composed of: Daniel Hannan, former Member of the European Parliament and founding president of the Initiative <a href=\"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/2020\/04\/29\/capitalism-and-climate-change\/\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"sr-only\">Read more about Capitalism and climate change<\/span>[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=969"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":972,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions\/972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icrei.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}