Are resources scarce; the Lomborg Backlash

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

Wars of want

It's comforting to be told environmentalists are deluded, but in fact
scarce resources are fuelling terrible conflicts

John Gray
Tuesday August 21, 2001
The Guardian

According to a growing body of opinion - well represented by Bjorn
Lomborg in last week's Guardian - we shouldn't fear too much for the
state of the planet. There's nothing wrong with it that technology
can't solve. Natural resources are practically inexhaustible.
Environmentalists who claim that we're coming up against the limits of
the Earth's tolerance are deluded. A magnificent future of unending
growth is opening up - if only we can bring ourselves to stop worrying
about the environment.

The idea that environmentalists are crying wolf is bound to be
popular. Who wants to face the prospect of having to make radical
changes in their lives? But the notion that resources are infinite
couldn't be more wrong. Shrinking natural resources are a fact - and
an increas ingly important cause of war. The combination of worldwide
industrialisation and population growth is putting ever more pressure
on resources that are unalterably finite. The result is not only the
degradation of the planet - including enormous and irreparable damage
to other species - but bitter human conflict.

Critics of environmentalism argue that free markets create an
incentive for resources to be used efficiently, new technologies to be
devised and further resources to be discovered. If this is true,
growing resource scarcity is a myth. Let's leave aside the
intellectual merits of the anti-environmentalist argument (though I'm
pretty sure it's largely tosh). More to the point is how far it is
removed from historical realities. Over the past 10 years, the
depletion of scarce resources has triggered a major war and aggravated
a number of conflicts. There is good reason to think wars of scarcity
will become more common.

We have managed to forget that the last big war of the 20th century
was fought over control of the Gulf oil supplies. True, there were
other reasons for the war, but the decisive factor was the threat to
western oil supplies. Without oil, our industrial civilisation soon
comes to a halt. The proportion of the world's supply of cheap,
conventional oil that lies in the Gulf is growing inexorably as
oilfields elsewhere are depleted.

The most critical input to western economies is increasingly located
in the world's most conflict-ridden region. This is partly what
accounts for American energy policies, which aim to mate rially reduce
American dependence on Gulf oil. It is also at the back of the revival
of the Great Game in the post-communist countries of central Asia.
Today, as they did in the 19th century, the great powers are vying for
control of the region's oil. The struggle for energy supplies looks
like being one of the dominant themes of this century.

It's not only oil that's becoming a potent factor of dispute. Water
shortage underlies some of the worst conflicts. It's one of the issues
at stake in the Middle East, and it was a factor in the genocidal war
in Rwanda. Rwanda is one of the most water-stressed countries, and in
the early 90s it had one of the highest rates of population growth. As
a result, per capita food production fell - a fact that undoubtedly
worsened the conflict.

It's becoming fashionable in rich countries to deny that resources are
limited, but it is a truth well understood in the developing world. In
China, it is widely accepted that its most serious long-term problems
are pollution, water shortage and population growth. The government
recognises that the only solution is to reach a balance between human
needs and natural resources. Yet its far-sighted "one-child" policy is
attacked relentlessly in the west.

Those who look to technol ogy and free markets to solve environmental
problems pay too little attention to huge inequalities in the
consumption of resources - or to the inequalities of power that
sustain them. The average American or west European consumes about 100
times as much commercially produced energy as an average Bangladeshi.
In terms of their impact on the planet, rich countries are far more
overpopulated than poor ones.

On the most conservative estimates, world population will increase by
more than 2bn during the next 30 or 40 years. If worldwide
industrialisation continues to accelerate, the pressures on resources
can only be intensified. The rising expectations of billions of humans
are on a collision course with growing scarcity in some of the basic
necessities of life.

Anti-environmentalists like to think of themselves as sober, practical
people, patiently pegging away against the legions of apocalyptic
doomsters, but what is most striking is their wild utopianism. They
insist that environmental problems can be conjured away by new
technology. But technology can just as easily be used to develop new
weapons of mass destruction to fight over shrinking resources.

We need to confront the root causes of scarcity - in the distortions
of the global free market and overpopulation. If we don't, history
suggests that the crisis which anti-environmentalists tell us doesn't
exist will be solved by the time-honoured Malthusian expedient of war.

John Gray is professor of European Thought at the London School of
Economics

j.gray@xxxxxxxxx