I f there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in
awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The
Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of
record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on
the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was
actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times
another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.
Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The
Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously
overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be
what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.
One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an
exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist
Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized
high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about
converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even
larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the
23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems
with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic
modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?
No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of
techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated
consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering
on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global
over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why
the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no
further than this article, which explains it all.
Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though
it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the
Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of
peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US
“Saudi America” some time back), degradation of the ocean and the stock of
creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of
whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate
migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.
As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the
relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the
world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the
limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay
for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction
that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the
central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could
by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive
accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of
markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final
result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things
everywhere.
The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the
collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most
fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack
fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low,
despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The
oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does
anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all
our cell phone apps?
The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past
200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy
in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching
industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring,
commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and
those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and
universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report
think that the oil distribution situation is stable?
There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did
anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th
incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi
Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly
all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of
neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23
genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what
it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the
market for only a few weeks?
Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating
with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t
it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?
