'Conservation Comment: Cornucopians' vs the 'Malthusians' in climate change debate

Brit Bunkley

By Brit Bunkley
The debate over climate change has shifted in recent years. Instead of that between climate change deniers and environmentalists, we have the war of words between the so-called "Cornucopians" and the "Malthusians". (Malthus was an economist who in the in the late 1700s wrote that population growth would outpace the growth of the food supply.) Both sides now accept that climate change is a human caused phenomenon.

The new book Apocalypse, Never by rogue environmentalist Michael Shellenberger falls neatly onto the Cornucopian side. Shellenberger believes that climate change is far less a threat that the alarmists believe. Only unfettered economic growth will lift developing nations out of poverty. He insists that, in the short-term, fossil fuels and deregulation will lead to a "cornucopia" of sustained economic growth.

The theory goes that the newly developed nations will have fewer children, thus lowering population growth. Increasing growth and wealth will make those newly developed nations more resilient to lower crop yields, increased storms, heat stress and the anxiety of moving coastal cites when sea levels rise.

Shellenberger maintains that nuclear energy is the only clean form of energy up to the task. Deaths due to carbon fuel pollution have been many times greater than immediate deaths and cancers due to past nuclear meltdowns. He claims that the worst energy accident of all time was hydroelectric - a dam in China that collapsed killing an estimated 200,000 people. The potential of meltdowns and the nuisance of nuclear waste are better options for him than the unreliability and immense amount of land needed for renewables.

Nevertheless, Dr Peter Gleick has demonstrated that in many cases Shellenberger "used bad science, strawman arguments, and cherry-picking facts". The most notable fallacy is that environmental problems are the result of poverty and will be solved by having everyone get richer. The Atlantic suggests that, "Economic growth has helped to mitigate some kinds of air and water pollution, but production of many of the most important pollutants, among them carbon dioxide, keeps right on rising with prosperity."

On the other end of the spectrum, is the bestselling book from 2019, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Wallace-Wells, once a sceptic, is a newly converted Malthusian. He asserts that he is not an environmentalist. He hates camping.
The book begins: "It is worse, much worse, than you think."

He then carefully lays out the future in succinct chapters with titles that tell it all, including Heat Death, Drowning, Hunger, Economic collapse, Dying Oceans and Climate Conflicts. They are meticulously laid out with facts, arguments and counter arguments. Although Wallace-Wells believes that we need to maintain our nuclear capacity in order to successfully fight climate change, he supports the fast-tracking of renewables. For him, electing green leaders with anti-greenhouse emission policies is vastly more urgent than skipping the plastic straw in your margarita.

He states that "annihilation is only the very thin tail of warming's very long bell curve, and there is nothing stopping us from steering clear of it."

It is happening faster and faster. "We are now burning 80 per cent more coal than we were just in the year 2000." The effects will grow, multiply and cascade. He demonstrated that every degree of warming, it's been estimated, costs a temperate country about one percentage point of GDP, which given the 4 degrees trajectory that Shellenberger believes is "acceptable", economic growth will soon be dead. The Economist stated it well: "Some readers will find Mr Wallace-Wells's outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too."

Brit Bunkley is an award-winning artist and film maker. He was head of sculpture at Whanganui UCOL for 20 years and taught at Hofstra University in New York.