The recent death of Paul R. Ehrlich, one of the first to sound the climate alarm, invites a look back at his energy views, which were errant when made and are embarrassingly so today. Ehrlich’s oeuvre, like Climategate, is a thorn in the side of current neo-Malthusianism. Ehrlich collaborator and Obama’s two-term science advisor, John Holdren, finds himself in the same boat.
Depletion Scare
Paul Ehrlich’s early writings emphasized the perils of natural resource depletion and impending strife. He wrote in the late 1960s: “That we are presently living beyond our means is obvious from the simple fact that we are madly depleting nonreplenishable resources.” In regard to petroleum, Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman spelled out their depletion argument:
No matter how you slice it, the resources of the planet are finite, and many of them are non-renewable. Each giant molecule of petroleum is lost forever when we tear it asunder by burning it to release the energy the sunlight stored in it millions of years ago. Concentrations of mineral wealth are being dispersed beyond recall, senselessly scattered far and wide to where we cannot afford the energy to reconcentrate them.
To conserve supply for the voiceless future, Paul and Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren advocated strict production quotas on natural resources, including hydrocarbons.
The Ehrlichs felt vindicated by the “mini-energy crisis” of the 1970s. The crisis was “real” and “permanent,” although “generous supplies should be available for a time.” They pointed to the empirical work of Shell geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, which predicted that U.S. petroleum production would peak by 1970 and decline thereafter. They asked, “What will we do when the pumps run dry?”
Events of the 1980s and 1990s revealed that the 1970s energy-crisis era was due to a surplus of regulation, not a shortage of resources. “There are no serious limitations on fossil-fuel supplies now or in the immediate future,” it was conceded, but “Energy use clearly is a primary area where humanity is living on capital, not on income.”
In 1996, the Ehrlichs toyed with a new view of energy/fossil-fuel scarcity. Quoting from their new energy mentor John Holdren, they stated, “We’re not running out of energy, but ‘we’re running out of environment, patience with inequality, money for sustainability, time for making a transition, and leadership to do what is required.’” Yet they again warned about “the prospect of relatively early exhaustion of petroleum supplies that can be economically extracted.”
Energy as Desecrator
Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s view of energy and energy policy was a lynchpin of their overall Malthusian worldview. Energy — that “very-difficult-to-perceive but crucial part of our world” — was the primary enabler of environmental desecration. “The level of energy consumption is probably the best index of the amount of damage that an individual or a society can do the environment,” they wrote.
Destruction accompanies the extraction of all fossil fuels—especially by strip mining—and the building of hydroelectric projects. Transportation of petroleum pollutes the oceans through oil spills. The burning of fuels, whether in factories or vehicles, causes most of the air pollution, at least in developed countries. Energy-intensive industry ‘development,’ and agriculture generate a wide variety of assaults upon ecological systems, overloading them, poisoning them, paving them over, and plowing them under. Environmental deterioration and energy consumption go hand-in-hand.
Among other ills, energy-led development was a primary cause of species endangerment:
Ecologists view rates of energy use as a crucial indicator of human impact on ecosystems. Almost all of the activities that lead to the indirect endangering of other species are energy-intensive… On the stored capital of fossil-fuel energy, humanity has risen to the stature of a global ecological force.
The Ehrlichs formalized the energy desecration argument in the equation, Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology. Growth and progress in these three independent variables increased the environmental impact.
Energy use is so central to the human assault on the environment that it can serve as a surrogate in the I = PAT equation. In fact, it plays such a key role in causing Earth’s environmental ills that we begin our consideration of those ills and their possible cures with an examination of energy impacts and energy options.
Part II of this series will examine the authoritarian proposals of Paul Ehrlich et al. to strictly limit energy usage for sustainability.
