In February 2004, Amartya Sen, the Nobel-prize-winning economist, published an opinion piece in the London Review of Books (LRB) titled "Why we should preserve the spotted owl" (I have not reproduced it here).
Although he is an economist, Sen made a philosophical case for the incorporation of environmental responsibilities into concepts of citizenship.
Here is an exchange that resulted from this, starting with the response from Wilfred Beckerman.
I think this is interesting to read from the point of view of Beckerman's general "take" on environmental matters as contrasted with others who responded to his input.
LRB |
Vol. 26 No. 6 dated 18 March 2004
Preserving the Owl
From
Wilfred Beckerman
About thirty years ago Amartya Sen and I were on the same side in a televised debate in America on the subject of economic growth v. the environment. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I read his article in the LRB (5 February), for most readers will interpret it as a defence of the environmental policies associated with advocates of 'sustainable development'. At the outset he repeats what Bjørn Lomborg has described as 'the litany' of the environmentalists: 'We routinely damage the ozone layer, heat up the globe, foul the air and the rivers, destroy the forests, deplete mineral resources, drive many species to extinction, and impose other devastations.' Sen's authority will no doubt now be cited triumphantly by green pressure groups as further support for their assertions.
This is unfortunate, since it is most unlikely that he believes them all, and quite unlikely that he believes any of them. For example, as an economist he will know that the usual doomsday predictions that we are depleting mineral resources at an unsustainable rate are based on a failure to understand how the price mechanism works: that if the supply of any particular material resource begins to fall short of demand at the prevailing price its price will rise and this will set up a series of feedbacks that will increase supply and reduce demand. He must also know that the empirical evidence conclusively demonstrates that this is what has happened over the centuries.
It is even true of food. Indeed, in his major work on the causes of famine, Sen has done more than anybody to demolish the myth that they have been caused by a general imbalance between the supply and demand for food. He has thoroughly debunked the widespread assertion that population is outrunning the world's capacity to feed it, either in aggregate or in specific regions. Yet in his LRB article he refers approvingly to Lester Brown, whose well-publicised predictions of imminent worldwide famine have been falsified again and again over the last forty years.
As for the global warming predictions included in Sen's litany, he will appreciate that drastic action to cut carbon emissions cannot be justified until we know that the benefits of preventing climate change are greater than the costs of doing so, and that the distribution of the costs and benefits between poor and rich countries or generations is not inequitable. Almost all the public discussion has concentrated on the science, but such analysis as there has been of economic questions suggests that the damage done by climate change will barely exceed the costs of preventing it, and that those costs will fall more heavily on poorer than on richer people.
Wilfred Beckerman
Balliol College, Oxford
LRB |
Vol. 26 No. 8 dated 15 April 2004
Preserving the Owl
From
Aidan Harrison
In his attack on Amartya Sen, Wilfred Beckerman places too much reliance on the price mechanism (Letters, 18 March). He says that if the supply of any particular material resource begins to fall short of demand at the prevailing price, its price will rise and this will set up a series of feedbacks that will increase supply and reduce demand. Where substitutes and flexibility exist, this is true. But what about oil? Never before has a single commodity become so vital, not only to a single country or continent, but to every aspect of our global economy and its ability to sustain a population of six billion. We now face a situation in which demand is set to outstrip production capacity - which is about to peak and slip into irreversible decline.
Since 1980, 500 billion barrels of oil have been consumed and 300 billion discovered. Last year was the first since the beginning of the Oil Age during which no new discoveries were made. Demand may already have overtaken production, and even extreme optimists predict that production will peak before 2015.
Beckerman does not seem to appreciate that there is no substitute for oil, or indeed for natural gas, which will go into a more sudden and rapid decline perhaps a decade later. If we wait for Beckerman's price mechanism to act, the effect will be a sudden, worldwide economic and social collapse, described by one oil expert as 'the greatest discontinuity in human history'.
Aidan Harrison
Morpeth, Northumberland
From Salah el Serafy
I find Wilfred Beckerman's criticism of Amartya Sen totally unwarranted. Left alone, the market will not restore the ozone layer, bring back depleted stocks of fish, conserve our remaining forests or arrest global warming. The employment market, the interest rate and even the exchange rate are considered too important not to be managed through 'public policy'. Why should the environment and natural resources in general be treated differently?
Salah el Serafy
Arlington, Virginia
From Wilfred Beckerman
Aidan Harrison accuses me of relying too much on the price mechanism to prevent crippling shortages of raw materials, and ends (Letters, 15 April): 'If we wait for Beckerman's price mechanism to act, the effect will be a sudden worldwide economic and social collapse described by one oil expert as "the greatest discontinuity in human history".' I wonder if he is quoting the energy expert Amory Lovins, who predicted back in 1974 that countries with expanding industry 'will be especially hard hit by economic energy scarcities from now on'? Or perhaps he is quoting one of the participants in the 1977 MIT workshop who reported that 'the supply of oil will fail to meet increasing demand before the year 2000.' In fact his anonymous expert might be any one of the innumerable issuers of similar scary predictions published over the last fifty years, all of which have been falsified.
Salah el Serafy, in the same issue, takes a different line. He says that 'left alone, the market will not restore the ozone layer, bring back depleted stocks of fish . . . or arrest global warming.' Perfectly true, as I have emphasised in various publications. But my criticism of Amartya Sen's views on climate change is that the cost of the damage done by climate change may well be less than the cost of preventing it (though this would depend on how it was done), and that the net burden of any policy to prevent it would probably fall most heavily on poor countries or poor generations.
I am well aware of the wide variety of market failures that call for public action. These include externalities (unpaid side-effects of an activity, such as pollution), 'non-rivalness' in consumption (if I admire flowers in a park that doesn't prevent others from doing the same), or the impossibility of excluding some people from certain activities. All of el Serafy's examples fall into this last category, known as 'commons'. But these have different characteristics from the private goods such as oil, coal, copper and tin to which I was referring when I predicted that, in the long run, they will be protected from serious 'shortage' by the price mechanism. El Serafy's failure to distinguish between these two classes of goods is symptomatic of the 'mental virus' that attacks many economists when the environment is under discussion.
Wilfred Beckerman
Balliol College, Oxford