Matt Ridley's Blog, page 34

Only innovation can save us

My Times column argues that only high-tech
innovation will give us the cash to fund our future, so why won’t
Cameron or Miliband talk about it?

 

Fifty years ago yesterday, a young computer
expert called Gordon Moore pointed out that the number of transistors on
a silicon chip seemed to be doubling every year or two and that if
this went on it would “lead to such wonders as home computers . . .
and personal portable communications equipment”.

Today, for the cost of an hour of work on the average wage, you
can buy about a trillion times as much
computing power as you could when Moore wrote his article. The
result has had a huge impact on our standard of living, indeed it
is one of the biggest factors behind world economic growth in the
past half century.

Back in the 1950s the American economist Robert Solow calculated
that 87 per cent of economic growth came not from applying more
capital or more labour, but from innovation making people more
productive. It’s probably even higher today. New materials, new
machines and new ideas to cut costs enable people to spend less
time fulfilling more of their needs: that’s what growth means.

Technological change is the chief reason that economic growth
for the world as a whole shows no sign of reaching a plateau but
keeps marching up at 3-5 per cent a year. Innovation is the main
reason the percentage of the world population living in absolute
poverty has more than halved in 35 years. And hostility to
innovation is one of the reasons for Europe’s current
stagnation.

Yet innovation has featured in this general election barely at
all. It seems to be of little interest to the party leaders or
their audiences. This is most peculiar, when you think about it,
because it will be what will make the British people better off in
2020 than they are today: really better off, rather than having
simply run up more debt, that is. If innovation grinds to a halt
then so will growth and deficit reduction and the rise of the NHS
budget and all the other things the leaders talk about.

On innovation policy the Conservatives (and David Willetts in
particular) have reason to be proud of their record. Despite tough
budget constraints, their science spending, and their encouragement
for translating ideas into business ventures, have been impressive:
Innovate UK; the Longitude prize; the talk of “eight great
technologies”; the “patent box”; tech clusters and the surge in
business start-ups. More telling still is that Gordon Brown, for
all his faults, got the importance of innovation, and so did Tony
Blair, whereas Ed Miliband’s silence on science, technology and
innovation is striking. Why is he not saying: vote for me and I
will forge a white-hot technological revolution that will bring
down energy prices far more effectively than any price
regulation?

For that matter, why is David Cameron not promising to make
Britain the envy of the world in new technology to transform the
NHS — and dismantle the barriers to entry that keeps banking
unreformed? What do Nicola, Nick, Nigel, Natalie and Leanne think
about innovation? Apart from the fact that three of them hate
fracking, I haven’t the foggiest. Most mentions of innovation in
the mainstream debate so far have been negative.

For those on the right, innovation holds by far the best chance
to keep pushing down the cost and pushing up the quality of public
services, so lifting the burden of taxes and liberating people from
dependence on government. Imagine if bureaucrats could be replaced
by robots that worked 24 hours a day, did not need pensions and did
not vote Labour. . .

Such a public-sector automation and productivity revolution
might seem to be a pipe-dream, but it is beginning to happen
already in the government’s digital initiatives, still in their
early stages. One of the most startling discoveries of the past
five years is that you can reduce the head-count in local government, or
the central administration of education and social security, and
see the quality of service, and public satisfaction, go up, not
down. That’s because of technology.

For those on the left, innovation is a great demolisher of
inequality. A century ago, you had to be very rich to own a car or
your own home, to have more than three pairs of shoes, to have a
spare bedroom, to buy on credit, to have indoor plumbing, to eat
chicken regularly, to have a library of books, to be able to watch
great acting or great music regularly, to travel abroad. Today all
those things are routine for people on modest incomes thanks to the
invention of container shipping, fertiliser, better financial
services, cheap materials, machine tools, automation, the internet,
television, budget airlines and so on.

It’s true that the very rich can now afford a few more things
that are beyond the reach of those on modest incomes, but they are
mostly luxuries: private planes, grouse moors, tables in the very
best restaurants. We would like those on low incomes to have access
to better medicines, better schooling, cheaper homes and lower
energy bills, and in each case the technology exists to provide
these: it’s mainly government policies that get in the way.

Technology is the great equaliser: today some of the poorest
African peasants have mobile phones that work as well as Warren
Buffett’s — at least for voice calls. In the 1940s, Joseph
Schumpeter said that the point of commerce consists “not in
providing more silk stocking for queens, but in bringing them
within reach of factory girls”.

It was not planning, trade unions, public spending, welfare or
tax that made the poor much richer. It was innovation.

In fact, here is a Tory way to talk about inequality — to
promise that politicians will work to unleash the power of
innovation to bring living standards up for the poor more than for
the rich.

But can politicians do anything about innovation? Not directly.
It happens to its own inexorable rhythm, unpredictably. Trying to
pick winners usually results in picking losers. There was no policy
to encourage search engines and social media, but they happened
anyway. What’s much more predictable is where they happened:
Silicon Valley has had just the right mixture of freedom, skills,
permissive law, critical mass of talent and capital to make
innovation thrive.

Here in Britain we have frustratingly never managed to grow our
own Googles. We still benefit even if innovation happens elsewhere,
but hosting it too could transform our public finances. Why not say
so on the stump?

The Vital Question

My review of Nick Lane's book The Vital Question in The Times:

Nick Lane is not just a writer of words about science, he is
also a doer of experiments and a thinker of thoughts. And these
days he is hot on the trail of one of the biggest ideas in the
universe: the meaning of the word “life”. In this, his third book
about energy and life, he comes triumphantly close to cracking the
secret of why life is the way it is, to a depth that would boggle
any ancient philosopher’s mind. He can now tell a story of how,
when and where life started, and what happened to it in its early
days. Most of that story looks as if it is true.

Life uses information (stored in DNA) to capture energy (which
it stores in a chemical called ATP) to create order. Humans burn
prodigious amounts of energy — we generate about 10,000 times as
much energy per gram as the sun. The sun is hotter only because it
is much bigger. We use energy to create and maintain intricate
cellular and bodily complexity, the opposite of entropy, just as we
do in the economy, where the harnessing of power from burning fuel
enables us to build skyscrapers and aeroplanes. But we — and here
“we” means all living creatures, including bacteria — have an
idiosyncratic way of trapping energy to make it useful. We pump
protons across lipid membranes.

During every second of your life you pump a billion trillion
protons across membranes in the thousand trillion mitochondria that
live inside your body. Mitochondria are the topic of recent
parliamentary debates (about “three-parent embryos”), the central
characters in this book and the descendants of bacteria. Their job
is to oxidise carbon and hydrogen so as to pump protons and fuel
life.

The collapse of these proton gradients is the true definition of
death. Cyanide is a poison because it blocks the proton pump, and
cells commit suicide (to rid the body of bad mutations) by
deliberately collapsing their proton gradients. A freshly dead body
is, to all intents and purposes, identical to a living one, except
that on a minuscule, invisible scale, its ability to keep protons
the right side of membranes has suddenly ceased.

Professor Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and
his colleagues have worked out why this is and what it means. His
exploration of the story takes him deep into conundrums that have
fascinated human beings for millennia: species, death, sex, gender,
ageing, fertility and health. In 2000 a new kind of alkaline,
warm-water vent was found on the ocean floor in the mid-Atlantic
(it was dubbed the Lost City because of its huge carbonate chimneys
and towers), where protons diffuse across thin, semi-conducting
walls of iron, nickel and sulphur into minuscule pores, causing
organic molecules to accumulate and interact.

This, Lane and others now think, was how life got started some 4
billion years ago, inside these rocky pores, where the natural
proton gradients came by accident to drive the generation of
molecular complexity. The details of the detective story that gets
him from this point to the first bacterium-like cell are
challenging (to understand), intricate and compelling, but well
worth the journey.

Life seems to have diverged very early on into two different
kinds with different chemistry sets. We call them bacteria and
“archaea”, but they both look like microbes. It was only when we
read their genes that we realised how different they were — one
uses right-handed forms of lipids, the other left-handed, for
instance. For a staggering two billion years they were all there
was on this planet. They both had great biochemical diversity but
small size and structural simplicity.

Only after this time did large cells and complex creatures
emerge — protozoa, plants, animals, fungi. These things have huge
internal complexity in their cells as well as bodies that are often
multicellular. They all share a single common ancestor because
their basic machinery is always the same: plants and animals are
mere variations on a theme. And yet this lurch to complexity has
left little trace — there are no surviving intermediate creatures
with bits of the machinery, but not other bits. How could complex
(“eukaryotic”) life have sprung fully formed, like Athena from the
head of Zeus?

Solving this mystery leads Lane into a world of ideas that only
Lewis Carroll could make sense of. Six impossible things become
believable before breakfast when you are reading a Lane book, and
there are plenty here.

What seems to have happened is that a single archaeal cell
engulfed a single bacterial cell that turned into a specialised
energy generator and gradually passed most of its genes to the
host.

This caused a problem because it brought rogue DNA sequences, or
digital parasites — a bit like computer viruses — into the
operating system of the host. We are still plagued by them today.
They are called introns, and we deal with them by splicing them out
of the transcript of DNA before using it. The machine we use to do
this works slowly so it has to have a safe place to work before the
transcripts get used — and that is why the nucleus evolved, to
separate transcription from translation (into protein).

Having mitochondria, as the bacteria became, enabled cells to
grow much larger, because the mitochondria could be numerous and
small and shrink their genomes to just the essential genes — we
have just 13 in ours — while the archeal genome could start to
service a much larger volume and generate new kinds of
machinery.

Lane’s crucial insight, his eureka moment, was when he realised
that, thanks to this division of labour, the energy available per
gene is hundreds of thousands of times greater in a eukaryotic cell
than in a bacterium: just as the energy available per worker leapt
higher in the Industrial Revolution enabling the construction of
much more technology and infrastructure (my analogy, not his).

From here Lane traces the echoes of ancient struggles inside the
cell, shedding light on questions such as why we have less sodium
in our cells than seawater has, why pigeons live longer than rats,
how species come to separate, why eggs are large and sperm small,
and so on.

The material Lane has to work with is almost impossibly
complicated and there are times when even the most dedicated reader
will have to keep turning to the glossary to check the meaning of
terms. But like the best science writers, Lane never glosses over
the detail. Instead he turns it into a series of detective stories.
Poirot-like he leads you from the crime to the perpetrator, from
the puzzle to the solution. The difference from a detective story
is that these tales are real, and fundamental to life itself.

Welfare reform and unemployment

My Times column on Britain's remarkable and
unexpected plunge in unemployment and what lies behind it:

Five years ago, almost nobody expected that
inflation would vanish, as tomorrow’s figures are expected to show,
or that unemployment would plummet, as Friday’s numbers will
confirm. Whatever else you think about this government, there is no
doubt it has presided over an astonishing boom in job creation like
nowhere else in the developed world.

The milestones are impressive: an average of a thousand new jobs a day over five years;
unemployment down by almost half a million in a year; a
jobless rate half the eurozone’s; more jobs created than in the
rest of Europe put together; more people in work, more women in
work, more disabled people in work than ever; the highest
percentage of the population in work since records began. All this
while the public sector has been shedding 300 jobs a day.

In a speech in September 2010, Ed Balls accused
George Osborne of “ripping away the foundations of growth and jobs”
and said that “against all the evidence, both contemporary and
historical, he argues the private sector will somehow rush to fill
the void left by government and consumer spending, and become the
driver of jobs and growth”. (Yup, Ed, it did.)

Is it too good to be true? I’ve talked to economists who think
the statistics must be misleading. The Labour party says that the
sanctioning of benefit seekers for the most trivial offences, such
as turning up late for interviews, has driven hundreds of thousands
out of the numbers, into dead-end apprenticeships, cruel zero-hours
contracts or doomed self-employment.

In a sense, they are not wrong. The government’s reforms, pushed
by Iain Duncan Smith, are indeed a crucial cause of the surprising
surge in employment. The reforms have indeed used tough love to
push people back into the workforce and off welfare. As long as
they are no worse off, this is no bad thing. Given that welfare has
treated people like children and conditioned them not to take
responsibility for their lives, it is a good thing.

For example, early trials found that making unemployment
claimants sign contracts in which they promise to look for work
(which is now universal) frightened quite a few people off the
system straight away — they had been working while claiming to be
unemployed. Regular re-testing of those who claim sickness benefits
has brought many fit people back into the labour force, while
actually increasing benefits for some of those whose conditions
have deteriorated. Paying work programme providers by results, so
that if they get people back into employment they get a bonus, has
worked.

And yes, the threat of sanctions if claimants do not treat
unemployment benefit as a wage for the full-time job of looking for
work has helped. The philosophy behind these reforms has not been
about cuts, IDS insists, but about reconditioning people’s
attitudes so they take responsibility for their choices. Little
things can make a big difference: like not having rent paid for
you, but having to budget for it from your housing benefit. Most
benefits are paid fortnightly but most employers pay monthly, so
going from welfare to a job often brings a budgeting crisis.
Universal credit is paid monthly wherever possible.

To general surprise, the welfare reforms have proved to be among
the most popular things this administration has done. Four in five
trade union members think the £26,000 cap on benefits is a good
idea, which is why the Conservatives are planning to push it down
to £23,000 if re-elected. Polls suggest that a policy of limiting
benefits to two children, so you could not get rehoused by having
extra children, would be wildly popular, as would a manifesto
promise to withhold benefits from immigrants till they have
contributed taxes for four years.

Tory candidates out canvassing tell me they are finding that
welfare reform, while horrifying the metropolitan elite, is most
popular in the meanest streets — where people are well aware of
neighbours who play the system. It is a staggering fact that when
Labour was in power and while the economy was growing, the cost of
welfare rose by 50 per cent in real terms, even as immigrants
poured in to work here.

The latest figures also suggest that British people from
inner-city estates are increasingly competing with immigrants for
low-paid jobs. We now have the smallest number of households with
nobody working and a record rise in the number of people who live
in social housing who are working. That feeds through to healthier
lives and less crime.

Universal credit, where it is being rolled out, has had an
immediate impact in making people more likely to go to interviews
and more likely to take jobs. Australian, New Zealand, Canadian,
German and American teams are monitoring Britain’s welfare reforms
with a view to emulating them.

Another international comparison is illuminating. Switzerland
has 3 per cent unemployment, Spain 23 per cent. As James
Bartholomew recounts in his book The Welfare of Nations, Swiss
unemployment benefit is slightly more generous than Spain’s, at
least initially, but to receive it you must prove every month you
are actively looking for a job. Switzerland has one of the
strongest such “search requirements”.

In Spain the requirement for the unemployed to seek work is much
less onerous. It is up to a public agency to find jobs for you to
consider and you don’t have to accept them if they are outside your
line of work or based more than 19 miles away. It is possible to
take long holidays abroad while receiving unemployment benefit.
There are other differences. Switzerland has no minimum wage and
makes it comparatively easy to fire people, both of which make
employers keener to hire unskilled young people. In Spain, the cost
of hiring somebody at a salary of 1,500 euros a month is about
twice as much as the employee receives after tax and social
security — three times as large a “wedge” as in Switzerland.

This government’s reforms have made us less like Spain and more
like Switzerland. Nor are most of the jobs created in the past five
years insecure, poorly paid and part-time. Since 2010, 60 per cent
of the rise in employment has come from managerial and professional
jobs. In any case, shoving people into some kind of work rather
than parking them on welfare has to be better for their morale and
their future.

 

Update: subsequent to my article, the latest unemployment figures showed continuing
strong improvement in Britain's workforce statistics:

Employment up 248,000 on 3 months before

Unemployment down 76,000

Claimant count down 21,000

Number not in the workforce down 104,000

Weekly earning and vacancies both up

A parliamentary nightmare

My Times column on what might happen if the
British election prouces a messy result:

had a bad dream. It was April 2016. The country
was tumbling into a constitutional crisis, dragging the Queen into
a gathering storm in the week of her 90th birthday. The financial
markets were hammering the pound and threatening a bond strike as
the deficit rose and growth faltered. Jean-Claude Juncker,
president of the European Commission, said he feared that Britain
had become ungovernable.

It had begun with the election. The Conservatives had won the
most seats, 290 to Labour’s 260. But with only 26 Lib Dems in the
Commons, the Tories were unable to form a workable coalition, and
with Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander gone there was no appetite for
it anyway, not when David Cameron would have to rely also on Ukip
or the Ulster Unionists to get bills through parliament. So Mr
Cameron had formed a minority government, but could not carry a
Queen’s speech and lost a vote of confidence.

My dream told me that under the rules of the Fixed-term
Parliaments Act, Ed Miliband had then been asked to try to form a
government. Rather than face another election — his party was broke
— he negotiated a deal with the 42 Scottish Nationalist and six
Plaid Cymru MPs (the Tartan-Plaid pact), whereby they would support
him in power. This left him short of a majority, but the Lib Dems
under Tim Farron abstained on the ensuing vote of confidence, since
they too could not afford to fight another election.

So the minority Labour government limped on indefinitely. John
Bercow, by the way, was in his element.

But slowly, inch by inch, the “Fishes” (Salmond and Sturgeon)
gnawed at the Union. Every time the Minnowband sat down to
negotiate legislation with the Salmond in Westminster, the latter
would sigh and say the Sturgeon in Edinburgh had asked for more. Mr
Miliband’s popularity in England plummeted with every concession,
but Nicola Sturgeon’s in Scotland only grew. So did Leanne Wood’s
in Wales, as she extracted concessions too, eroding Labour’s power
base there.

The anti-Scottish feeling in England suited Ms Sturgeon just
fine. Even in the tribal northeast of England, Labour was
crumbling: it lost a Tyneside by-election to Douglas Carswell’s
Ukip.

So Mr Miliband could not risk going to the country, which
weakened his hand in negotiation. The Fishes had only to threaten
to join the increasingly pro-Scottish-independence Tories in a vote
of no confidence for Labour to cave in again. The government’s
legislative programme now included cancellation of Trident, the
comprehensive reversal of welfare, education and trade union
reforms, and a date for a second Scottish referendum.

The Tories watched frustrated, comfortably ahead in the opinion
polls, now that Boris was leader, and longing for another election,
but up against the implacable arithmetic of the Fixed-term
Parliaments Act — that only a two-thirds vote for dissolution could
bring down a government. They had begun secret talks with the
Fishes, but the BBC had got wind of them and scuppered the deal.
The Lib Dems were in talks to merge with the Greens.

The crisis came to head when the House of Lords blocked Labour’s
legislative programme again and again. There were no Scottish
Nationalist peers — as there are not now, the party having refused
to appoint any. Labour’s red benches are loaded with passionate
unionists. But what really made the peers obstructive was the
government having included a bill for the abolition of the Lords,
to be replaced by a toothless four-nations-and-six-regions talking
shop. We ermined turkeys were not about to vote for Christmas. (The
Lords generally cave in to the Commons on everything — but that
would change if they were about to be abolished.)

So in my bad dream the government was resorting to the
Parliament Act, and ramming through its bills. More and more media
commentators were denouncing this as getting horribly closer to
dictatorship. There was even growing pressure on Her Majesty to
withhold royal assent to measures that broke up the union. The
Prince of Wales dared not say or write anything, so felt impotent
to take the pressure off his mother. Constitutional lawyers were
trying to find ways to force a dissolution of parliament via the
Privy Council. The only thing that did not seem likely was a coup,
since there were too few troops to carry it out.

Oh, and meanwhile in my dream Greece had fallen out of the euro;
Vladimir Putin had fomented a proxy separatist rebellion in the
Baltic states by well-equipped troops with insignia-free uniforms;
and the Shia-Sunni civil jihad had spread still further. The
Miliband government had signed up to a plan in the Paris climate
conference of December 2015 to get all our energy by 2020 in the
form of sunbeams out of cucumbers.

At this point, I awoke sweating from my feverish nightmare,
realised that the election was still to come and remembered that I
was a rational optimist. All could still be well. Mr Cameron still
looks likely to form a government, minority or coalition, that is
not dependent on concessions to the Nationalists. Doesn’t he?

But there is still more than a hint of plausibility about my
nightmare. As Peter Kellner, of YouGov, astutely observed as long
ago as last September: “The decline in Lib Dem support could leave
them with fewer MPs than the combined ranks of the ‘other’ minority
party MPs. If that happens, there is a real possibility that the
parliamentary politics of the House of Commons will be exceedingly
messy.”

And the reluctance of most opposition parties to bring on
another election is something that is often forgotten. As Lord
(Bernard) Donoughue, who was head of Harold Wilson’s and Jim
Callaghan’s policy unit in the 1970s (a weak government kept going
by calling the Tories’ legislative bluff) recalled in a recent
article in The Financial Times: “Above all, we
found that an imminent election was not as attractive to opposition
MPs as the blood-seeking press assumed. The Liberal party could not
afford another election campaign. Individual MPs did not relish
possibly losing their seats. [Each of those aids to government
survival will apply after the 2015 election.]”

Since then the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, with its two-thirds
requirement for a dissolution and two weeks for the opposition to
try governing, has changed the calculation. It reduces everybody’s
room for manoeuvre. Minority but long-lasting government now seems
highly likely. Let’s hope both main party leaders have people
thinking hard about how to make it work.

High-speed rail versus driverless cars

My column in The Times on British transport
priorities:

By the time HS2 is fully operational in 2033, more
than a quarter of all cars on our roads will be fully autonomous,
according to a forecast by the consultants KPMG. That may well make
fast trains less urgent, and decongested motorways more so. The
economic case for HS2 is fragile enough before taking future
driverless cars into account.

Last week on the very same day that a House of Lords committee
savaged the economic case for the HS2 railway
— costing £50 billion with contingency — another report by KPMG, for the Society of Motor
Manufacturers and Traders, estimated the potential benefits to
Britain of driverless cars at £51 billion. Per year.

The two are connected.

The Lords report, chaired by Lord Hollick, urged the government
to make incremental improvements to the existing rail network
instead, plus better links between cities in the north. It said it
had not seen evidence that the capacity constraints on the west
coast line warrant building a line to take trains that would go
faster — at 250 mph — than the fastest trains in China, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan and America.

The report also said the cost-benefit analysis for HS2, which
came out with a marginal result, relied on evidence that was “out
of date and unconvincing”, depending for example for its valuation
of non-work travel-time savings on a study done in 1994. About four
fifths of the putative benefits of HS2 are derived from the value
placed on work and non-work travel time — yet these do not even
take into account the fact that time on a train can be used
productively, especially so in the age of the mobile and wi-fi.

Pretty well the first thought in my head when I decide to take
the train for a journey of 100 miles or so, rather than drive, is
that I can use the journey time productively: one of the biggest
attractions of a train is the fact that you don’t have to drive it.
If you didn’t have to drive a car, so a road journey could be
productive (and not spent listening to, say, Test Match
Special), the attraction of the train is less; the car,
after all, can start and end at your front door. In effect, the
driverless revolution could bring the chauffeur-driven experience
to the many.

No doubt we would love to have both driverless cars and faster
trains, as well as HS3 for the north, and a bunch of new airport
runways, and lots of improvements to the road network too. But we
cannot afford everything. (Incidentally, as the Lords report says,
the benefits of HS2 will be received mostly by businessmen, so why
is the government paying for it, not business?) HS3 will cost more
per mile than HS2, so a combination of the two high-speed rail
lines is quite unaffordable. We have to prioritise.

In Britain, roads are just as full as trains. But there is no
innovation on the horizon likely to transform the demand for rail
travel as much as the driverless revolution could transform the
demand for road space.

In cities, driverless cars could cut congestion. A recent simulation at the University of Texas of
a city with driverless cars prowling for business found that
passengers need wait an average of 18 seconds for a driverless
vehicle to show up and that each shared autonomous vehicle could
replace 11 conventional cars. A study by Columbia University concluded that a
driverless vehicle fleet could cut the cost of transport by 80 per
cent compared with a personally owned vehicle driven 10,000 miles a
year — not counting the reduction in parking costs and the value of
time not spent at the wheel.

However, I suspect that on routes between cities, the advent of
driverless cars could increase congestion. When taking an
autonomous car allows you to work, motorway traffic is almost bound
to increase. An older person, for example, currently deterred by
both the difficulty of driving on the M1 through the rain, and the
effort of getting to a station and walking to a train, might today
decide to stay at home.

If in 2030 she can be collected from home and driven direct to
her destination 100 miles away while reading or snoozing, then she
is a bit more likely to make the trip. Since motorways are even
more congested than railways already, that is surely where the
problem will lie. We should be planning now for more lanes on
motorways in 2030.

Driverlessness will arrive in stages. Although Google’s and
other driverless vehicles have clocked up impressive trial journeys
without problems, and for all the experiments going on in Coventry,
Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Bristol with fully autonomous vehicles
right now, I don’t expect to be able to buy a fully driverless car
for about 15 years.

But already half of all cars are connected: I have an app that
lets me check where I left my car and how much is in its tank. It
tells me when I am wandering out of a lane and warns me of
congestion. It tells the garage if I have a fault. Some cars
already park themselves, though the “valet” system where you leave
the car at the entrance to a multi-storey, tell it to find a space
and pay is some years off.

Some cars already have adaptive cruise control, slowing down
automatically if they get too close to the car in front. Soon cars
will have “traffic jam assist” so they can take over in stop-start
traffic at slow speeds. By 2020, KPMG reckons, some cars will have
autopilot on motorways, but the driver will have to be ready to
resume control. By 2025 there should be lightweight, driverless two
-person taxis patrolling cities. Overtaking or navigating rural
lanes may take a long time to master, as will swerving for cats. By
2030 perhaps we can expect fully autonomous cars that can go
anywhere.

They will never be flawless, but nor are drivers. Insurance
needs sorting out. Yet KPMG reckons that the driverless revolution
may save up to 2,500 lives by 2030, and points out that Britain has
a technological head start in all the relevant industries, so there
is every reason to think we can become a centre of excellence in
connected and autonomous driving, and get 320,000 jobs out of
it.

Alongside this kind of stuff, I just cannot help feeling that a
very fast train, built at glacial speed (half a mile a week) over
many years of consultation, review and challenge as it punches
through Nimbyland, and at up to nine times the cost per mile of
French high-speed rail, feels like a white elephant waiting to
happen.

How to save the oceans

My Times column on fish and oceans:

The decision to create the world’s largest marine
reserve around Pitcairn Islands seems to have taken campaigners by
surprise. Environmentalists and celebrities had been pushing for this reserve and others
in British overseas territories (around Ascension Island and the
South Sandwich Islands) but their startled pleasure at George
Osborne’s announcement in the budget implies that they had not
expected to win anything.

You can see why. The government’s progress in creating marine
conservation zones around the British coast has been grudging.
Despite being under an international obligation, it has designated
only 50 of 127 zones recommended by experts. Worse, the MCZs are
not much more than paper preserves: with little enforcement, some
fishing still allowed, but budgets galore for landlubber
bureaucrats to send memos to each other.

The difference may be that the Pitcairn islanders don’t get to
vote in the general election. Marine protection annoys a few
fishermen disproportionately more than it pleases a lot of nature
lovers. But there are four reasons why protected zones in the sea
should be far and away the top priority in conservation right now:
they are desperately needed; they work; the alternatives don’t; and
the technology to police them is coming.

On terra firma, I am a conservation optimist. As the world gets
more productive, we can (and do) reduce the amont of land we need
for food, fuel and fibre, which takes the pressure off wilderness
so that we can start to re-green the continents and bring back
species from the brink of extinction. In the sea, by contrast,
things are still getting horribly worse. What works best on land is
to align incentives with conservation. Problems remain where there
is free access to a common resource, like bushmeat in African
forests.

And that’s how we treat the sea: as a free-for-all, with
inevitable tragedies for the common good. Stock after stock has
been or is being driven to extinction by gold-rush fisheries:
Newfoundland cod, North Sea herring, California abalone, Chesapeake
menhaden, bluefin tuna, Black Sea sturgeon, Caribbean grouper.
Passing laws to ban over-fishing just isn’t working, because it’s a
political process susceptible to lobbying, or because of pirates
and poachers.

At sea we are behaving as our African ancestors did on arrival
in Eurasia and later in the Americas and Australia: we slaughter
our way through the biggest animals first, then shift down the food
chain to the next, then down to the next and so on. On land we
wiped out the mammoths and sabre-tooths first, then bison, gazelles
and rabbits and by the end were left eating grass seeds. In the
sea, it was the same and in many areas we are now down to the
prawns and shellfish. No other predator has the flexibility to do
this “fishing down the food chain”, which is what makes our species
so lethal.

Just as on land, there is growing evidence from around the
world, especially Iceland and New Zealand, that the best way to get
fishermen to cherish rather than punish fish stocks is to set up
transferable quotas under which they can own, buy or sell the right
to a percentage of a total catch set by the government. That turns
them into conservationists trying to maximise the overall catch.
But politicians have proved reluctant to follow this route, so
political control, and political failure, continue to be the story
of fisheries.

Fishing has been by far the dominant factor spoiling
the oceans. This came out clearly in The Unnatural
History of the Sea, a fine book by Callum Roberts, a
University of York marine biologist. Professor Roberts looked up
the accounts of what each sea was like when pristine: encrusted
with reefs of coral and shellfish, boiling with vast shoals of
fish, attended by sharks, dolphins, seals, whales and turtles. We
no longer even know just what a pristine marine ecosystem looks
like, he argues, so we settle for dismal second best when saying
that fisheries have “recovered” — by which we mean moderate shoals
of smaller, less desirable fish in an impoverished ocean.

We tolerate the utter devastation of the seabed by nets and
dredges, increasingly assisted by powerful engines, synthetic
materials, sonar and electronics. Seabeds could be a veritable
aquarium of reefs of water-cleansing shellfish and corals, even in
the North Sea, instead of a waste of silt and rubble. We would not
drag nets through forests.

Over-fishing has been more important than pollution, which —
with the exception of plastic litter in some places and nitrogenous
dead zones in others — has mostly done less harm. Over-fishing has
far more impact than climate change or ocean acidification. Indeed,
the relentless focus by the “green blob” of environmental lobbyists
on the latter has sucked attention and funds from the over-fishing
issue.

For example, National Geographic recently examined the plight of Iceland’s puffins,
kittiwakes and arctic terns, which have failed to breed well for
many years for lack of fish to feed their young — like those of
Shetland and Norway, too. It blamed global warming and mercury
pollution; it did not even mention over-fishing. Yet this makes no
sense: the puffins, kittiwakes and arctic terns of the Farne
Islands off the Northumberland coast are thriving at the southern,
warm limit of their range, and closest to industry, but where
sandeels are not exploited. The climate obsession has not served
the conservation movement well: it has been a red herring.

We know that marine reserves work: examples from New Zealand,
Florida, Chile and elsewhere show dramatic results. A scallop
no-take reserve in Lamlash Bay off the Isle of Arran has increased the number and size of scallops
inside the reserve and nearby. At Cabo Pulmo on the Mexican coast,
where a no-fishing reserve was established in 1995, there has been an explosion in the number of
fish, including an eleven-fold increase in large predators such as
groupers and sharks: it’s a glimpse of what oceans could look
like.

It is not too late. The restoration of the oceans can happen.
Most populations of great whales — blues, sperm, humpback, fin,
right, bowhead — are now growing by up to 8 per cent a year.
Antarctic penguins and seals are rebuilding their populations.

It is surely not beyond the wit of man to find ways to do the
same for bluefin tuna, albatross, sharks, halibut and giant cod. In
the days of satellites, it should be possible to insist that every
fishing boat has a transponder fitted so it can be tracked. Maybe
the green blob could use some of its vast budget on such
things.

Carbon capture and storage is not coming to the rescue

My Times column on carbon capture:

Carbon dioxide is not the most urgent problem
facing humanity, compared with war, extremism, poverty and disease.
But most presidents, popes and film stars think it is, so I must be
wrong. For the purposes of this article let’s assume they are
right. What’s the best way of solving the problem?

Whichever party wins the election will be legally committed to
cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. About
90 per cent of Britain’s total energy still comes from fossil fuels
and bio-energy, both of which produce carbon dioxide. The expansion
of nuclear, wind and solar is not going nearly fast enough, because
electricity comprises just one third of our energy use. If we are
to decarbonise transport and heating too, we will have to switch to
electric cars, and electric radiators, which means generating three
times as much electricity. Only aeroplanes would be left using
fossil fuels.

Leave aside for now the problem of the intermittency of
renewables: how to charge your car, or cook on your electric hob
when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Also, the
rest of the world is not following suit: fossil fuel use is growing
rapidly and maintaining market share. The concentration of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, as measured on a Hawaiian mountain top,
is climbing relentlessly.

The science and technology committee of the House of Lords (on
which I sit) told the government last week in a report on the resilience of the electricity
system that it has not sufficiently informed the public about
the “trilemma” facing policymakers. We cannot — in the present
state of technology — make the electricity supply low-carbon,
resilient and low-cost all at the same time. Decarbonisation is not
achievable if politicians wish to restrain energy prices.

Which leaves plan B: to continue using fossil fuels but extract
the carbon dioxide from power station exhaust by “carbon capture
and storage” (CCS). The Energy Technology Institute told our
committee that CCS is the only way to keep the cost of
decarbonisation from raising energy prices by an extra £10 billion
a year by 2030 and “several tens of billions a year” by 2050.

When the topic of CCS comes up, I admit to being unsure whom to
believe. On the one hand there are those who say: it is ready to
go, it solves the problem, what are we waiting for? On the other,
those who say it’s a costly white elephant going nowhere.

My own self-interest as a landlord of a Northumbrian coal
producer would suggest that I should be in the first category,
because it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for the fossil-fuel
industry. If CCS were to work, then we could press ahead with
fossil fuels and stop worrying. But I’m not convinced it will do
the trick.

It is technically possible to extract CO2 from an exhaust
stream. The recipe is as follows: bubble the exhaust gases
through a caustic brew of chemicals called amines, which grab the
CO2. Then place the brew back on the stove, bring the heat up to
120C and the CO2 fizzes back off again. Capture it and inject
safely into an oil well to enhance the recovery of more oil, or
store it underground. Save the caustic brew and re-use.

The first problem is that the process reduces the efficiency of
the power station. A normal coal-fired power station runs at about
35 per cent efficiency — that is to say, a bit more than a third of
the heat energy in the steam gets turned into electricity. Adding
CCS means that the efficiency drops to maybe 26 per
cent. The cost correspondingly goes up substantially, as do
people’s electricity bills: according to the industry, it would
roughly treble the price to about the same as power from an
offshore wind farm.

The biggest working demonstration of CCS began operating last
October in Saskatchewan in Canada, where SaskPower says its new
coal-fired plant is exceeding expectations, generating about
160 megawatts, 40 of which are used to capture the carbon dioxide,
leaving about 120 megawatts for the grid. The 2,300 tonnes a day of
captured carbon dioxide are 99 per cent pure and are used to
enhance recovery of oil near by. But this is a small unit by
coal-fired power station standards and only pays because the nearby
oil industry is prepared to buy the CO2.

Nor is it without risks, so the greens are against it, though
they would be anyway because they hate the idea of fossil fuels
getting a new lease of life. Injecting huge quantities of carbon
dioxide into the ground risks causing small earthquakes, and
possible leakage, with the (remote) potential to suffocate a nearby
town.

The British government has been dangling a £1 billion carrot in
front of the energy industry to get CCS going. A few years ago, Eon
and Scottish Power both dropped out. Then last year two projects
signed contracts, one in Yorkshire, and one in Peterhead in
Scotland. In the latter case, SSE, the energy company, and Shell propose to pump the CO2 out under the North
Sea, not to help to enhance the recovery of oil but to justify
putting off the decommissioning of an oil platform called
Goldeneye.

Similar delays and cancellations are affecting CCS around the
world. Whereas the United Nations once forecast that at least 20
large-scale demonstration plants would be on line by 2020, in
practice there will be none. Given that electricity is
only a small part of the energy system, if CCS is to solve our
problems it has to roll out to not just every coal and gas power
station on the planet, but to three times as many — once we have
electrified heat and transport.

However, all is not lost. Last week scientists at the University
of California, Berkeley, announced the discovery of a new class of
compounds that scrub carbon dioxide from exhaust much more cheaply.
Called diamine-appended metal-organic-frameworks, they require only
half as much heating as the conventional process. Another team at
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, also in California, is getting good results with microcapsules of
baking soda. In other words, it is possible that chemists will come
up with something much cheaper — but it will take time to find out
if such ideas can be scaled up efficiently.

For now, though, there is no way to meet our self-imposed
decarbonisation target without bankrupting the country. It’s not
more effort and political will we need; it’s more research.

Fossil fuels are not finished, not obsolete, not a bad thing

This essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal and later in shorter form
in the Sunday Times

The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in
recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run
out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will
price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford
the climate consequences of burning them.

These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very
healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and
environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will
continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have
contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and
progress.

In 2013, about 87% of the energy that
the world consumed came from fossil fuels, a figure
that—remarkably—was unchanged from 10 years before. This roughly
divides into three categories of fuel and three categories of use:
oil used mainly for transport, gas used mainly for heating, and
coal used mainly for electricity.

Over this period, the overall volume of fossil-fuel consumption
has increased dramatically, but with an encouraging environmental
trend: a diminishing amount of carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of
energy produced. The biggest contribution to decarbonizing the
energy system has been the switch from high-carbon coal to
lower-carbon gas in electricity generation.

On a global level, renewable energy sources such as wind and
solar have contributed hardly at all to the drop in carbon
emissions, and their modest growth has merely made up for a decline
in the fortunes of zero-carbon nuclear energy. (The reader should
know that I have an indirect interest in coal through the ownership
of land in Northern England on which it is mined, but I nonetheless
applaud the displacement of coal by gas in recent years.)

The argument that fossil fuels will soon run out is dead, at
least for a while. The collapse of the price of oil
over the past six months is the result of abundance: an
inevitable consequence of the high oil prices of recent years,
which stimulated innovation in hydraulic fracturing, horizontal
drilling, seismology and information technology. The U.S.—the
country with the oldest and most developed hydrocarbon fields—has
found itself once again, surprisingly, at the top of the
energy-producing league, rivaling Saudi Arabia in oil and Russia in
gas.

The shale genie is now out of the bottle. Even if the current
low price drives out some high-cost oil producers—in the North Sea,
Canada, Russia, Iran and offshore, as well as in America—shale
drillers can step back in whenever the price rebounds. As Mark Hill
of Allegro Development Corporation argued last week, the
frackers are currently experiencing their own version of Moore’s
law: a rapid fall in the cost and time it takes to drill a well,
along with a rapid rise in the volume of hydrocarbons they are able
to extract.

And the shale revolution has yet to go global. When it does, oil
and gas in tight rock formations will give the world ample supplies
of hydrocarbons for decades, if not centuries. Lurking in the wings
for later technological breakthroughs is methane hydrate, a
seafloor source of gas that exceeds in quantity all the world’s
coal, oil and gas put together.

So those who predict the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels are
merely repeating the mistakes of the U.S. presidential commission
that opined in 1922 that “already the output of gas has begun to
wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.” Or
President Jimmy Carter when he announced on television in 1977 that
“we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world
by the end of the next decade.”

That fossil fuels are finite is a red herring. The Atlantic
Ocean is finite, but that does not mean that you risk bumping into
France if you row out of a harbor in Maine. The buffalo of the
American West were infinite, in the sense that they could breed,
yet they came close to extinction. It is an ironic truth that no
nonrenewable resource has ever run dry, while renewable
resources—whales, cod, forests, passenger pigeons—have frequently
done so.

The second argument for giving up fossil fuels is that new
rivals will shortly price them out of the market. But it is not
happening. The great hope has long been nuclear energy, but even if
there is a rush to build new nuclear power stations over the next
few years, most will simply replace old ones due to close. The
world’s nuclear output is down from 6% of world energy consumption
in 2003 to 4% today. It is forecast to inch back up to just 6.7% by
2035, according the Energy Information Administration.

Nuclear’s problem is cost. In meeting the safety concerns of
environmentalists, politicians and regulators added requirements
for extra concrete, steel and pipework, and even more for extra
lawyers, paperwork and time. The effect was to make nuclear plants
into huge and lengthy boondoggles with no competition or
experimentation to drive down costs. Nuclear is now able to compete
with fossil fuels only when it is subsidized.

As for renewable energy, hydroelectric is the biggest and
cheapest supplier, but it has the least capacity for expansion.
Technologies that tap the energy of waves and tides remain
unaffordable and impractical, and most experts think that this
won’t change in a hurry. Geothermal is a minor player for now. And
bioenergy—that is, wood, ethanol made from corn or sugar cane, or
diesel made from palm oil—is proving an ecological disaster: It
encourages deforestation and food-price hikes that cause
devastation among the world’s poor, and per unit of energy
produced, it creates even more carbon dioxide than coal.

Wind power, for all the public money spent on its expansion, has
inched up to—wait for it—1% of world energy consumption in 2013.
Solar, for all the hype, has not even managed that: If we round to
the nearest whole number, it accounts for 0% of world energy
consumption.

Both wind and solar are entirely reliant on subsidies for such
economic viability as they have. World-wide, the subsidies given to
renewable energy currently amount to roughly $10 per gigajoule:
These sums are paid by consumers to producers, so they tend to go
from the poor to the rich, often to landowners (I am a landowner
and can testify that I receive and refuse many offers of risk-free
wind and solar subsidies).

It is true that some countries subsidize the use of fossil
fuels, but they do so at a much lower rate—the world average is
about $1.20 per gigajoule—and these are mostly subsidies for
consumers (not producers), so they tend to help the poor, for whom
energy costs are a disproportionate share of spending.

The costs of renewable energy are coming down, especially in the
case of solar. But even if solar panels were free, the power they
produce would still struggle to compete with fossil fuel—except in
some very sunny locations—because of all the capital equipment
required to concentrate and deliver the energy. This is to say
nothing of the great expanses of land on which solar facilities
must be built and the cost of retaining sufficient conventional
generator capacity to guarantee supply on a dark, cold, windless
evening.

The two fundamental problems that renewables face are that they
take up too much space and produce too little energy. Consider
Solar Impulse, the solar-powered airplane now flying around the
world. Despite its huge wingspan (similar to a 747), slow speed and
frequent stops, the only cargo that it can carry is the pilots
themselves. That is a good metaphor for the limitations of
renewables.

To run the U.S. economy entirely on wind would require a wind
farm the size of Texas, California and New Mexico combined—backed
up by gas on windless days. To power it on wood would require a
forest covering two-thirds of the U.S., heavily and continually
harvested.

John Constable, who will head a new Energy Institute at the
University of Buckingham in Britain, points out that the trickle of
energy that human beings managed to extract from wind, water and
wood before the Industrial Revolution placed a great limit on
development and progress. The incessant toil of farm laborers
generated so little surplus energy in the form of food for men and
draft animals that the accumulation of capital, such as machinery,
was painfully slow. Even as late as the 18th century, this
energy-deprived economy was sufficient to enrich daily life for
only a fraction of the population.

Our old enemy, the second law of thermodynamics, is the problem
here. As a teenager’s bedroom generally illustrates, left to its
own devices, everything in the world becomes less ordered, more
chaotic, tending toward “entropy,” or thermodynamic equilibrium. To
reverse this tendency and make something complex, ordered and
functional requires work. It requires energy.

The more energy you have, the more intricate, powerful and
complex you can make a system. Just as human bodies need energy to
be ordered and functional, so do societies. In that sense, fossil
fuels were a unique advance because they allowed human beings to
create extraordinary patterns of order and complexity—machines and
buildings—with which to improve their lives.

The result of this great boost in energy is what the economic
historian and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls the
Great Enrichment. In the case of the U.S., there has been a
roughly 9,000% increase in the value of goods and services
available to the average American since 1800, almost all of which
are made with, made of, powered by or propelled by fossil
fuels.

Still, more than a billion people on the planet have yet to get
access to electricity and to experience the leap in living
standards that abundant energy brings. This is not just an
inconvenience for them: Indoor air pollution from wood fires kills
four million people a year. The next time that somebody at a rally
against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of
her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying
today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

Notice, too, the ways in which fossil fuels have contributed to
preserving the planet. As the American author and fossil-fuels
advocate Alex Epstein points out in a bravely unfashionable book,
“The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” the use of coal halted and then
reversed the deforestation of Europe and North America. The turn to
oil halted the slaughter of the world’s whales and seals for their
blubber. Fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land
needed to produce a given amount of food, thus feeding a growing
population while sparing land for wild nature.

To throw away these immense economic, environmental and moral
benefits, you would have to have a very good reason. The one most
often invoked today is that we are wrecking the planet’s climate.
But are we?

Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century,
the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no
increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no
acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but
Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are
agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to
an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the
amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since
1980.

That carbon-dioxide emissions should cause warming is not a new
idea. In 1938, the British scientist Guy Callender thought that he
could already detect warming as a result of carbon-dioxide
emissions. He reckoned, however, that this was “likely to prove
beneficial to mankind” by shifting northward the climate where
cultivation was possible.

Only in the 1970s and 1980s did scientists begin to say that the
mild warming expected as a direct result of burning fossil
fuels—roughly a degree Celsius per doubling of carbon-dioxide
concentrations in the atmosphere—might be greatly amplified by
water vapor and result in dangerous warming of two to four degrees
a century or more. That “feedback” assumption of high “sensitivity”
remains in virtually all of the mathematical models used to this
day by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or
IPCC.

And yet it is increasingly possible that it is wrong. As Patrick
Michaels of the libertarian Cato Institute has written, since 2000, 14
peer-reviewed papers, published by 42 authors, many of whom are key
contributors to the reports of the IPCC, have concluded that
climate sensitivity is low because net feedbacks are modest. They
arrive at this conclusion based on observed temperature changes,
ocean-heat uptake and the balance between warming and cooling
emissions (mainly sulfate aerosols). On average, they find
sensitivity to be 40% lower than the models on which the IPCC
relies.

If these conclusions are right, they would explain the failure
of the Earth’s surface to warm nearly as fast as predicted over the
past 35 years, a time when—despite carbon-dioxide levels rising
faster than expected—the warming rate has never reached even
two-tenths of a degree per decade and has slowed down to virtually
nothing in the past 15 to 20 years. This is one reason the latest
IPCC report did not give a “best estimate” of sensitivity and why
it lowered its estimate of near-term warming.

Most climate scientists remain reluctant to abandon the models
and take the view that the current “hiatus” has merely delayed
rapid warming. A turning point to dangerously rapid warming could
be around the corner, even though it should have shown up by now.
So it would be wise to do something to cut our emissions, so long
as that something does not hurt the poor and those struggling to
reach a modern standard of living.

We should encourage the switch from coal to gas in the
generation of electricity, provide incentives for energy
efficiency, get nuclear power back on track and keep developing
solar power and electricity storage. We should also invest in
research on ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, by
fertilizing the ocean or fixing it through carbon capture and
storage. Those measures all make sense. And there is every reason
to promote open-ended research to find some unexpected new energy
technology.

The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the
environmental movement insists upon: subsidizing wealthy crony
capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive,
land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to
give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.

More food from less land

My Times column on farm yields and land
sparing:

If something drops out of the news, it usually
means it is going well. Mad cow disease killed nobody last year;
Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious
lick; the Somerset levels are not flooded this winter. There were
only two localised famines last year — in South Sudan and the
Central African Republic — both caused by conflict, rather than
drought or population pressure. That’s because the feeding of the
world is going so well it’s not news.

New figures from the United Nations’ Food and
Agriculture Organisation show that the world’s cereal harvest,
which provides more than half of the calories that humans eat,
broke a new record last year at 2.54 billion tonnes — an
astonishing 20 per cent higher than ten years ago. Thanks to better
techniques and seeds, the world’s farmers (of which I declare I am
one, in a mostly hands-off way) have provided a growing population
with more food per head, year after year, largely without
cultivating extra land or using extra water or chemicals.

Maize, rice and wheat — the big three cereals — each broke
records in 2014. So why do we hear frequent cries that the world
soon will be or is already struggling to feed itself?

“The world is closer to a food crisis than most people realise”
headlined one newspaper in 2012. “The food-apocalypse is already
upon us”, the same paper shrieked last year. “Rising temperatures
reduce global wheat production” was the title of a widely cited academic paper in
2014.

The title was stretching it somewhat since global wheat
production has been increasing. The paper was about predictions
from a mathematical model that if average global temperatures rise
by one degree (which at the rates of warming experienced over the past
35 years would take seven decades), and if farmers do absolutely
nothing to adapt, such as switching to more heat-tolerant maize in
some places, then wheat production might drop by — wait for it — 6
per cent. That’s less than 0.1 per cent a year, when it is going up
by 2 per cent a year.

And once Africa, the gigantic continent whose average yields
have barely budged in 50 years, gets access to plentiful
fertiliser, global harvests will increase even faster. It’s not
just plants that are getting better at giving us what we need
thanks to science; so are animals. The rate at which cows, pigs and
especially chickens convert grain into meat is also going up
steadily.

Thus even as a richer world turns increasingly to meat and other
luxuries, we can cut the human footprint on the planet. Jesse
Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, calculates that if we continue raising average
yields at the current rate, stop putting 40 per cent of America’s
maize into cars in the form of ethanol, and reduce food wastage,
then, despite the rising population, an area the size of India
could be released from agriculture over the next 50 years and
handed back to Mother Nature.

There is one exception to this happy picture. Europe has seen
its wheat yields stagnate. If wheat and barley yields had gone on
increasing in Europe at the rate they did in the 1980s, they would
now be 30 per cent higher. A study published last week ruled out the fashionable
excuse for this — climate change. “Climate trends can account for
only 10 per cent of the stagnation in European wheat and barley
yields,” it said.

Actually, there is good evidence that carbon dioxide emissions
are measurably increasing the growth rates and yields of crops.
After all, greenhouse owners pump CO2 into their glasshouses to
make tomatoes grow faster. Studies confirm that crops and forests are growing
faster and yielding more today than 50 years ago because of the
extra carbon dioxide in the air, especially in arid areas. This
phenomenon has cut the appropriation of land for farming by about
13 per cent compared with what it would otherwise be, resulting in
more land being left wild.

The authors of the paper on European yields conclude that the
explanation for the stagnation lies mostly in “changes in
agriculture and environmental policies”. That is to say, just as
the European Union cannot grow its economy, so it cannot grow its
harvests, and for similar reasons. The fault lies in European
officialdom’s perpetual war on innovation in agriculture — its
precautionary and bureaucratic de facto opposition, at the behest
of what the former environment secretary Owen Paterson calls the
Green Blob, to safer pesticides and genetic modification, both of
which demonstrably boost yields, save inputs and spare land
elsewhere in the world.

As Britain’s new life science minister, George Freeman, put it
on a recent visit to Brussels, EU anti-science regulation risks
condemning the continent to the slow lane of the 21st century
bio-economy, as evidenced by the announcement of the chemical firm
BASF that it was leaving Europe. He added with refreshing
directness: “If the EU won’t put in place a more supportive policy
framework, we will use our reform, renegotiate and referendum
strategy to pursue the progress we need.”

There are two ways to try to achieve both abundant food and
resurgent wildlife in the 21st century. One is to make farming as
wildlife-friendly as possible, essentially sharing the bounty with
insects and birds, but needing lots of land. The other is to coax
as much from each acre as possible for ourselves, but spare lots of
acres for wild vegetation and its wild consumers.

This second strategy, of land sparing, is proving more
successful. If we tolerated weeds and pests in fields to the degree
we did 50 years ago, we would need more than twice as many acres to
feed today’s population.

The ultimate land sparing policy is to grow more food indoors. A
Japanese entrepreneur named Shigeharu Shimamura is now using low-energy, pink LED lights and
hydroponic irrigation to produce 10,000 heads of lettuce a day
inside a semiconductor factory that was damaged in the 2011 tsunami
— occupying 2 per cent of the land that would be required if the
lettuces were out of doors. He uses 99 per cent less water and no
pesticides, because pests are denied entry to the factory.

The late, great science writer Nigel Calder once wrote that a
Martian would conclude that the masters of planet Earth are three
species of grass — rice, wheat and maize — which have somehow
persuaded huge numbers of apes to toil day and night to clear
forests, irrigate deserts and kill weeds on their behalf.

Scandals don't dent reverence for the BBC and the NHS

My latest column in The Times:

The latest report into Jimmy Savile’s astonishing freedom
to roam the wards of Stoke Mandeville hospital will not lead to the
end of the National Health Service. Nor will the forthcoming report that apparently finds a
“systemic cover-up” of the unnecessary deaths of babies and mothers
at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
between 2004 and 2013. The NHS itself will survive these scandals,
as it survived the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal of
2005-2008. The immortality of large public-sector monopolies is a
given.

Likewise, although the Jimmy Savile affair has caused crises and
resignations at the BBC, nobody for a moment believed that the BBC
itself would close. But why not exactly? Private firms that get
into this much trouble generally do vanish, by takeover or
bankruptcy. Castlebeck, the company that ran the Winterbourne View
care home where scandalous treatment was exposed in 2011, went into
administration two years later. Pollypeck, Enron and Barings no
longer exist.

Of course, neither the BBC nor the NHS deserve to be shut down
because one criminal was allowed free rein by one set of managers
in years past. There are plenty of good people in the NHS and the
BBC who do not deserve punishment for the sins of others (though
the same was true of Barings). But private companies know they have
no guarantee that they will continue to exist — and it affects the
way they behave.

Perhaps a form of mortality for public bodies would be a good
idea. After all, knowing what we do about self-justification in
public bodies, the NHS and the BBC might well be on course to last
as long as the Church of England.

Indeed, as this analogy suggests, it is not just that public
institutions survive scandals; they continue to be admired. The NHS
is generally considered an object of devotion. We are touchingly
grateful that it saves lives, even though that is what we pay it to
do, through the nose. The terrible cruelty and chaos of the Mid
Staffordshire and Jimmy Savile affairs does surprisingly little to
tarnish the halo, as the coming election campaign will
demonstrate.

The BBC, despite experiencing “a succession of disasters of its
own making” remains “a widely admired and trusted institution”, in
the words of John Whittingdale, chairman of the
House of Commons culture, media and sport committee. His committee
recommends continuing to pay for the BBC through a flat tax on
televisions that hits the poor relatively harder, even though that
is “becoming harder and harder to justify” in the internet age.

Amid plenty of dross, the BBC makes some fine programmes — but
so it should with £4 billion a year in predictable income. The NHS
provides some fine care and cure — but so it should with £100
billion a year in guaranteed income. Aldi, Morrisons and Waitrose
reliably provide lots of remarkably affordable and often fine food
without any guaranteed income but we don’t treat them with
devotion. Quite the reverse: we moan about them.

Imagine if a large supermarket firm had maltreated, and
sometimes killed, its customers in one of its stores the same way
as the NHS had done in Mid Staffs and Morecambe Bay. That company
would have lost its chief executive immediately, been deserted by
its customers, found itself hammered on the stock market and then
been taken over by its rivals — and rightly so. The best a grocery
firm can hope for is to be taken for granted; it is never going to
be celebrated at an Olympic opening ceremony.

Of the 100 firms that made up the FTSE 100 in 1999 when it last
peaked at the current level, 22 no longer exist at all: including Allied
Domecq, BAA, Corus, Cadbury Schweppes and EMI. The possibility of
extinction by takeover or bankruptcy leads businesses to seek
perpetual innovation and reform. This generates improving living
standards for consumers.

Imagine if you are chief executive of either a private company
or a public institution. In both cases you are faced with the
choice of funking change or embarking on an exhausting and
dangerous course of pushing people into new ways of doing things at
some risk to your own job. In a private company, the possibility of
corporate death nudges you towards the latter course. In a public
institution, not so much.

That is one reason the internet, though its embryonic form was
invented in the public sector, did not explode upon the world until
private firms started using it. That is why post offices failed to
invent mobile telephony, the BBC did not invent social media and
the NHS does not develop most drugs. That is why private sector
productivity has increased markedly in the past 15 years while
public sector productivity has not budged an inch.
(Parenthetically, I keep asking people how it is conceivably
possible not to increase public-sector productivity in the age of
the internet, and I have yet to hear a convincing answer.)

Mortal public institutions do sometimes exist. One of Margaret
Thatcher’s best ideas was that of the urban development
corporations — local planning monopolies with limited lifetimes
charged with transforming city centres. Some were outstanding
successes and it was the acute awareness of the
roughly ten-year deadline that helped them to be so.

Conversely, there are also immortal private institutions, such
as General Motors, or maybe HSBC — firms that are considered too
big to fail and therefore know that they will persist whatever
happens. These grow to resemble public institutions such as the BBC
and the NHS in their gigantism, their lack of innovation and their
tendency to block the process of creative destruction by which
innovation spreads to the benefit of consumers.

As public sector bodies proliferate in number, some way of
making them mortal is not a bad idea. If you were starting from
scratch, and acting in the best interests of the taxpayer, you
might award the franchise to run public broadcasting, national
healthcare, perhaps even the defence of the realm, the civil
service, the legal profession and the established church, to the
best bidder every five or ten years, just as is done with rail
franchises and the national lottery — or, for that matter, Ten
Downing Street. Of course, the BBC and the NHS (and those other
institutions) are much too big for that to be conceivable. Too big
to fail, in a phrase.