The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

(British aristocrats were six inches taller than the average in 1800; today they are less than two inches taller),

The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750. He consumes fifty times as much power and 250 times as much transport (measured in passenger-miles travelled), too.

America’s horse population peaked at twenty-one million animals in 1915; at the time about one-third of all agricultural land was devoted to feeding them.

There are now over two billion acres of ‘secondary’ tropical rainforest, regrowing after farmers left for the cities, and it is already almost as rich in biodiversity as primary forest.

Farm subsidies and import tariffs on cotton, sugar, rice and other products cost Africa $500 billion a year in lost export opportunities – or twelve times the entire aid budget to the continent.

The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation.

Innovators are therefore in the business of sharing. It is the most important thing they do, for unless they share their innovation it can have no benefit for them or for anybody else.

the trends are getting better, not worse: the radioactive dose his sons receive today from weapons tests and nuclear accidents is 90 per cent down on what their father received in the early 1960s and is anyway less than 1 per cent of natural background radiation.

The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.

Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.

Meanwhile a Spanish study confirms that wind power subsidies destroy jobs: for each worker who moves from conventional electricity generation to renewable electricity generation, ‘two jobs at a similar rate of pay must be forgone elsewhere in the economy, otherwise the funds to pay for the excess costs of renewable generation cannot be provided.’

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