Americans fleeing to Canada due to global warming, and other environmental issues

"Rather than spending money only on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, [scientist James Lovelock] believes that [Canada's] government would be wise to develop plans to house and deal with the millions of American wetbacks who will soon wash up on our shores. 'This is going to become a very habitable part of the globe and people are going to want to come here in vast numbers.'"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/apocalypse-now/article1172056/
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html

The global recession has kind of put environmental policy and climate change on the back burner, but ideas of environmental apocalypse are getting more prevalent, especially with reminders such as the BP spill. We are familiar with the various disaster scenarios caused by the Earth's average temp going up a degree or two, due to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Apparently our neighbors to the north are preparing for milder weather in the future, and for the influx of desperate people from the south similar to the Dust Bowl migration (another man-made eco-disaster). We may or may not believe that human activities are contributing to global warming, but no one can deny that more humans on the planet, consuming more and more resources and polluting more and more ecosystems, is also a major environmental concern. But how do we ethically and fairly manage the human population, as part of an overall sustainability strategy? Governments can't even agree on how to bail out Greece, so I'm not sure how we can tackle larger problems with uglier choices.

I'm sure you economists are familiar with the Malthusian model of population growth. Biological proliferation is exponential, yet Malthus thought that the growth in our sustenance capacity was linear, so at some point we would outgrow our resources supply, suffer a population crash, and then hover around a new equilibrium, as other species do. Some 1960s era scientists like Paul Ehrlich also thought that our species (numbering just 3B at the time of his writings) would overshoot the planet's ability to sustain us, and face a population and environmental calamity by 1979 or so. But those bright people were wrong, because they failed to predict the influences of technology and economics to enhance our survival (in the short term at least). 

Technology and innovation have allowed humans to continually raise our global carrying capacity, and create stout defenses against most other predatory animals and nature's fury. From the Stone Age until the Industrial Revolution, the global population was fairly steady around 100-300M, but then really took off since the Spanish Flu. Medical advances and sanitary practices have severely mitigated or even abolished some diseases. Genetically-modified (GM) agriculture and food science have improved crop yields many times over, and permitted foods to last longer. Water purification and management have made that resource safer and more accessible. And global economics in the Information Age have allowed buyer, laborer, and seller to connect on an unprecedented scale, boosting productivity and wealth in almost every nation. But some of this has come at a cost. Huge tracts of nature were destroyed to clear land for farms and ranches, and industrial pollution/urban sprawl have wiped out other areas. High-density animal husbandry has increased the risk of animal-human disease transmission, as we have seen with avian flu. GM strains have overtaken local species and disrupted environmental equilibrium. Over-used anti-microbials have weakened human immune systems and unleashed drug-resistant strains. Mass marketing has convinced consumers that they need to buy all sorts of single-use, non-biodegradable junk to be happy. So ironically, the very ingenious innovations that allowed humans to dominate the globe and vastly increase our numbers may be the causes of major population loss and species decline in the future. And of course humans were only able to increase our carrying capacity by endangering or exterminating other species and ecosystems in the process.

All the technologies that I mentioned were not necessarily developed out of human need or altruism, but instead out of a desire for profit. This is a cynical simplification, but even if individual inventors were benevolent, then needed to partner with a profit-seeking company or self-serving government to mass produce and market their creations. Economics doesn’t necessarily obey natural laws. Free-marketeers probably believe that wealth and humankind can increase indefinitely. But wealth is a human construct, and the resources that wealth is built on do have finite limits. Even “virtual capital” like Facebook still requires silicon chips and hydrocarbon-fueled electricity to exist. People are debating whether we have reached "peak oil" or not, but what about peak grain, water, etc.? They will come to be at some point, despite mighty efforts to postpone them. Conservation of mass. Nature strives to achieve equilibrium, but businesses exist to maximize profit and countries exist to take care of their own, even if it means breaking the law and putting people and the environment in danger. Companies influence our governments and employ many of our citizens, so when push comes to shove, we may find ourselves siding with them instead of the planet and the poor. Therefore, the only way I see our species being able to sustainably continue its growth is to cease all R&D and economic activity not related to food/water production and environmental protection/restoration, in order to reduce waste and focus on planetary survival. But this would require a global dictatorship in order to abolish profiteering and distribute resources on a need basis. Unfortunately such command economies like North Korea have had a horrible track record though.

Maybe population shocks and environmental collapses won’t be as drastic as Easter Island, because the planet changes slowly, and humans can be very adaptable when we put our minds to it. But if population losses do occur, they won’t be felt evenly. Rich nations can close their borders and distribute drugs during pandemics, or so we hope. Rich nations can afford to overpay for food, water, and energy during shortages, or use their armed forces to commandeer access. Rich nations are mostly geographically situated to avoid the harshest effects of global warming, and have the resources to migrate to greener pastures if needed. Rich nations, despite being much less populated, are bigger culprits of resource waste and pollution, yet sadly it will be the already suffering poor that suffer more. I don't buy the racist argument (at least to me) that poorer nations are killing the planet because of their birth rates. You've seen those satellite images of the world at night - the lights, which correlate with emissions/consumption, aren't on in the Third World. Their life expectancies and standard of living are much lower, so ten rural Rwandans aren't killing the planet as fast as one suburban American. Yes more poor pre-industrial people can be a problem, but more so for other humans than the planet, since Earth doesn't really care about a little more subsistence farming and human defecation going on. "Semi-poor" people in Brazil, Nigeria, and China are more of a concern, because for the first time in their history they can afford the heavy machinery to clear-cut forests and strip mine in order to make a living, which endangers other species and habitats, causing all sorts of unforeseen havoc on the natural balance. And of course rich nations enable this by selling them the equipment, providing a market for their unsustainably-harvested resources, and investing in and managing their operations to make money. We can't really blame the poor, because when you have nothing else, people become capital. A village with 100 kids has a better survival outlook than one with 50. I'm sure many people in the G20 would want to have more kids, but just can't afford them. So our economics have evolved from a facilitator of fertility to a limiter.

Some might argue that the rich will come to the poor’s defense. Have we so far? Rich nations stay rich partly by keeping the poor down. The top killers in the world are respiratory diseases, tuberculosis, and malaria – all cheaply preventable/treatable and affecting younger, productive people in the Third World. Yet the rich spend so much more money on cancer and cardiovascular treatments, because that is what we die from when we’re old. Tony Blair helped set up a fund so that rich nations would contribute a measly 1% GDP to virtually eliminate poverty (the merits of his plan are another discussion), but so far most of the G20 are behind on their pledged donations, and the global recession has put the project further on hold. And speaking of that, we have enough environmental crises to worry about, but now rich nations are creating their own socioeconomic calamities that also hurt people in the Third World by cutting off credit and increasing protectionism.

It will get really interesting when rich nations (and their symbiotic growth nations like China and Brazil) end up fighting each other over resources and environmental issues, and sadly we may witness it in our lifetimes, or it's already ongoing in the shadows.  


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Thanks for your comments. Yes surely if I had to rank expenditures for wars, Western illnesses, and Third World illnesses, I would put war at the lowest priority - especially our current conflicts. I understand why our government would prefer to research expensive cures for Western diseases over more cheaply treatable Third World killers, I am just questioning the morality and even efficiency of that. Chloroquinine, malaria nets, antibiotics, and HIV/TB drugs are sure thing solutions for millions of patients. Companies and the NIH spend billions of dollars on diabetes, cancer, cholesterol, and neurological research that gets next to nowhere. Even some current "breakthrough" cancer treatments on the market have a median extension of life of about 5 months, at a cost of $20k/month to Medicare or one's HMO/PPO. I can see why we would want to fund such efforts, but in my view it's not a great use of precious resources.

Sure, debt/GDP is a way to measure a nation's financial health, but when I mean rich nations, I think GDP is a decent metric. How productive is that country and how much do the people and government spend? Obviously Sierra Leone and Nigeria are rich in some resources but poor by many other measures. America may be rich in wealth/consumption but poor in less quantifiable measures of life quality.

Conflict is not 100% guaranteed, but it's like 99% guaranteed, if you consider human nature and history. Surely there is a chance that we will reform and improve our behavior before it's too late, but it's a small chance. When the pressure is on, people's true colors show and nations will stop at nothing to protect what they think is rightfully theirs. Brazil is not Switzerland. In fact their rich-poor wealth gap is the biggest in the world, even more than Mexico and the US. Brazil may be externally at peace (though its military imports are the highest in South America, but per capita/per $GDP they're much lower), but internally there is major racism between the fairer skinned minority who own everything and run the country, and the indigenous/black masses. Many native Amazon tribes have been victims of injustice and are not represented by their national government. The poor in the favellas are victims of drugs violence and social neglect. But yes, Pakistan and India have avoided nuclear war, though various skirmishes over the years have claimed dozens of lives, and maybe the attack in Mumbai and violence in Afghanistan can also be partially attributed to their conflict.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_con_arm_imp-military-conventional-arms-imports

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GDP might not be the best measure for the next century; after all, something like software isn't included in the standard GDP measure and I image other "knowledge economy" outputs (e.g. intellectual property) is also not included in the measure.  Just as developing nations have been able to deploy infrastructure in one-tenth the time spent in the industrialized world (e.g. nothing to 3G telecommunications in 10 years v/s 100 years of the Bell evolution) it could be the case that by focusing on GDP as a measure of wealth we make ourselves more susceptible to the "blind spot" you mentioned with respect to American life quality and even to the actual difference between "rich" and "poor".

Also, I guess we have to agree to disagree about the potential for conflict; I can understand your point (i.e. a simple regression on the data shows a trend) but I also think relying on history alone can be a... well... regressive way of thinking.  After all, our country did get sick of "return of the neo-cons" after a few years, yeah?

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I agree about the limitations of GDP. But for now it's a quick and dirty measure that almost tells you enough of what you want to know. But there is a move to add more "knowledge capital" to the GDP in a few years. I think they'll try to take into account worker training/development, and more R&D type value. But I think it's hard to quantify quality of life. The UN/WHO measures I think include GDP, life expectancy, and subjective surveys, but I'm not sure how you add more to that.

But I don't think it's fair to compare US telecom's history to the rapid rise in some poorer nations. Yes some industry inertia and political red tape has retarded our efforts to modernize (and we've now fallen behind several nations), but without the groundwork done in the US, Europe, and East Asia, poor countries wouldn't have the know-how to get their networks up so quickly. Plus it's foreign companies who are consulting and investing in the poor nations' networks, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get off the ground.

I think wars and politics may be cyclical like economics. As you said, after a near decade of neo-con extremes, we moved back towards the center-left, even though many of Obama's policies are similar to Bush's. But after all, we're a center-right nation I guess. But humanity has never really had to struggle through a global environmental crisis before (climate change and energy/water security), on top of the usual political, social, religious, and economic crises. Now with globalized everything, a problem in one area may have butterfly effects far beyond. Basically, powerful nations have always had more than they knew what to do with, and life essentials were more affordable. Now $70/barrel oil is a reality, and it may get worse. Now decade-long droughts are not only possible but likely. Now even traditionally "rich" countries are going into record debts and unable to fund social programs, create enough jobs, and even birth/educate enough young people. This may exacerbate conflicts and tensions among nations and peoples.