Date published: 2007/05/02
The final (and longest) lecture in the Department of Engineering's Fifth Annual Lecture Series in Sustainable Development (2007) was given by David King, Chief Scientific Officer for the UK. He started off with the usual definition of "sustainable" development along the lines that each generation should leave the planet in no worse shape for the next generation. He gave the usual academic middle class party line that we worry too much about GDP and not enough about "human capital" and "environmental capital".
Then he moved onto his first big topic. Unlike the other speakers in the series, he hit the number one problem straight off. It is that there are 6 billion people on the planet, and projected to grow to 8 billion by 2028 and 9 billion by around 2054. Almost all of that increase will be in poor, not rich, countries. Most countries allegedly have a period with high birth rates matching high death rates, then as the health system improves (e.g. with clean water) the death rate drops but the birth rate lags and remains high, before finally falling to match the lower death rate. Countries in the middle stage have a large population growth. The rich countries have already entered the final stage. Indeed, many rich countries (e.g. Italy, Spain) have a birth rate far below the replacement rate. Many (but not all) poor countries are still in the middle stage. Indeed, King claimed that the population of Africa is increasing by 2.4% per annum in spite of HIV/Aids.
He then mentioned that water will be a growing problem in future, with the projection that (global) demand will exceed supply by around 2050 plus or minus 10 or 15 years. And this is ignoring the problem that supply is not generally located in the same location as demand. He said that this was a technological problem, with the solution being to find a cheap(ish) way to desalinate seawater.
He then listed what he considers to be the obstacles to sustainable development:
and he said that someone in his office had removed:
He failed to mention the corrupt political leaders. The one thing in his list that is never mentioned is the problem of having multiple aid agencies and NGOs crawling over each and every poor country in the world. He said that in one African country (Tanzania?) there were 130 such organisations and the civil service had to spend much of their time answering to them rather than to their own citizens.
Well, perhaps it's not too surprising that he said he was practically booed at some international aid meeting he had gone to. But it turns out it had nothing to do with the above. It was that apparently (presumably many, rather than all of) the people who work in international development do not like scientists. And the main example he mentioned was GM food. So the anti-science and anti-technology attitudes are not so much in the people in the poor countries but more in the people from the rich countries who think they should tell the people in the poor countries how to run their country. He showed a graph of "wealth intensity" (i.e. GDP per capita, in spite of him saying we should not concentrate on that) versus "citation intensity" (in scientific journals). There is a correlation. Unfortunately, as a scientist he should have known that correlation is not the same thing as causation. So does being rich cause you to do more science or does doing more science cause you to be richer. Well, probably neither, exactly.
King got in trouble a few years ago for stating that climate change was the number one problem in the world. But he said it again in the lecture, and spent most of the rest of the lecture talking about that. He covered all the usual ground, including showing the usual temperature series showing it getting warmer. He showed the emissions trajectory for the "business as usual" scenario and then what we would need to do to go no higher than 450 ppm and 550 ppm. (As a comparison, in pre-industrial times we were at around 265 ppm, down to as low as around 200 ppm during ice ages, up to as much as 1000 to 1500 ppm during tropical eras.) The UK government (and lots of other people) say (somewhat arbitrarily) that we should aim not to get above 550 ppm and should hopefully be closer to the 450 ppm target. Well, you can look at the emissions trajectories and there is no way we are going to be as low as 450 ppm unless the world economy collapses pretty damn soon. Even 550 ppm looks suspiciously optimistic. And King said that the lead time between emissions and temperature was two to three decades. So expect it to get a lot warmer this century. (450 ppm corresponds to around 1 to 3 degrees C above the long-term average, and 550 ppm corresponds to around 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C above the long-term average.)
The British government is about to publish an energy white paper (in spite of Greenpeace, as King pointed out). The UK government wants UK emissions to be reduced by 60% by 2050, compared with 1990 levels. The white paper will tell us allegedly how we will get there:
and then there would also be "further developments" in science and technology, although he wasn't counting on them in his calculations. Well this is all very well. The one thing that will raise the most hackles is nuclear power. He said this would almost certainly be the last generation of nuclear fission plants, because they ought to last 60 years and by then nuclear fusion should be feasible (but they've been saying that fusion is around the corner for 40 years now).
He said that McKinsey had recently done a study showing how much it would cost to reduce carbon emissions in various ways. And they concluded (as others have) that there are many things that could be done (e.g. better insulation in buildings) that actually had a negative cost (so you eventually save more money than you invest).
And he mentioned that we are about to have somthing called the Energy Technology Institute, half funded by government and by industry to the tune of almost a billion pounds over 10 years, to be invested in energy research, design and development. Well, that is welcome news and hopefully they will get some good (and young) scientists involved.
In spite of overrunning by almost half an hour, they still allowed some questions. Someone asked if we would be saved because fossil fuels are running out. King claimed that if all fossil fuels were burned we would be at 2000 ppm, so no this does not help. Well, the problem here, which King did not mention, is that although oil is going to all but run out fairly soon, there is still plenty of coal in the ground, and that is far worse for carbon emissions.
Now Cambridge, in spite of being a university town with allegedly intelligent residents, has plenty of people who are anti-GM food. And one of these said that although King's lecture was great, she couldn't agree with him about GM food and that wasn't this just a way for rich people to get richer and for poor people to get poorer. Well, this is the line that the so-called environmentalists have been pushing for years, so it's not surprising that many people in the academic middle class believe it. King of course didn't have ages to explain why she was wrong, but did mention one example of GM-modified grass being grown with maize in Africa to help against a specific pest. And he mentioned that of course millions of people around the world are eating GM food with no ill effect. (Although that was not directly relevant to the question.) He even claimed that for people with allergies, GM food was even better than non-GM food, because the corporations have been specifically paranoid about that.
Someone was left with the impression that King had said that science and technology would save the world, so asked about that. King replied that he believed that was necessary but not sufficient. We also needed a carbon tax or a cap and trade system. And we needed a "cultural change". His example for that was the old favourite example of the academic middle class, namely the "Chelsea tractor" in London. People allegedly have these cars just so they can show they have more status (i.e. are rich). Well, anybody who thinks that most humans are not going to worry about status, or that status does not involve buying (often wasteful) things that other people cannot afford, is not living in the real world. The ruling elite (including King) travel around the world unimpeded, and cause far more environmental damage than a "Chelsea tractor" does (although people who own those also probably do a lot of air travel). And it should not be up to the ruling elite to decide which sources of carbon emissions are allegedly ok and which are allegedly not.
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