I consider myself to be an environmentalist, and so do most other people I have met in my life so far. Of these others, I find they can be classified, mostly, into one of only two types.
Before we get to the types, at the risk of stating the obvious, why worry? What are the environment’s current ills? In order of importance: global warming; rapid extinctions of many species of plants, animals and fungi; loss of biodiversity more generally; soil loss and desertification; and pollution. While these obviously threaten all of us in obvious ways, it just isn’t going to be such a great world to live in for us or our descendants if there are no elephants, whales, rainforests, icecaps and so on. In fact, it will suck. So, let’s avoid that outcome.
So, what about those two types? First there are the left-wing environmentalists, who blame capitalism for all of the global environment’s current ills. While this group contains, obviously, a huge diversity of views, their general feeling (I wouldn’t call it a considered view) is that more rapid economic growth will only exacerbate these problems. I’ll discuss what I think of this below.
Second are people who want to save the environment for sound environmentalist reasons, but who find these reasons highly convenient because they want to go on shooting and killing things, either in Texas, Argentina, Shropshire, Estremadura or Tanzania. While much smaller, this group are much richer. They are instinctively highly capitalist (mostly because they are winners from capitalism) and in my experience are just as pessimistic about the long-term prospects for the environment but determined to preserve it through the convening power of lots of money and amazing networks. (Over twenty years ago I recall a member of this group discussing the fate of the manatee in the oceans off Florida’s coasts. She was an old, rich lady from Sarasota. Such a shame, she said, that everyone’s perfectly admirable right to ride a massive, fast speedboat was going to do for such a lovely creature.)
Neither side is completely wrong, and neither side is right, either. However, the political and economic reality is that if the environment has a chance, it has to come through widespread economic progress. Without such progress, the vast mass of humanity will remain very poor, and therefore quite rightly indifferent to the fate of the elephant and the rhinoceros because you know what? If I couldn’t feed my kids, I would be too.
And we are nearly there: I agree with the iconoclastic James Anderson who claimed in early 2020 that within five years from then (i.e. three years from now) that renewable electricity generation would become cheaper than any alternative, such as fossil fuels, at every point on the landmass of the Earth with a probability of 90%. As the great William Gibson said: The future is already here - It’s just not very evenly distributed. If you want to see the future of the planet, go to Iceland. They don’t need fossil fuels or nuclear power any more, and haven’t for years.
And here’s the important point: Anderson said this would be achieved by cold, hard capitalism. It’s profitable to build renewable electricity generation capacity if it’s cheaper than the existing alternatives. Big oil figured this out years ago. Very soon now, perhaps exactly now given the war in the Ukraine and its deleterious impact on oil and gas prices, we will have reached the tipping point, and soon solar and wind farms will be part of our everyday life, wherever we go in the world. There are few countries which can’t use the amazing cocktail of technologies that now exist.
(Yes, there will be bottlenecks. We need copper for wires and zinc for batteries, and there isn’t enough of either. Go out and buy some for your portfolio.)
Were the left-wingers wrong? No. First, governments played a vital role in sponsoring development of the nascent technologies that markets then took on. This was an amazing contribution. Governments can really help with new tech at an early stage, and they did. Everywhere from the US to China. Second, the very first sign that big oil would have to get its act together on renewables or eventually die out was when Exxon-Mobil, the biggest company in the world by market cap for well over 100 years, suddenly discovered it couldn’t hire the smartest young people coming out of America’s best business schools. Those young people, usually more left-wing at that age than their more world-weary parents, just didn’t fancy working for a company they thought was making the world worse. It helped they all got awesome jobs in tech instead.
What about the right-wingers? They’re not wrong either: The only way species and environments will survive is if people, especially local people, have an incentive to preserve them. If I look at my local wood and think: I need logs to cook my food and heat my family, that wood is toast. If I look at it and think: That wood is my bread-and-butter, it will pay me a decent wage so long as it survives, the wood just may survive, along with all the things that live in it. This requires whole communities to participate, not just a lucky few. And there lies the problem.
What about endangered species? Let’s pick the rhinoceros as a great example. Rich Westerners have given millions to save the rhino, and despite dire prognostications, it’s still with us. But a poached rhino horn can command $100,000 on the black market. The temptations to poach just one, to set yourself up, are overwhelming, even if you are likely to be killed.
The solutions? Education and jobs. And in rural southern Africa, that requires great wi-fi. An entire generation of Ruby-on-Rails experts are waiting to become software developers in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. They’re as smart, if not smarter (they’re hungrier remember?) than their brothers and sisters in Palo Alto. They just don’t have wi-fi.
So step forward Elon Musk, who makes both left-wingers and right-wingers uneasy for different reasons. Musk’s successful, and entirely capitalist, Falcon 9 project so reduced the cost of putting a payload into orbit that it (a) made a fortune that would have satisfied most of us; and (b) made it profitable to put around the Earth a necklace of satellites that will put cheap wi-fi within the reach of everyone, just at the same time as James Anderson’s renewable electricity prediction may come true. (Musk has also made a vital contribution to the cost of electricity storage that may be an even greater legacy.)
Starlink, the name of this satellite network, potentially allows every rhino on Earth to be tracked in real time (as, to be fair, do some other satellite networks). Much more importantly, it allows rural Southern Africans to join the global economy, learn everything, and forget about the dangerous business of poaching rhinos.