AURORA FORUM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 20 JANUARY 2005 NATURE S ECONOMY: POPULATION, CONSUMPTION, AND SUSTAINABILITY

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1 AURORA FORUM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 20 JANUARY 2005 NATURE S ECONOMY: POPULATION, CONSUMPTION, AND SUSTAINABILITY PAUL EHRLICH ANNE EHRLICH GRETCHEN DAILY Mark Gonnerman: Good evening and welcome to the Aurora Forum at Stanford University. I m Mark Gonnerman, the Forum s director, and I thank you for joining tonight s conversation, Nature s Economy: Population, Consumption and Sustainability, with conservation biologists Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and Gretchen Daily, whom I will soon introduce. Our program tonight is being taped and later broadcast on KQED Public Radio. We will follow our usual format of forty-five minutes of on-stage conversation among our guests while we have the privilege of listening in. After this, we ll open up the mikes in the aisles for an additional forty-five minutes of audience conversation. If you have a question or a brief statement in response to the Ehrlichs, please take your turn at the mike. Our planet faces unprecedented ecological challenges: deforestation, habitat loss, species extinction, global warming, diminishing access to potable water, and economic disparities that compromise the chance for a reasonable quality of life among increasing numbers of people. In their new book, One with Nineveh, Paul and Anne Ehrlich describe these and other problems. They underscore the uncomfortable fact that those of us who live comfortably in North America are disproportionately engaged in behavior that threatens the long-term well-being of our planet. Borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem, Recessional, the book s title intimates the possibility that we too may go the way of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. What shall we do to prevent this? First, we must face hard facts provided by responsible members of the community of scientists who join our Forum tonight. Second, it is imperative that we learn to think and act in ways that foster a more just and sustainable world. We forget that fundamental changes in society come not from the dictates of government, but from people who make conceptual shifts and thereby change their minds. What might happen if, for example, we reimagine ourselves as citizens, not consumers; stakeholders, not shareholders; participants, not spectators? What will happen if we shift our emphasis from hierarchy to interdependence, from exploitation to conservation, and from anthropocentric to more biocentric ways of thinking?

2 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 2 It is indeed a privilege for me to introduce ecologist Gretchen Daily, a Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist here at Stanford. She s also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies, where she works with scholars from a wide range of fields to develop political and institutional support for the scientific research and knowledge that enables us to better protect and preserve earth s life support systems. Gretchen has known Paul and Anne Ehrlich since 1984 and is intimately involved with the programs and projects of Stanford s Center for Conservation Biology, which was also founded in I urge you to visit the Center s Web site which is also listed in the program notes. Tomorrow, Gretchen heads to Hawaii with her husband and two young children where she ll continue her tireless work of teaching that conservation is both necessary and economically attractive. There is no better moderator for this conversation tonight. Gretchen knows the science, she knows the economics, she knows the politics, and, she tells me, she really knows the Ehrlichs! Before turning the forum over to Gretchen, I want to comment briefly on the image of the earth now up on the screen. You will recall that Paul Ehrlich s book, The Population Bomb, was published in The first images of earth from space were published by NASA in 1969, and, in 1970, we celebrated the first Earth Day as ecological thinking began to take hold. This image of our planet has now been part of human consciousness for thirty-five years, and I believe it helps us move from the Cenozoic Era to what cultural historian Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic Era that has begun in our time. Stewart Brand, who was one of Paul Ehrlich s students at Stanford, Class of 1960, has written about the welcome appearance of images of earth from space: These whole earth photos were a universally understood gesture of inclusiveness, of pride and newness, of limits and fragility, of vastness and mystery. With the advent of this image, says Brand, Hope beat despair. How can one look at this beautiful photo of our planet and not think we need to compose and live according to a new global declaration of interdependence? Please bear this in mind as tonight s conversation proceeds, and please join me in welcoming Gretchen Daily, Paul Ehrlich, and Anne Erhlich to the Aurora Forum stage. Gretchen Daily: I should start off with a huge thank you. It s really inspiring I can t tell you how inspiring to see so many people here. As you ve heard, I ve just done the unthinkable and had two children. That s it. And I guess it s mainly testimony to having some hope, and a lot of my hope for the future comes from the passion of people such as yourselves with your awareness and obviously your willingness to act on these really complicated, worrying, and challenging problems that we face today. It s also amazing to me to think back over the past nearly twenty years that I ve known Paul and Anne Ehrlich and, first of all, all the good times we ve had and the many good times I hope we have coming up. Paul is actually flying over to Hawaii on Monday to join in on this big project where we re trying out some new ideas new ways of making conservation economically profitable in the U.S., the country where this sort of change needs to happen most urgently, I d say, in many respects. So we ve had a ton of fun in

3 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 3 places all over the planet working on all kinds of issues, but I should say that when I first met him, it was actually pretty disappointing. I had been living in West Germany and moved over to the U.S. to go to college and came to Stanford as an undergrad. I d heard a lot about this Paul Ehrlich, who had won a Nobel Prize and everything, in Germany, and didn t realize that actually that guy got the Nobel Prize in 1908 that the Paul Ehrlich you re looking at is a totally different man not the original. My disappointment didn t last for long. He got the equivalent of a Nobel Prize soon after I met him and he and Anne have actually shared many prizes so many that I can t possibly remember them. I ll just tell you about two: the Heinz Award in the Environment, and Anne recently was named a Distinguished Peace Leader by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. They work on all kinds of things, including some of the topics they re most famous for, such as population. Anne has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Paul is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and as you ve seen with their latest book, they re still going at 100 miles an hour in trying to correct, or at least change, the course that society and the environment are on today. I d like to start off with a bit of perspective. We d like to get into all kinds of things, so I ll try to do that as our discussion opens up now, but you re most welcome to ask any kind of question. It would be great to hear a perspective from both of you on what the big issues are today and how your view of things has changed over the past couple of decades or so or maybe even since the two of you together basically wrote The Population Bomb. Paul, what s on your mind? Paul Ehrlich: What s on my mind is that I m thrilled that you re all here and of course, as you know, one of the reasons I m thrilled is that, because I was doing this tonight, I sent back the two complimentary tickets to the Inaugural Ball that George Bush sent me. You made it worthwhile. Things have changed a lot, in one sense. One is that there are roughly 600 people here tonight interested in these topics, and between the early 1960s and now, that s a big change. The main drivers of our main problem which is that we are slowly but surely, and more rapidly in many places, destroying our life support systems have not really changed all that much. One of the problems that we and that Gretchen have faced too over the years is how do you make the same old story somehow into news and get it out in front of people. We ll talk some tonight, I m sure, about population, and as Anne will probably say later on, there s some good news on that front. But one of the drivers is how many people you have, as hopefully you all know. A second major driver is how much does each one on average consume, and how is that consumption distributed, because when you think about solutions to these problems, you have to look at how the problems are distributed among people within and between societies, and as hopefully you all know, there are very, very serious problems there. So that s one of the major things that we have to deal with. And then there are things like what kind of technologies we use and also there are a lot of issues of how power is distributed in societies and how we make decisions and so on, that you ve all been very much aware of in recent years, I think.

4 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 4 So the basic story hasn t changed. I guess from my perspective, we made a lot of progress through the seventies and into the eighties and then we started going backwards, and I can t remember what Mark said, but I usually refer to the current era not as the Holocene, or the recent era, but starting about three years ago, as the Arbustocene those of you who know Spanish will be able to derive that term because for the first time in the history of the world the most powerful nation has a deliberate policy of destroying the environment in the short term rather than preserving it, and that s not a great idea. So a lot of our issues are political and maybe we ll talk about some of them tonight. It seems to be a political night anyway. Anne Ehrlich: Maybe you should tell them what arbusto means. Paul: Arbusto means bush, of course, in Spanish. She always reminds me of those little things. Gretchen: Just to press you a little bit further, if there were one thing that you could change, what is it? Paul: The results of the last election. That s easy. Gretchen: What about you, Anne? Do you agree with Paul on all these issues? What would you change? Anne: I would change exactly the same thing. I don t necessarily agree on every single issue in every single way, but for the most part, yes. Gretchen: How do you think things have changed over the past few decades? Anne: Well, things have certainly changed. We ve mostly continued rolling along in the same trajectory, but there are some happier things on the horizon. Things have improved in some ways. Certainly the population issue is something that people have become aware of and done a lot to try to fix. Not enough; as usual, it was too little too late, but better late than never. We have made a fair amount of progress, and whereas thirty years ago it looked like we might be facing twelve billion people in 2030, it looks now as if we re going to come in somewhere under nine billion. So that s a major improvement. The population growth rate has definitely slowed up in the last fifteen to twenty years. Back in the 1960s, the world population was growing at more than 2 percent per year; now it s only about 1.3 percent and the trend is downward. Fewer people are being added to the world population each year than were being added ten or twelve years ago. That s progress because of course the base from which they grow, like compound interest, is still getting bigger. So there s good news on the population front worldwide. There is some good news on the environment and a lot of bad news, too. Unfortunately, as has already been mentioned, the current administration is not moving in the right direction there. It is very busily trying to undermine all the accomplishments of the

5 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 5 environmental movement over the last twenty-five years. And before I run totally out of voice, somebody else had better talk. Gretchen: Paul, I know one of the projects you ve been working on in the lab late at night is the consumption condom. What s that all about and how are we going to control our over-consumption? Paul: Let me say something cheery just to show you that I can say something cheery, particularly since we re at a place called Stanford. One of the things that s thrilled me over the last fourteen years and I think Anne and Gretchen also is that we have had an increasing trend of the ecologists at Stanford particularly Ken Arrow and Wally Falcon and Larry Goulder and Roz Naylor and now elsewhere working hand-in-glove with world-class economists. All the economists have been working very closely with us on dealing with a bunch of these issues. As a matter of fact, we recently published a paper with Ken as the lead with five ecologists and six economists on it, total, in the premier journal of economics in the United States entitled Are We Consuming Too Much? And it s the first edge of what I think is going to be a major area of research. If you think about the population problem, one of the things that has changed since Anne and I got into it is simply that we know a lot more about the kinds of reproductive decisions people make and why they make them. For example, when we first got into it, the U.S. government had the idea that what you did was get a helicopter and shower condoms over India and that would somehow solve the population problem. We ve gotten a lot more sophisticated in several ways. We understand that the problem is worse in the United States in many ways than it is in India. We also understand, for example, that if you change the situation of women if you give them jobs, if you increase their literacy, and so on that has a dramatic effect. That s one of the main reasons, because countries have done that, that we have seen a decline in the birth rate. Basically, in my view and Anne and Gretchen may not share it I think we know how to solve the population problem and are on the way to doing it. Too slowly as Anne said, maybe not in time but to the degree that we don t solve it, it s going to be because of lack of will and relatively small effort. When you think of some of the money that s being spent elsewhere, and I won t mention where, we could solve the entire problem, I think, worldwide, on a month s expenditures. Anne: Something I can mention is that the funds that were meant to be devoted to reducing population growth to increasing women s education and their well-being and also to making sure that contraceptives were available around the world is, at this point, less than half of what was promised internationally fifteen years ago, and the biggest culprit in failing to pay what was pledged is, guess who? It s the United States, which is also meant to be the biggest contributor. Paul: We could have put in the effort. We haven t, but we still could. We know what is required there. The consumption issue is a much more complex one.

6 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 6 Gretchen: Just to back you up, that must be stunning in a way, having written a book called The Population Bomb, and thinking how intimate and personal the decision about how large a family to have is, was that a surprise to you that today you d be sitting around saying, Actually, we know all we need to know Paul: That was maybe in a sense the biggest surprise except that in our business and it s true in all the things we do surprises don t come instantaneously. To give you an example, it took me about fifteen years to be surprised to learn that several hundred acres of Jasper Ridge, which is our preserve here on the Stanford campus, were not enough to preserve an insect population. It s a terrible surprise in retrospect. It wasn t just one day, BOING, you discovered it, and it s the same thing here. If we d been having this conversation in 1967, I would have been saying things like, It s going to take a long, long time (and we actually did say this in the past) if the government gets behind it before the total fertility rate of the United States gets down to replacement level. And it actually took about six months to a couple of years in the early 1970s for reasons that people still don t thoroughly understand. But we thought, as Gretchen indicated, it s so personal; how many kids you have is so important. If you are anywhere near our age, you ll remember the advertisements for the washing machine that would wash the diapers of your 27 kids and you could stuff them all in the back of your giant station wagon and so on, we thought, Boy, it s going to take forever to change that. And in fact it didn t. That s one of the hopeful things which maybe we can come back to: societies can change dramatically in very short times for reasons we don t understand. The thing about the consumption issue is we haven t even gotten yet to the point we were on population in the early 1960s. That is, most people who had any interest in environmental issues then, and there were relatively few compared to the general public, thought that the population problem was important. That goes way back; you could go to books in the forties, for instance, that discuss that. Consumption wasn t really on the radar. We talked about it quite a bit in The Population Bomb but that was one of the first places. Economists didn t get interested in it at all. And it s a really complex issue. You can explain a lot about what overpopulation is in fairly straightforward terms. Overconsumption is a much more complicated issue. To give you just a very simple example, which I think we use in the book, if you have ten million dollars and you spend it on an executive jet, I d be quite willing to say that s over-consumption if it s for your own personal use and hasn t got some really big, important business use. If you spend it on a cheap Van Gogh, although I don t think you can get one for ten million bucks anymore, is that over-consumption? In other words, the environmental impact of your consumption as a starter is very difficult to calculate and to deal with, and this makes policy decisions a lot more difficult in this case because how do you control consumption? I think every economist I know thinks we ought to have some kind of consumption tax rather than primarily taxing income, but it s non-trivial how one would deal with that and put it on and measure it and so on. So consumption is just starting to move into the academic sphere, and as you can tell, it hasn t touched the political sphere. The average politicians of either party if the economy starts shaking what do they say? Get out and buy another Hummer. You know, you ve got to keep the economy growing forever.

7 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 7 Anne: Well, back up a little bit. The public knows better perhaps because Hummer sales have fallen off, SUV sales have fallen off, and Priuses have sold a quarter of a million already with very little advertising and no campaign. Gretchen: Back up a little bit and give us a thumbnail sketch of the consumption issue. What are the main ways of measuring consumption and how does American consumption here in the U.S. differ from consumption patterns elsewhere in the world? Anne: Well, it depends on who you re comparing us to. If you re comparing us to a European country, they re not that different except the Europeans tend to be somewhat well, considerably more sparing in their use of energy. On average, they use roughly two-thirds as much energy as we do per person. Japan uses only about half as much as we do and they live very satisfactory lifestyles. They do use more mass transit, they don t drive Hummers, and they don t drive as many SUVs, although unfortunately they re getting to be more popular in Europe, at least. Energy is key, and I think we all know that because of its connection to global warming, among other things, but it s also involved in virtually every kind of environmental damage you want to talk about. How we use our energy and why we use so much: these are the key questions and this is where the policy makers should start looking if they want to control consumption. Gretchen: What would you add to that, Paul? Paul: Well, I think I d only back over and reinforce it. Normally, when people in our business of environmental science try and look at consumption, the first measure they use is energy consumption for the reasons Anne mentioned and for another extremely important reason, and that is that s the statistic most countries keep so it s one you can find very easily. It s not simple there either, particularly at the tails of the curve. For example, if you were going to try and compare U.S. energy consumption with Japan s, you d have to ask questions like: comparing the climates, if everybody in Japan were to keep their home at 70 in the winter and 68 in the summer, would that per capita use more or less energy because of the climate? How much do you have to drive if you re going to have the same amount of transportation? If you re in a very compact country, you have a different situation. But actually, all kinds of weird things get into this. It s a little bit off track; we re talking about surprises. I ve had a lot of surprises over time in finding out how silly some of my ideas were. For example, I kept pushing for mass transit; mass transit always seemed to me like a great idea. One of the reasons Anne and I stay at Stanford is that we can walk to work if we want to. I walk to work every day. That s a real advantage. But suppose you have a commute. Isn t it better to ride in and read the newspaper on a fast mass transit train in the morning and have a martini on the way home and have nobody shooting at you on the freeway? I mean, that s great. But when you start looking at it closely, you find out that one of the main barriers to mass transit is crime rates. People in many areas are afraid. You can build mass transit until you re blue in the face, but people won t ride it.

8 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 8 How many of you know Palm Drive here? Is there anybody who doesn t know Palm Drive? Again, it caught me by surprise when I first heard about it. Gretchen and I have taught an ornithology class, Terry Root teaches one now, and we teach other natural history-type classes. We would love to have natural vegetation, not a mess of imported trees from Australia and everything mowed clean in between. So we go to the university and say, Listen, we could teach our classes right outside the door; we don t have to take cars and drive them up to Jasper Ridge. A lot of the early bird stuff we can do right there if we had more natural vegetation. Why don t we have it? Rape. People are afraid that if there is natural vegetation, people walking along Palm Drive will be mugged or raped. And so there are always little surprises; when you think you see a simple solution, very often there are factors involved there that you just don t think about. Somebody, fortunately or unfortunately, may point them out to you, often in an embarrassing situation like this. Hopefully none of you know anything that we don t know. Gretchen: What do you see as the most promising line here? You were away when someone came to campus whom I invited a few weeks ago: Paul Tebo, who is vice president at DuPont, a company that has made absolutely stunning changes in response to basically a scientific outcry over the impacts of some of its products. So obviously they produced CFCs and that experience of dealing with the CFC issue and stopping production and hiring scientists needed in the company to address that left them, as he put it, well poised to start taking seriously other issues that came up. They had a whole atmospheric science team at DuPont a long time ago, well before global warming became a big issue. And now, just to put it in perspective, they ve actually cut greenhouse gas emissions by something like 67 percent, which is well below what the U.S. would be required to do were we to ratify and comply with the Kyoto Protocol. So that gives me cause for hope, but am I being naïve in looking at this one company and only one aspect of it? What are the bright spots you see, especially on the corporate front, given that there is such an intimate connection there? Paul: I think you re being naïve, but not much more naïve than we are in being optimistic. I do think that particularly now we can t look to the government for solutions and that in fact there s much more promise in the corporate world. Corporate executives have kids coming home saying, I don t like hearing that you re contributing to smog. We don t like the planet being toxified, and so on. For instance, when I went to Alaska to give some talks and look at some birds just after the Exxon Valdez (by pure coincidence, I had been invited earlier), I met some of the most enraged corporate executives I ve ever met. I didn t know it at all, but it turned out that many of the American oil companies used Alaska as a training ground for their young executives who were moving up in the companies, and these were all people more or less from the first generation of kids that got interested in the environment. They were all really interested in making their companies environmentally sound and they felt, correctly so, that Exxon had torpedoed them through total incompetence and everything else, and they were madder at Exxon than those of us who didn t like the idea of the oil spill. I think there are a lot of people like that. Gretchen in particular has done wonderful work in this area.

9 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 9 We ve all met people in corporations who want to change things. It doesn t mean that we still don t have our Exxons and Bechtels and companies like Halliburton that are making fortunes over in Iraq and so on, but they re not everything. It s a mixed bag, just like faculty and students are mixed bags or environmentalists are mixed bags. For simplicity, we human beings like to classify people very carefully. I like to classify them into idiots and people who agree with me, for example. But in truth, there s enormous variation among people in business just like there is among people on faculties or anywhere else. We had a nice talk the other night with a guy we d never met before who had been with Chevron, and he had a lot of good ideas on what might be done to change the course of society. He was extremely concerned. And I ve met dozens and dozens and Gretchen and I have seen hundreds of people like that and have been working with them. If you haven t looked at her book, The New Economy of Nature, buy twenty copies and send them to all your friends. Anne: Well, let s not forget John Brown of BP who comes to Stanford to tell us about how he is reducing CO 2 emissions from his company which, as you know, is a global company. He s done it twice. He came the first time and pledged to reduce them by at least 10 percent in ten years and he came back something like seven years later and said he d done it and he was working on his next 10 percent. And not only that, he d been very busy proselytizing to his colleagues in other oil companies, with some effect, apparently. Paul: Yes. The smartest oil companies are moving in the direction of becoming energy companies. They re looking toward the future. For example, they re way ahead of the administration on global warming issues. They have much smarter people and they have a lot bigger stake in it in terms of the future of their companies. Gretchen: I know you get into all these issues and a lot of potential solutions in your new book. Do you want to give us a thumbnail sketch of some of the solutions, Anne? What do you think is most promising? Anne: There are any number of solutions, but Paul should talk about that. Paul: Drinking a lot, I thought of saying. Anne: That s a personal one. A global one is what she wants. Paul: Then you keep your internal environment in great shape while the external one goes down the drain. Well, one of the things that we talk a lot about in the book is I ll give a harangue now. I think it s fair to say that all of the people we work with all of our colleagues in environmental science and most of them in the social sciences that we work with feel that the scientific community not only has done enough work to know the general directions in which we re going and what s wrong with them but has expressed them in no small detail. And so the biggest issue that I think we face is not, for instance, using much bigger computers and much more time on them to get a better handle on what ways the climate is going to change, say, regionally as opposed to

10 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 10 globally. There s a lot of science we could do that would put us in a much better position to make certain kinds of judgments. But doing that work is trivial compared with getting society turned around and moving in the right direction with time to spare. For instance, it s clear to me that a fair number of quite honest politicians are just ignorant of what s involved. That is, they think the environment is another pressure group, basically: us environmentalists, and that in fact if we get noisy enough or if, indeed, the climate starts to change dramatically in the wrong direction and causes all kinds of troubles, which a lot of people think it s doing right now (that s somewhat controversial, but I think you could make that argument) that we ll just switch; that we ll stop using fossil fuels and we ll move to a solar or hydrogen economy. Well, unfortunately, it just ain t that simple. In other words, if you look at the standard estimate of the time it would take to switch from the time you had a solar-hydrogen technology that had been tested on a large scale and that everybody agreed was a suitable one to deploy, from the time you have that, which we don t have now, it would be roughly thirty years before you had 10 or 15 percent of your energy out of that system. That means that we have a huge commitment to using fossil fuels at one level or another if we re going to have anything like the society we have now or if the poor countries are going to have any real chance of catching up with us. So solutions really involve finding ways to change human behavior as rapidly as possible. In fact, a number of us have been working on something we mention in the book: a millennium assessment of human behavior. Right now, we have a couple of semimodels. We have the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a totally transparent process. It s sponsored by the UN and governments. It involves virtually every competent climate scientist in the world. It involves energy corporations and so on. And they are continuously looking at the climate situation, discussing it, what is going to happen, what can we do about it, and so on, and much of what you hear and now you hear more and more; the media has finally started to pick up on it comes basically from the IPCC s operations. In the ecological community, hundreds of scientists have just completed a millennium ecosystem assessment which is looking at the state of our life support systems. And you re going to hear more about that. It s not government sponsored in the same way the IPCC is, so you probably won t hear as much, but it actually has worked. And we think it s time the social scientists got together with the natural scientists and began to look at a lot of the issues, particularly the ethical issues involved in how we treat each other and our planet, trying to find ways to change them. Gretchen: Give us a concrete example of how more study would help us understand what to do. Paul: I think there are two elements to it. One is more study, and that s the kind of thing that s going on with the economists right now on the issue of consumption: how do you judge it, how do you tax it, and so on? Larry Goulder at Stanford has done a lot of work on the following issue. Again, of the economists I know, almost all agree that we ought to have a carbon tax. One of the best ways of dealing with the overuse of fossil fuels is to

11 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 11 tax them more heavily. I think it s a particularly good way of doing it. You often hear these things like, what should we do? Well, we ought to put balloons up in the atmosphere that are silver to reflect away the sunlight, or put tons and tons and tons of iron filings into the oceans to encourage them to take up CO 2, and so on vast geochemical experiments where we haven t got the slightest clue whether they would work or whether they would be disasters, and in most cases they re irreversible. Taxes? We know all about them. We know how to impose them and, if they re not working, we know how to de-impose them. You do it with the stroke of a pen. It s easy to calculate; the apparatus is already in place; they re great fans of doing this. Gretchen might want to say something more about this later in the discussion. A lot of us have learned in our interactions with economists that markets can be very, very effective mechanisms for getting all sorts of environmentally good things done, so market mechanisms and taxes can be included and there can be really good things. But there are issues like this: if gasoline goes up to what it ought to be in the United States, let s say just roughly five bucks a gallon (somewhere in the range of bottled water in cost), one of the effects would be to prevent people who have to drive each day for two hours in each direction in the San Fernando Valley from driving to their jobs as grocery sackers. They d go unemployed, so what do you do about that? That s one of the things that Larry has worked hard on: how you recycle the revenues. One of his suggestions has been that you use the huge revenues you d get from the additional tax, which wouldn t all be put on at once, and that you put it into paying down the FICA tax which is regressive. So you make people pay more for their gasoline but you give them the money back in the form of tax relief where it really hurts them, and that s the kind of thing that the economists are thinking about. That s the research side of it. But on the other side of it there s a public education issue. There s a lot of pressure on our government right now to do something about climate change and it s basically because of education that s even gotten through the Fox Channel a little bit. It even gets into the straight propaganda, and that s important, too. And I think if we had much more open discussions, but many people don t understand. You re a very special audience. Talking to people in the Bay Area, some of my colleagues have what I call the Berkeley-Stanford syndrome: they can t understand the world because everyone they ve always talked to lives in the Bay Area, and they ve never given a talk radio show on the southern border about immigration, for example. They don t know what s out there, basically. The education on these issues is extremely important. Issues, for instance, of intergenerational equity. That is, how much should we be able to use of earth s goodies on what assumptions about what our kids and our grandchildren are going to have? You can t answer those questions totally in an open forum, but you can raise issues people just don t think about. On one side, you can say, Well, we don t have to worry about what we use because technological change is going to make it easy for our descendents who will do just as well as we do even if we used all this up or all that up. Well, maybe so and maybe no, but, for example, I suspect one of the things that a lot of you in this room tend to use is wilderness. If we get rid of all of it,

12 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 12 are our grandchildren going to have any to use? Is that going to be OK? I don t know what the answer is necessarily to these questions; obviously I have my opinions. But the point is, these things aren t discussed. Gretchen: How are you going to get them discussed? To back up a little bit, there are all these new leadership training programs that are out that young students of ours get involved in. I ve gone through a whole bunch of them. They ve been really helpful and interesting, but at the same time, the aim of these programs is to train scientists to communicate more effectively with a wide range of audiences, people in society, and so on. But at the same time, when you read the statistics on people s awareness, awareness levels about the environment have gone way up. If you ask the public how important different problems are and whether they d like to see action taken on global warming, and so on, 80 percent will say, Yes, this is an important issue and we need to take action now. And yet that makes me think that education isn t the limiting factor here, that there are other problems, deeper problems. Paul: I think there are deeper problems, but I also think.we ve been married fifty years. Gretchen: And it s time Anne got a word in. Tell us about the deeper problems. Anne: I think we re back to Arbusto and his minions, unfortunately. Gretchen: How do things look in other countries? Anne: Better, curiously enough. Kyoto has been ratified; it s going into effect on the sixteenth of February. Maybe there will be some kind of notice taken of it. Gretchen: What is that going to mean for the world? Anne: What it s going to mean for the world is, among other things, there is going to be a lot of trading of carbon credits, and guess who is left out of the game? American companies. And who deserves to be left out of the game? All the low-hanging fruit is already being picked and they re missing the boat. Sooner or later, they re going to wake up and start making a lot of noise about it, I m convinced. Some of them already are. Those that are multi-national in character are in the game because they can do it through their branches in other countries, but an awful lot of American companies are suddenly going to wake up and realize that, Hey, there s something going on here that we re not a part of. It s going to be interesting, but that s my optimistic outlook on that particular issue. As I already mentioned, most other countries use far less energy per person than we do, in fact, virtually everyone. The only ones that exceed us are countries like Kuwait that have very few people and a lot of energy that they re busy refining and that accounts for their high per capita consumption. We re the main culprits in creating global warming, we re the main culprits in using up the world s energy supplies, and in case you haven t

13 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 13 noticed, gasoline prices have been going up for a reason. We may be reaching the peak of oil production worldwide. The U.S. passed its own peak in 1970 and that was predicted by M. King Hubbard twenty years earlier. And we are now approaching, if we haven t already passed, the peak production of oil for the world. And in the meantime, demand is going up. It s going up in the U.S., and it s going up like a skyrocket in places like China and India and in a lot of other developing countries that are getting past their very poor stage in a rapid situation. In fact, China is going to be an interesting character to watch. It s competing for resources, not only oil or natural gas, for that matter, but also food will be an issue in the next few decades. Anyway, it s all going to be very interesting. They re competing with us more and more in terms of trade around the world and Wall Street is watching. Maybe we should, too. Gretchen: I ve detected a slight degree of frustration with the current administration in the U.S. I wonder, how do you think things would have gone had Mr. Gore come to the fore? Paul: You know, it s interesting. We have long debates about it. Both of us have known Al for a long time, and the discussion basically was, since I don t think and I think Anne and a lot of my colleagues agree he didn t push as hard as he might have when he was vice president. If he had gotten to be president, would he have looked at the need to be reelected and then the need to be followed by another Democrat and not done things that were basically unpopular? That s one of the places I think I am a hopeless pedant, there s no question about it and I don t think education is the only answer, but it sure would help a lot. For example, if everybody in American high schools had known something about the history of oil and the history of the Middle East and why we re there, the administration could never have gotten away with the series of lies they invented, one after another about why they were interested in Iraq. And there are lots of other examples. If people actually did the numbers on some of the tax programs.one of the things that s stunning about the last election is how many people voted very strongly against their own economic interests presumably without knowing it. The example that I absolutely love, which shows you Americans are generous but uninformed on current events, which somebody actually mentioned on NPR the other day; I don t remember the exact numbers, but you all know the basic story. If you ask people in the United States how much we spend on foreign assistance to help close that horrendous rich-poor gap, they say they think the federal government spends somewhere between 15 and 25 percent. It s serious from most of our points of view and from an ethical point of view, but of course since the poor are getting armed with nuclear weapons, it becomes serious in another dimension. If you ask them how much we ought to spend, they say, well, 8 or 10 percent. And what we actually spend, I think, is onequarter of 1 percent. So in other words, they re always about 50 to 100 times off on their calculations.

14 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 14 John Holdren is the best person on arms control and related issues. He has been urging us to pay attention to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which we haven t paid attention to, and do certain things with nuclear power to reduce the chances of proliferation. He was saying that thirty and forty years ago and because of him we put it into print: If we stop doing x, y, and z and pay attention to d, we are going to get to a period when there are going to be rogue nations and then sub-national groups armed with nuclear weapons. Poor John. Here we are, and that s exactly what we have. And are we paying any attention to nonproliferation? No. We are working to build nuclear bunker busters. The American people talk about something you ought to be educated on we re spending billions of dollars on a missile-interception system that any scientist can tell you will not work. First of all, they can t make it work; they can t hit anything. But the more basic reason is it s always cheaper to build decoys than it is to build more interceptor missiles. And of course the really big reason is that the last way any rogue nation would ever send us a nuclear weapon is by way of a missile. That s the only way you can be absolutely sure where it came from. A colleague of mine was asked by a president of the United States, How would you get a nuclear bomb in the United States? And my colleague said, Put it in a bale of marijuana. We only get one in a thousand of those. John Kerry mentioned it once during the campaign, but most Americans are unaware that we are on the verge we could easily blow up the entire world with our nuclear weapons right now. The U.S. and Russia still have targeted on each other enough bombs to remove the world as we know it and in 1996 or 1997, the Russians got something like eight minutes into their fifteen-minute countdown to blow us off the face of the earth before they realized that their rickety command and control system had not processed the information the Norwegians had sent them about an atmospheric sounding rocket they were sending up and they misinterpreted it as an attack coming from the United States. That s something Americans ought to know about. As a matter of fact, if you heard the hearings, there s some woman who s going to become, I think, our Secretary of State who was questioned rather intensively about the Nunn-Lugar thing, and she should be questioned rather intensively on it because it s another area where this administration, at least in terms of letting people know, has totally dropped the ball. But it does show that if you re a failed national security adviser, the next thing you want to try and be is a failed secretary of state. Gretchen: I d like to start opening it up to the audience, so if people want to move to these microphones, please do so, but while you re thinking of your questions and getting in position and while we re on this miserable topic, I wondered if you just want to offer a personal perspective. How do you keep your spirit up and what hopeful signs do you see? Paul: Great young students. Anne: Great young students is obviously one of them, certainly. It helps to have learned it all gradually as it unfolded over the last forty years rather than being like some of our

15 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 15 great young students having it all dumped on them at once because it s an awful lot to try to digest and take in without getting totally depressed. Stay optimistic because every so often, some good news comes along and all is not hopeless as long as there are still people fighting for the right things. Paul: If you look at social history and the general trend of things, we have had miraculous changes in this country and the world in the last fifty years. A current one is I was totally against the Iraq war for a lot of reasons; many of you can imagine. But I and many other people don t miss Saddam Hussein. Two hundred years ago, if a miserable, slimy dictator was overthrown on some other continent, nobody knew or cared about it, but there is a global morality now where you say, It may have been a mistake to go into the Iraq war, but nobody misses Saddam Hussein. Just think about it: all of the changes that have gone on in our society, not far enough, but on the rights of women, on the rights of minorities. After all, many of you will remember, but for those of you who don t, if it hadn t been for the Second World War, the state of women in this society would be awful compared to what it is today. Still not good enough, but there have been incredible changes in our lifetime on race relations. So things do change in the right direction, and if you think about thirty or forty years ago, nobody the average person thought about the environment. And now it s a political issue around the world. That s rapid change on a social scale. The trouble is the rest of the technological change is going on even faster. So we ve had a lot of success in the general pattern of human society, but unfortunately our problems are going bad faster than we re learning to deal with them. Gretchen: Let s open it up to questions. What I suggest we do is start off taking one question at a time, but there are a lot of people lined up, and if we get more people lined up, we ll just take a bunch of questions and comments at once and you guys can reply as you like. Let s start over here. Question from the Audience: My question has to do with the carrying capacity of the earth, and I believe it was Dr. Wilson at that other university on the other side of the United States who did some modeling and computed a number of something on the order of 500 million people. Then I believe you, Professor Daily, said something about an optimum level of one and a half billion. And then when you read the literature, there are all sorts of other numbers out there that depend on how it s calculated the quality of life issues and that sort of thing. My question is, is there a way to reach a consensus on what a reasonable carrying capacity is for the earth, what is it or what might it be, and how can we communicate that to the world? Gretchen: Good question. Paul: That s yours, Gretchen. You re the senior author on a paper coming out on that. Gretchen: Well, I ll start off briefly. That s a deep and complex question and you re right. A lot of people have taken stabs at it. The first thing people try to do is ask how

16 Aurora Forum at Stanford University 16 many people could be sustained by the planet s life support systems at a given standard of living. And it really comes down to what standard of living you prefer. And in the calculation that the three of us actually presented in a paper that I m amazed you found and read (we published it in a pretty obscure place), we were proposing that people live the kind of life that people around here enjoy, but obviously there are a lot of lifestyles that one could propose as being really worth living. We spent a huge amount of time in Costa Rica where people live with a much lower footprint on the planet, experience life totally differently, but also very, very comfortably, and we could probably support over the long run, given current technologies, maybe double that number on a sustainable basis if we change what we are doing from an institutional perspective significantly. So a lot comes down to how optimistic you are about rates of social change and technological change, and the point of that paper and these estimates is just to say that we re far above what we could possibly sustain given current know-how and current political, economic, and other social considerations. Paul: That s basically it. You can make calculations based on a certain standard of living, but then you have to also make assumptions about how long that s sustainable what it requires. The standard of overpopulation that I think all of us in our business would use is if you are not living on your income from your natural capital if you re actually using it up then you re overpopulating. You may be doing fine. It s like a profligate son who s inherited a vast fortune and every year brags that he s writing a bigger check on the bank account but doesn t pay any attention to what s happening to the balance. So if the balance is steady, you can come to some sort of a calculation, but it does always involve the uncertainties about sustainability and you can t solve all of those and also the social choice of what kind of lifestyle you want. I ve stolen one of Gretchen s lines from her many times: If you want to support a lot of people, you move to a sort of a battery chicken-type lifestyle and you maximize the number of people by giving everybody an absolute minimum diet and a minimum of options, whereas when we did our paper, we assumed that we d like to design a world where you had a maximum number of options. There would be big enough cities so that people who liked opera and libraries and crowds and bars and so on and so forth could enjoy them, and so that the people who wanted to be hermits and wanted to live in the wilderness could do that. And in fact when Anne and I were born, there were about two billion people on the planet and there were plenty of big cities, but there was also, by today s standards certainly, plenty of wilderness. And as I recall, we backed off by about half a billion to give us some buffer against bad mistakes. A good example of a bad mistake is the chlorofluorocarbon situation, which I think you re all familiar with. DuPont thought it had an actual miracle in the chlorofluorocarbons, which replaced dangerous working fluids in refrigerators, and if we hadn t been very lucky, it could have destroyed the world. That s the kind of thing we d like to have some cushion against. Gretchen: Right now, the basic upshot is that we re depleting natural capital at such a rapid rate, it s easy to say and come to agreement over the unsustainability of our activities and the question is, what do we want to move toward as a final target? That something that we reach so far out into the future that I think what you ve got to do at this point is get the dialogue going. That s really the key. People can decide as we go