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« Back to Sustainable Development main page    Transcript for: Sustainable DevelopmentBen Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In August 2002, world leaders traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Summit on Sustainable Development. Participants argued over how best to clean up the environment AND at the same time boost the economies of poor nations. Are those two goals compatible? What is the real state of the environment?To find out more, 'Think Tank' is joined by Steven Hayward, Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators; and Christopher Flavin, President of WorldWatch Institute and co-author of the annual State of the World. The topic before the house: Does Development Hurt the Environment? This week on Think Tank. After two weeks of negotiations in Johannesburg, United Nations delegates agreed on a plan to reduce poverty and protect the environment. Koffi Annan: I think we have achieved success and I am satisfied with the results...the summit has put sustainable development firmly on the world agenda. Ben Wattenberg: The plan sets ambitious goals for improving access to clean water, reducing poverty, and greater reliance on renewable energy sources. Free-trade advocates were generally pleased. The plan acknowledged the power of markets to create the wealth needed to protect the environment. Some environmentalists, however, criticized the blueprint for not going far enough, and for pandering to big business in a way that could lead to further environmental degradation. In short, experts still disagree not only on how to reduce poverty but on what direction the environment is headed. Are we better off than we were? Or are we speeding toward a global crisis? Okay. Gentlemen, thank you, Chris Flavin and Steve Hayward for joining us on “Think Tank.” Let me open this seminar with a very simple question to which I would like a relatively simple and brief answer. Is the global environment getting better or worse? Chris Flavin? Christopher Flavin: There are many specific examples around the world where the environment is getting better as a result of government regulation and new technology. But unfortunately there’re more examples where the conditions are either continuing to deteriorate or are just not improving at all. Ben Wattenberg: So your basic answer is worse? Christopher Flavin: In more cases it’s getting worse and in fewer cases it’s getting better. Ben Wattenberg: Steve Hayward? Steven Hayward: In general I’m an optimist about the environment. I think there’s a lot of areas where things are getting better. And where things are getting worse, and I agree with Chris that there are many areas where things are getting worse on the global scene, I think there’s reason to think that we’re going to turn the corner and make things better in the future. There’s always going to be question marks; there’s always gonna be new problems coming along in the environment, though my basic view is that human beings are a very creative species and our capability of finding solutions is at least equal to our propensity for causing problems. Ben Wattenberg: So you generally answer the question “better.” So we have a “worse” and we have a “better.” I just want to sort of inform our viewers. Let me ask about a couple of very specific things because I’ve been reading your respective volumes that sort of lay out these points of views. And to just, again, for the sake of the viewers, let’s take the idea of clean air. Is that a better or a worse? Chris? Christopher Flavin: Air quality is certainly getting better in most of the United States and most other industrial countries’ cities. There are other cities, particularly in the developing world, where conditions are continuing to deteriorate. But one thing that we’re seeing that is happening in many, many developing countries, I was just in China last week, they’re now putting unleaded gasoline on the market. They’re forcing their car companies to clean up. They’re doing what we did twenty-five years ago, which is putting the screws to industry and making it clean up its act. And as a result you see technological innovation and things get better. Ben Wattenberg: You buy that? Steven Hayward: Absolutely. It seems to me that’s one of the reasons to be optimistic. I mean certainly air quality in places like India and China is abysmal and getting worse day by day, but the example Chris points to is the kind of example I would point to is how we’re going to turn the corner on that problem. Ben Wattenberg: How about clean water? Steven Hayward: That’s a more of a mixed bag everywhere. Even here in the United States we do a very poor job of measuring water quality on a consistent basis. But what measures we have suggest it’s getting better here, and has been for a while. The developing world’s gonna be a lot harder, because of the problems of a lack of access to technology and lack of wealth to pay for some of those things. But again, I think if the promise of Johannesburg of encouraging economic growth pays off over the next generation, I think we’ll be able to begin turning the corner on water quality too. Ben Wattenberg: Boy, it really sounds strange hearing someone who swings from sort of the conservative side of the plate applauding one of these UN conferences. I am so used to, you know, it’s sort of a slam dunk, the conservatives are against whatever the UN does. How about water? Where are you on that? Christopher Flavin: Water quality is a real problem in many, many parts of the world. Both simple sanitation – there’re about three billion people in the world, close to half the world’s population, that does not have toilets yet. One of the key goals in the Johannesburg Summit was to reduce that number by half, by one and a half billion, over the next two decades. So both water shortages and the access to clean water is a real problem and getting worse. Basically the pace of progress is not keeping up with population growth in a lot of developing countries. Ben Wattenberg: All right. How about endangered species? Christopher Flavin: By the estimates of most biologists, and this is one that is very difficult to measure on a routine basis, but most of the estimates are that we’re in the middle of one of the greatest rates of extinction that the world has ever seen, comparable almost to the last time when an asteroid hit the earth. You’re seeing, you know, likely thousands of species disappear over the coming decades. Ben Wattenberg: You buy that? Steven Hayward: I do largely agree with that. I think that the problem of habitat fragmentation in this country and around the world and species loss is the single most important environmental challenge. And it’s also the one that’s the least susceptible to a regulatory remedy or a political remedy. That said, once again I think there’s reason to not be entirely gloomy about the long-term future of this. I’m a fan of Edward Wilson’s work. He’s been pointing out recently that you could preserve a lot of what are called the hotspots of biodiversity around the world for, I think, the figure he names is about twenty billion dollars. Ben Wattenberg: Now, Chris, tell me what happened in Johannesburg. The first thing that struck me when I was reading the newspaper stories about the conference on sustainable development was that there were scheduled to be fifty to sixty thousand people in attendance. That’s a big conference. Were there really that many people there? Christopher Flavin: There were different counts. There was something between thirty and fifty thousand people at the conference of whom most were representatives of non-governmental organizations including many industries. There was a very substantial business component there. Ben Wattenberg: What actually does sustainable development mean? I mean this is a conference on sustainable development. The arguments earlier have been that development causes—if you read Paul Ehrlich, for example—is that affluence, development causes environmental degradation. And the UN at times over the years has put out various documents that seem to play into that deck, and yet here they are saying, putting together what sounds like an oxymoron: sustainable development. What does it mean? Steven Hayward: Well it’s a tricky and often vague concept. I think the shorthand definition that the UN itself generated twenty-five years ago in one sentence was “meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” Is that about right, Chris? And, as an abstract concept for getting us to think about the future, maybe it has some use. It’s of very little use in actually guiding particular policy decisions day by day until you start breaking it down and applying it to particular situations, and that’s a lot of work to do. I think that what has changed is this. I think that when the idea first was developed, starting in the Seventies and Eighties, of sustainable development, I think it was in some ways a successor to the Limits to Growth idea which was very popular. Ben Wattenberg: Yeah, that’s right. Steven Hayward: And that idea really hit the wall I think because it was overstated in all kinds of ways that have been talked about. And I think that sustainable development was susceptible to the interpretation that it was Limits to Growth under a new name. I don’t think it does mean that anymore. I think it has changed in ways that Chris hints at, I think. I would state it is this: it recognizes the dynamic linkages between the environment and the economy and as such it is a rejection of the Ehrlich idea that affluence and population and technology equals environmental degradation categorically. And I think that’s why, I mean I’m critical sometimes of the vagueness of sustainable development, but I don’t categorically say it’s unusable or makes no sense or that we can’t develop it into something that is useful. Ben Wattenberg: What did they agree on? Let’s get down to specifics of this thing. What is in this plan? Christopher Flavin: There were concrete goals to reduce the number of people without access to safe drinking water. There was a goal agreed to reduce the loss of biological diversity. There was a goal agreed to on fisheries, which are being over harvested in most cases now to bring the fishing level down to sustainable yields. And there was an agreement to substantially increase the share of renewable energy, that is, non-fossil fuel based energy in the energy mix. So there were some very concrete goals that were agreed to. Then beyond that, there were two hundred and fifty partnerships between non-governmental organizations, businesses, UN agencies, and governments that were also put in place to implement specific aspects of that broader action plan. Ben Wattenberg: But in other words, what they do is proclaim goals? They have no enforcement mechanism, is that right? Christopher Flavin: There are follow-up mechanisms that are put in place. I was just at a meeting earlier today where there were a couple people who were saying some relatively pessimistic things about Johannesburg. A representative of Dupont, one of the largest chemical companies in the world, got up and said, “You all are being far too pessimistic. I saw real change in my company after Rio. Specific commitments on chemicals came forward in the years afterwards. And I see the same process taking place after Johannesburg. I’ve already told the top leaders of my company that there’re specific changes in our business that are likely as a result of this conference.” Steven Hayward: Yeah, I mean two things to be said, I think, in praise of what happened there is if you compare what came out of Johannesburg to Agenda Twenty-one ten years ago that came out of Rio. Agenda Twenty-one, my line on that is, it’s as big as a phonebook and by its very length defends itself against the risk of being read. And a lot of the language is very vague and general, and this document is shorter and it does, as Chris says, try to attach some real numbers and real measurable targets to get towards. And you can argue about renewable energy and all the rest of it all day long. Ben Wattenberg: Well I was going to ask that specifically. What targets did they come to, twenty-five percent of… Christopher Flavin: They decided not to include a numerical goal. Ben Wattenberg: Oh. Christopher Flavin: But to just have a general goal that each country should attempt to change policies in such a way to increase the amount of, you know, wind power, solar energy, and bio energy that they use. Ben Wattenberg: Are those things realistic substitutes? Because you know we have been hearing about this, I mean this is thirty years now that we’ve been hearing about, it’s just around the corner, renewable energy… Christopher Flavin: There’s been a remarkable surge in growth in those technologies. Ben Wattenberg: Well, from a base that is miniscule, I mean you know… Christopher Flavin: Yeah. But that’s… Ben Wattenberg: …if you say there are ten windmills and now we got a hundred and ten… Christopher Flavin: What happening with wind and solar, etcetera, today is exactly what happened with computers and Microsoft and cell phones ten years ago. They’re growing at thirty percent per year. Wind power’s already a seven billion dollar a year market. There are countries in Europe… Ben Wattenberg: Seven million, with an M? Not B with… Christopher Flavin: Billion. Seven billion dollars. Christopher Flavin: And there are now regions in Europe that are getting more energy from wind power than they are from nuclear. And that’s happened in ten years, whereas nuclear took forty years to get to the same place. So these are getting to be really serious energy sources, which was reflected in the agreement in Johannesburg, where renewables got a lot more attention than they did in Kyoto. Ben Wattenberg: Do you believe that? Steven Hayward: I believe part of that. The difference would be a matter of degree and time frame. I guess what I think in summary is that the fossil fuel energy era has rather longer to run than Chris might think. But I do think that alternate forms of energy of various kinds are going to be developed fairly quickly, maybe as quick as Chris says. I put on solar photo voltaics on my house out in California because the state would pay for half of it. And I’m glad I did it but I was somewhat underwhelmed by the performance. Now I think ten years from now it’s gonna get a whole lot better. But I also think that the state of California can’t keep paying for half the cost of all of us who want to put solar cells on our houses. Ben Wattenberg: What position did the Johannesburg come out on in terms of free trade, open markets, the actual motive force behind the new economics? Steven Hayward: I don’t remember the exact language, maybe Chris does. But I think what was important about the point you raise, and all the other points of particular items in the document, is that you didn’t see there, I mean it seems to me the dog that didn’t bark at Johannesburg was sort of doom and gloom or large scale pronouncements about the world’s coming to an end or you avoided the entire argument about climate change, which I think could have derailed the whole conference and made a huge can of worms. And I think it is a reflection in my mind of how the environmental debate worldwide is slowly changing and I think maturing. I do think, I mean even some of the books that Chris’s organization has published like the David Roodin book on harnessing the market for the environment, shows its understanding that economic growth is not a categorically suspect thing, as a lot of environmentalists, I think, seemed to make their central premise back in the Seventies. Ben Wattenberg: Chris, where do you come out on this, uh, issue of trade and economics? What did they say at Johannesburg? Christopher Flavin: The language in the draft suggests that trade is certainly something that can be very helpful both economically and environmentally but the trade rules do need to be adjusted to take account for both environmental and social needs that completely unfettered or free trade does not make sense. That you need to have trade rules that allow for environmental improvement. Ben Wattenberg: Steve used an interesting phrase just a moment ago: the dog that didn’t bark. That’s the title I think of a, or the one of the lines, in a famous Sherlock Holmes mystery, that the clue to what happened was something that didn’t happen. And what you did not have at Johannesburg was this huge raging argument that often accompanies these sorts of meetings, for example these days when the WTO or the IMF or any of the great economic meetings get together you have demonstrators. We just had it here in Washington and they closed down streets. That was not the flavor of the results or the actions in J-burg. Is that right? Christopher Flavin: I think that’s right. I think that most of the NGOs, despite the occasional… Ben Wattenberg: NGOs are non-governmental organiz… Christopher Flavin: Yeah. The various environmental and… Ben Wattenberg: …like WorldWatch? Christopher Flavin: Yeah. And many, many others. That most of them were really focused on very specific and constructive agenda items. The anti-globalization movement has unfortunately taken on a bit of a negative, non-productive character to it. And you didn’t see much of that in Johannesburg despite the fact that there were very real differences and real divisions on particular issues. Ben Wattenberg: Buy that? Steven Hayward: Yeah I think so. I mean when I say that the dog that did not bark in Johannesburg, what I mean is that you didn’t see a lot of beating the drums for population issues, you know, having to stop population growth. You didn’t see some of the even implicit flavor that economic growth and corporations and trade are a bad thing. And instead I think the balance of the document affirms trade and economic growth and I think that represents a real change from the dominant tone of these kinds of meetings twenty-five, thirty years ago. Ben Wattenberg: The population situation is something that I know something about and write about, has really changed so dramatically. In fact in your book, one of the essays says that world population growth will go negative before the middle of this century, by Twenty Fifty, which is something I happen to agree with. But even the UN doesn’t quite agree with it yet, and they’re coming down in their targets. So that insofar as people cause pollution, you sort of have a built-in tilt toward the favorable side as you look ahead? Christopher Flavin: Well that’s right but unfortunately, you know that peaking is still several decades away and we still have two or three billion more people that will be added to the world’s population. And unfortunately the vast majority of that additional two to three billion will be in basically already poor cities in the developing world. So I think it’s important not to minimize the fact that we still have a big challenge ahead of us, particularly in developing countries as we make these final stages of the demographic transition globally. Steven Hayward: I agree with most of that. It’s going to be a very tough problem to solve in many ways. I do think though it does represent again a change from what we thought thirty, thirty-five years ago with Ehrlich’s population bomb. I think there was very little optimism that, absent coercion and tyranny, you could stop population growth from going on forever and bringing it with environmental ruin. And now all of a sudden with all the problems that we’re gonna have, you can see probably the end of it. And you know I think it was the movie producer Sam Goldwyn who said “Never prophesy, especially about the future.” You know I think that one of the problems that I think a lot of environmentalists… Ben Wattenberg: He also said an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Steven Hayward: Right. That’s right. I think one of the problems that some environmentalists have I think is they sound like the little boy who cried wolf too often. And so the projections that WorldWatch and other people make now of problems ten and twenty and thirty years out may be accurate, but a lot of predictions made, like in the Limits to Growth book, turned out not to be, or the global two thousand report. And so suddenly if you look out a hundred years from now, which as I say you really can’t do with any real confidence, but it’s not implausible as some demographers now suggest that the largest social problem we may face on the planet is a rapidly falling population. Ben Wattenberg: I think that’s gonna happen within thirty or forty years. Steven Hayward: I mean that’ll relieve a lot of environmental stresses and that’ll be on the plus side. But the social dimension of that could be quite dramatic. Ben Wattenberg: It could lead to a vast economic recession, in point of fact. Steve, you wrote in this idea of looking forward that, had somebody made a projection in Nineteen Hundred, they would have said that the key resources we need is copper and wood, and now rather than what we now have which I guess would be oil and gas. How do you factor into your various projections and outlooks this idea Steve mentioned earlier of human ingenuity? I mean this was what Julian Simon called the ultimate resource and he was roundly criticized but it seems to be a potent factor. Christopher Flavin: Absolutely. And human ingenuity is the key to dealing with all of these problems. It’s the key to developing a sustainable global economy. But I see human ingenuity in the terrific advances in renewable energy technologies, for example. Why is it that it costs about a tenth as much to generate power from solar and wind energy today as it did a decade or two ago? Because of human ingenuity, because of government funded research and development, privately funded research and development, market forces, government reforms; all of that is human ingenuity coming together. Steven Hayward: The reason I picked the resource mix of a hundred years ago as an example is one, as you discover in your own book The First Measured Century, we have a lot of baseline data back then to look at. The point of looking at a resource mix in the past is it helps illuminate, I think, the problem of applying sustainable development. Because if you look at a snapshot of any particular kind of resource use at any particular time, you can point to lots of unsustainable features of what’s going on. I even have an old New York Times headline from about Nineteen Oh-three that projects forward to when we would cut down the last tree in America because of the way we burned wood and used wood for everything. And of course that didn’t happen. Ben Wattenberg: In fact the country is reforesting, isn’t it? Steven Hayward: That’s right, because we’ve changed our resource mix. Or you know another, my favorite idea of straight line thinking now is if you take the growth rate from the last ten years of the growth of Elvis impersonators and do a straight line out, in fifty years two thirds of all Americans will be Elvis impersonators. And I think that, notwithstanding better modeling, there’s still a lot of that fallacy of static thinking and that’s why it’s hard to apply sustainable development over a long horizon, because we’re constantly changing how we use resources. Christopher Flavin: You know I think the bigger difference between you know at least some of the conservatives and some of the environmentalists on these issues is not that we’re pessimistic and they’re optimistic. In fact, I would argue that it’s just the reverse. When you get to this, I mean I think one of the most fundamental issues, which is an energy transition, you know can we, will we make a transitional way from fossil fuels? I’m the optimist. Just as we moved away from wood to coal and then oil, the logical next step is to move entirely away from energy sources that are causing a build-up of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere. Why can’t we take the same human ingenuity that allowed another energy transition to occur a hundred years ago and allow it to occur today? In fact it will rely on many of the same technologies that are allowing the computer revolution, the telecommunications revolution etcetera. Steven Hayward: Well here’s where we have I think quite a vigorous policy argument underway. And Chris and I a few minutes ago talked about government sponsored research, sometimes government sponsored research gives us great things like Teflon coated pans out of the space program. But one of the reasons that someone like me would resist a lot of government interference or involvement in the market for energy is the old public choice problem of you begin subsidizing ethanol, which may or may not be a promising technology, but once it gets in place it’s harder than hell to get rid of it because it’s part of the whole foreign politics and so forth. If you begin subsidizing certain kinds of technology over others, in other words you start picking winners, you can often make mistakes. For the most part, and I understand there were subsidies for coal an oil a hundred years ago, but for the most part those tech… Christopher Flavin: They actually still exist today. We’re still… Steven Hayward: I know they do. Christopher Flavin: …we’re still heavily subsidizing coal and oil and nuclear. Steven Hayward: Well you know, some of my friends have suggested a unilateral, or a disarmament pact where we give up all… Christopher Flavin: I think that’s a good idea. Steven Hayward: …subsidies for all of them, so we can agree on that one. Christopher Flavin: I would agree to that. Exactly. Ben Wattenberg: Well but, nuclear power if you’re interested in global warming, puts out no emissions. Christopher Flavin: I think we should leave that one to the market, Ben. I mean the market has basically delivered zero additional nuclear power plants in this country in twenty-five years. Because it’s not economical, because private companies don’t want to invest in it because the government subsidies and the government protections that were once there no longer exist. Ben Wattenberg: You don’t think that one of the reasons they haven’t been building new plants is because environmental activists have cost—I mean the anti-nuclear movement starts when Jane Fonda, you know comes up against Three Mile Island and everybody says oh my god we’re all going to blow up. Christopher Flavin: I don’t think that Jane Fonda is going to be able to single-handedly stop a multi billion dollar a year industry. It was described by Forbes magazine as the biggest economic disaster since the Vietnam War. And I think Forbes is right that market forces destroyed the nuclear industry and it’s very unlikely to be revived. Steven Hayward: More recently Forbes said, like other forms of technology where the costs are coming down, that there’s new generations of nuclear technology that look a lot more plausible. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. On that note of quoting Steve Forbes as the bible on both sides of something, thank you very much, Chris Flavin. Thank you very much, Steve Hayward. And thank you all for joining us on “Think Tank.” Please remember to send us you comments via e-mail. For “Think Tank,” I’m Ben Wattenberg. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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