A seriously deluded man. What's with these big eared people?

Prince of Wales attacks climate change sceptics – and economic growth

The Prince of Wales was in the European Parliament just now, attacking economic growth. To his credit, unlike many Eurocrats and Greenies, he made the attack explicit:

It is plain to me that responding to these problems with a “business as usual” approach towards our pursuit of GDP growth offers only short-term relief, not a long-term cure. Why? Because I cannot see how we can possibly maintain the growth of GDP in the long-term if we continue to consume our planet as voraciously as we have been doing.

Well, alright. But the prince might like to consider two points. First, although natural resources are finite, human ingenuity is not. The reason that every Malthusian doom-monger since Malthus has been wrong is that they underestimated the capacity of our species to stretch resources through new inventions. A hundred years ago, no one would have thought it possible that our planet could sustain six billion human beings. But a series of advances in agriculture, industrial production and, perhaps most important, global commerce, confounded the predictions of the Prince Charlses of their day.

The pessimists are at least consistent, in the sense that they often resist these technological developments. The prince, for example, laments the felling of rainforests, and rightly so. Yet he is reluctant to embrace the one development that would most obviously allow us to get more food out of existing farmland, and so relieve the pressure on neighbouring jungles, namely GM.

Which leads to the second fallacy, viz the belief that governments in general, and the EU in particular, are well placed to secure the natural environment. All the evidence suggests the opposite. The Common Agricultural Policy has been an ecological calamity, encouraging the felling of hedgerows and the use of chemical fertilisers in Europe, while causing much preventable poverty in Africa. The Common Fisheries Policy has exterminated fish stocks more efficiently than any national system and, having sterilised Europe’s seas, is now emptying the territorial waters of Third World countries through a series of bilateral agreements.

No, the best way to protect the environment is through private ownership. One of the most encouraging developments of recent years has been the readiness of philanthropists to purchase millions of acres of endangered ecosystems. When rich people buy rainforests, they make damn sure that no one degrades their property. When, by contrast, Sting made over a chunk of the Amazon to its indigenous population, local chiefs promptly set about reducing their tribes to near-slavery, and started logging and mining on an unprecedented scale. Why? Because, as in the old USSR, the land was owned communally, not privately.

If you think I’m being fanciful, consider the story of two elephant populations, one of which was privatised, the other placed under state protection (see this 90 second video). As Adam Smith observed, give a man a seven-year lease on a garden and he will turn it into a desert; but give him a freehold on the desert and he will turn it into a garden.

The prince knows this perfectly well. In his capacity as a private landowner, he has been an exemplary custodian of the natural environment. While it’s hardly my place to offer him advice, I can’t help thinking that he’d be better off extrapolating from his own example than urging the state to regulate more.

As for the notion that the pursuit of economic growth is somehow unhealthy or unbalanced, it’s worth reminding ourselves of preciselywhat we mean by economic growth.