By Gerry Harant
There is far more wrong with Paul Ehrlich's formula I=PA (or I=PAT in its extended form) than GLW correspondence and articles have so far suggested. Both the form and the contents of Ehrlich's statement are ideologically loaded.
By implying scientific precision, Ehrlich (who is not mathematically literate) blinds us to the fact that population size and "average affluence" are not by any means the most important parameters affecting environmental impact, and that their interaction is far more complex than simple multiplication. And whatever Ehrlich's motive may have been in putting his ideas in that form, mainstream media promoting the notion do so for their own far from pure motives.
The world's power brokers can no longer ignore the fact that our planet is being destroyed by gross over-exploitation of finite resources. They can, however, obscure the social forces driving this destruction, by blaming it on individuals. I=PA conveniently reduces the problem to stopping the poor nations of this world from "breeding like rabbits", while in rich countries ordinary people must "tighten their belts".
Promoting these "solutions" to the exclusion of reality is an excellent way of blaming the victims, and results in slanging matches between two artificially created sides. On a world scale, the notions expressed by I=PA have created divisions between "North" and "South" which put huge obstacles in the way of tackling our real environmental problems.
The parameters
The only factor in Ehrlich's "equation" which can be quantified is population number. Environmental impact means quite different things to different groups of people. For the rich in the affluent North, it often means preserving some species of pretty- looking mammals; for the poor of the South, it means the survival of their children as their soils and water supplies disappear. For workers it means sacrificing their health and often their lives to industrial processes. Even if there were some common unit to allow us to quantify global environmental impact, what earthly use would it be given that different factors, which often have to be tackled separately, contribute to different aspects of global destruction.
Even more counterproductive is the notion of "average affluence". One recent letter in GLW tried to justify
the use of I=PA by quoting a hypothetical example of a population which eats so many apples today, "obviously" eating twice as many apples if it doubles. In reality, today's Third World apple-eaters are limited to the top few per cent of the population, and it is the consumption of these few which dominates overall apple consumption; it may not change much with population change. The "average consumption" concept in both rich and poor countries, like other averages, is meaningless because it is an average of vastly disparate quantities.
Apart from this, when we talk of the destruction of the environment, we are not talking about producing apples for local consumption, but about the environmental depredations of powerful technologies driven by an allied, equally powerful, destructive ideology.
The "maths" in I=PA is fatally flawed. A does not stand for some quantity occurring in reality, but is an artificial number simply arrived at by dividing overall resource use by the human population. We could equally well divide this resource use by the number of rats, call that average "A" and then prove "scientifically" that doubling the rats would lead to environmental disaster, while exterminating them would save the earth.
Anyone with high school maths would readily understand that, since P and A are not independent parameters, I=PA can easily be used to prove that two equals one.
A real example
I=PA is not something we have to argue in the abstract, or by reference to some faraway country. Victoria's per capita production of greenhouse gases is very high by world standards. Despite governmental waffle, it has been and is still rising. More than half of this comes from electricity generation.
But while it is clearly laudable to switch off unnecessary lights, Victorians should realise that even if we all burnt candles, Victoria's overall electricity use would hardly be affected. The sum total of private consumption of power is about equal to that used by the aluminium industry, most of whose product is used outside Australia.
It is clear that the slight rise since 1980 in population P is not responsible for our considerably increased contribution since then to the I in I=PA. It is equally clear that if our population were to double, the effect would be quite minor.
For the formula to hold, our additional greenhouse emissions would have to be due to some rise in A, the average affluence.
Sadly for the population of Victoria, as well as for the exponents of I=PA, the reverse is true. The period of greatest absolute rise in CO2 production has been a period of falling living standards.
Nor is this negative correlation spurious. Currently, Victorians contribute no less than $250 million per annum to the Alcoa smelter alone; with the inauguration of Loy Yang B2 and its privatisation, these subsidies to energy-intensive users will rise considerably, as will our CO2 production; other forms of pollution will also increase further due to the operation of energy-intensive processes like smelting.
This inverse relationship between individual living standards and pollution is not an isolated instance. Worldwide, as a recent article in New Scientist pointed out, energy subsidies, at the expense of the people, distort the picture to such an extent that actual production costs of various forms of power generation are impossible to ascertain. A major part of France's deficit goes to maintain the nuclear energy establishment in that country.
Population growth represents a serious problem to third world countries. This is generally known and frequently acted on by their own governments; it is not for us to impose racist solutions on them, given that white populations have expanded to 10 times their size over the last 400 years. Our job is to look into our own filthy backyard.
A class issue
Apart from the two-thirds or so of electricity used by Victoria's individual consumers and the process industries, the other third goes to commercial users. Just what they use it for was illustrated in Victoria recently during a heat wave, when all demand records were broken.
Where are all these air-conditioners? Not in suburban homes, but in huge office blocks, in shopping centres and other commercial locations which appear to have been deliberately dressed in glass to waste as much power as possible.
But then, the activity performed in these buildings is, in itself, largely dedicated to waste. What necessary work is done in the advertising agencies, accounting offices, law firms of our CBDs? Why do we need more and more lavish shopping centres as our incomes are falling? What return do the people get from the massive expenditure on armaments? How many people do you know who work in some really essential job?
Environmental destruction in our society is not mainly due to
consumption by ordinary individuals, but to wasteful practices. While these proliferate, there is no money or indeed labour left for essential services, which go down the drain.
Environmental impact does not depend so much on the amount we produce, but on what we produce. The production of waste, of arms, of mountains of computer and photocopying paper and of massive amounts of squandered energy, is highly profitable to those running the system. Indeed, it is a necessary precondition for the continued existence of their class. It is disastrous for the people who pay for the waste not only in reduced economic standards, but in the degradation of a physical environment which, unlike the rich, they cannot escape. Hence the environment is the ultimate class issue.