October 10, 1973
Page 33530
LIMITS TO GROWTH
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, much has been said and written in recent months about where man is headed if he continues along the current path of unexamined growth. One of the most thoughtful commentaries I have seen on the subject of "Limits to Growth" is the address which the distinguished Senator from Rhode Island (Senator PELL) delivered last week to an Honors Colloquium at the University of Rhode Island.
As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Oceans and the International Environment which Senator PELL chairs, I am particularly aware of the Senator from Rhode Island's long-standing concern for the relationship between economic growth and the environment. The address which he delivered in Rhode Island on October 1, is an important contribution to the continuing debate about the consequences of growth for the quality of human life and human society, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
LECTURE BY SENATOR CLAIBORNE PELL
Recently I received a letter from a concerned citizen listing some of the major problems clouding the future of civilized man. The list was a familiar one:
Uncontrolled growth in population,
Limited world resources in terms of food, fiber, and energy,
Limited capacity of the world environment to absorb the wastes and byproducts of affluent, industrialized society.
In concluding, the letter posed a worrisome question: Is our Government formulating any cohesive, comprehensive response to this on-rushing crisis facing mankind?
The question is an important one, and I would like to address myself to it tonight.
I believe that humanity does indeed face critical problems in the coming decades, problems that will have a profound impact on the quality of life here in our country and throughout the world.
Thus far, at least, I have been far more impressed by the enormity of the problems than I have by the ability of our Government or other governments of the world to focus on those problems in a meaningful way.
These long-range problems, however, are beginning to show themselves symptomatically in our national life, in the form of short-term crises. Let me cite a few examples:
FOOD
During the past six months, we Americans have had the shocking and sobering experience of seeing empty meat counters at supermarkets, spotty shortages in certain other foods, and soaring food prices. To a large extent, these problems, I believe, are quite clearly the result of extraordinarily bad economic management by the Executive Branch of our Government. To some extent, however, the food supply problems of the past few months have been a first, gentle reminder of some stark truths:
Man remains, as he has through history, dependent for survival each year on the food he can coax from the earth and wring from the sea in the same year. A convergence of crop failures in a single year can spell disaster for much of mankind. And with population growth pressing closer to world agricultural productive capacity, man becomes increasingly vulnerable.
As we learned this year, it is exceedingly difficult, even if it is determined to be desirable, for one fortunate affluent nation to insulate itself from crop disasters that strike other nations.
The demand for more food, worldwide, will grow as human population grows – and world population at current rates will double in twenty to thirty years.
Never perhaps has all of mankind been fed adequately. The outlook for improvement in the future is not bright.
ENERGY
Similarly, we are now experiencing the first cutting edge of a long-term energy supply problem.
We have had the first peacetime shortages of gasoline for our mushrooming population of automobiles, and we face the possibility of the first serious shortages of home heating oil this winter. Once again, these shortages, unparalleled in the recent decades of plenty, are but foreshadowings of great problems to come.
We are in the United States profligate users of energy. With six percent of the world's population, we now account for more than one-third of the annual world energy consumption and almost one-half of the world's pollution. Through the industrial age, affluence and high levels of energy consumption have gone hand in hand.
At current growth levels, we expect that our consumption of energy in the United States might double in a decade.
As a nation we are faced with critical problems of developing new energy sources to meet ever-increasing demand. But we have also the certain knowledge that at some unknown future time, the fossil fuel reserves of the world will be exhausted. Will we by then have developed a new technology of perpetual energy supply?
Even during the current era of fossil fuels, we know that as a nation we must inevitably become more dependent than we would like to be on imported energy.
And what of the rest of the world? The developing nations of the world, with a majority of the world's population, aspire to industrialization and improvement in the material quality of life of their people. As we have noted, economic growth and increasing per capita income are linked to increasing uses of energy.
The known energy resources of the world would face insupportable pressures if by some miracle of economic development, all the peoples of the world consumed energy at the rate that we Americans do.
ENVIRONMENT
At the same time, we have become intensely aware in the past few years that the human environment – the life-sustaining environment that we share with other creatures of the earth – is not unlimited in supply or capacity.
One of the basic elements of the environment is land. Largely because of our affluence and growth, land in many areas of our country has become a scarce commodity – and like all scarce commodities, increasingly expensive. We have found that we can no longer afford to be wasteful or careless in the way we use our limited supply of land. There are only so many miles of beaches, and more and more of our land area is being paved. with concrete, sliced into quarter- acre portions for home sites, or dedicated to industrial parks or shopping plazas. In fact 1 percent of our land area is now hard-topped, devoted to the moving, parking, care, and production of automotive vehicles, and in urban areas it is obviously much higher.
On a broader scale we have found that our affluence may in some cases place unsustainable burdens on the atmosphere and the waters of the world.
The environmental problem, in many ways, underlies the other major problems I have mentioned – food and energy supplies. I say this because efforts to ease or solve the food and energy problems all too frequently are found to be feasible only at an unacceptable cost in terms of environmental damage.
The technology that increases food production requires increased uses of energy to produce fertilizer, to run tractors, to irrigate. The chemicals and pesticides that boost crop production all too often take a heavy toll in environmental damage.
Tapping new energy sources invariably involves severe environmental problems: surface stripping of oil shale or coal, or extracting oil from beneath the sea.
And, even if the energy sources are successfully tapped, there is serious question about the long-range modification of the climate resulting from prolonged, high-level consumption of fossil fuels.
Without plunging you further into gloom, I hope I have made my point. As fortunate residents of the most affluent and industrialized nation on earth, we have in the past few years begun to feel the pinch of severe, long-term global problems.
If you look at these problems as a whole, you find there is a single thread that runs through them all. The suggestion clearly emerges that there may well be limits to growth, particularly to exponential growth:
Limits to the growth of world population,
Limits to the growth of energy consumption,
Limits to the agricultural production of the world.
To put it another way, continued, endless growth may have complications and consequences for the quality of human life and for human society that are best avoided.
For most of the world, and for our own society in particular, this is a startling, if not revolutionary concept. The idea that growth is good is deeply embedded in our culture, and in Western civilization.
But the concept that growth may indeed have limits is one that is now being given serious study.
One study, in particular, has provoked worldwide interest. That study, appropriately entitled, "Limits to Growth," was commissioned by an organization called the "Club of Rome," conducted by a team of academicians led by Professor Dennis Meadows of MIT, and published in March of last year.
The study has its critics, and certainly has its shortcomings. But, it has succeeded in provoking serious thought about where man is headed if he continues along the current path of unexamined growth. I commend it highly and hope each of you will have an opportunity to read and critique
it.
The Club of Rome, incidentally, is not a very apt or descriptive name for the organization. It is in fact a relatively informal organization, with a membership limited to under 100 persons for practical working reasons. It was formed several years ago, under the leadership of Dr. Aurelio Peccei, by a group of individuals concerned about the destiny of man. I have the honor of being the only elected politician who is a member of the organization.
Let me turn now to the question I posed at the outset. How well is our Government responding in formulating responses to some of the long-range problems confronting mankind?
We have, In fact, made some very good modest beginnings.
We now have an Environmental Policy Act that requires our Government, for the first time, to examine the environmental consequences, in broad terms, of any major governmental action.
In addition, the Senate this year has passed a Land Use Policy Act that, in effect, requires that some conscious decisions be made about the development of land resources in our country, giving consideration to alternate uses and future needs. We now have a Coastal Zone Management Act that provides incentives for state governments to undertake the same kind of conscious management of our increasingly crowded coastal zones.
And last year the Congress took a major step in authorizing the establishment of an Office of Technology Assessment – an arm of the Congress that will provide objective and expert information on possible side effects and unforeseen impacts of the introduction of new technology.
As an example of the importance of the work of this new Congressional office, we need consider only that the United States Government to a large extent sponsored the growth of the automobile as the predominant transportation technology in the nation, without any serious appreciation of the longer-range social and environmental impacts of that technology.
Each of these recent governmental actions is a significant and helpful step in the right direction.
But I believe more far-reaching action will be required if we are to respond adequately to the challenge. Unfortunately, there are very serious obstacles – political, cultural and institutional.
I have alluded previously to one of the principal barriers. It is the deeply-ingrained belief in growth – economic growth – as one of the principal goals of national policy. Indeed, politically the success of any national administration is most usually measured by the growth of the economy during its term in office. A big Gross National Product is a big step toward a big plurality at the ballot box.
This is quite understandable, for the orthodox economic and political philosophy of society from the start of the industrial revolution has been that economic growth is the essential means of improving the condition of man. It is a philosophy that has indeed served us well, and for evidence of that we need only look at the material well being of the great masses of people in the industrialized nations of the world.
But, having viewed economic growth as the solution to man's problems, society generally is not likely to accept very readily the view that growth without limits is not a solution, but a problem in itself.
I do think we are becoming aware that indexes such as the Gross National Product do not provide an adequate measure of the quality of life – and that is what we really are concerned about.
As Stewart L. Udall has suggested, we have a need for other quantitative indexes that will measure some other very important aspects of the quality of life: indexes of privacy, of quiet, and of cleanliness. The public, I suspect, is becoming increasingly aware amidst the evidence of daily life – traffic jams, smog warnings, crowded recreational areas – that more is not always better.
If our national and international policies are to be guided by considerations other than gross tonnage of products produced, it is, I believe, important that we learn how to produce meaningful measures ments of what it all means to the quality of life.
Another serious barrier to coping with serious, long-term problems is that our institutions are geared to the solving of immediate problems in the shortest time possible.
In politics, in government, and in business, the rewards in terms of honor, recognition, and money go to those persons who can apply the quick fix.
In the Federal Government, any administration is compelled by political realities to seek short- range solutions to immediate problems; to promote policies that will produce demonstrable results within a four-year term.
There are at least two problems with this bias toward the short-term policy. First, it may lead to neglect of apparently less-pressing long-term problems. Secondly, the, quick fix for a short-term problem may in fact make the long-term problem worse.
For example, a quick fix for the gasoline shortage this past summer would involve government action to require the production and distribution of enough gasoline to meet consumer demand. But that action might well make it even more difficult in the future to focus attention on basic long-term solutions, including development of alternative and more efficient transportation systems, and policies to conserve energy discouraging profligate burning of irreplaceable oil resources.
The public pressures for immediate solutions to a problem are immense. There are very few public pressures for policies addressed to long-term problems.
I can tell you from my personal experience that anticipating problems of the future and trying to solve them while they are manageable is personally satisfying but politically unprofitable.
For example, in the field of disarmament, I labored for several years promoting the idea of a treaty to prohibit the introduction of nuclear weapons onto the seabeds of the world. Such a treaty has now been negotiated and ratified. But this effort met with no great applause, little recognition, and scarcely mention in the news media.
Indeed, there was some criticism that this treaty was empty of import, because there were no nuclear weapons on the seabeds. I cannot help but think, however, that the world would be a safer place today if a treaty had been negotiated 25 years ago prohibiting the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles before they were deployed.
Today, there is governmental and public focus on the SALT talks, where efforts are being made to limit offensive strategic weapons such as the ICBM. But where are the efforts to prevent the development of new kinds of weaponry?
Recently, the Senate adopted my resolution urging the negotiation of a treaty prohibiting the development or use of environmental warfare.
I believe this new technology of warfare poses a very real threat, but because it is a problem of the future, it is not receiving the attention it deserves.
Another example, drawn from my personal experience, is the effort to improve intercity rail passenger service, and to develop new ground transportation technology, as an alternative and a supplement to proliferating interstate highways. It is an effort I began 13 years ago, largely as a one-man campaign in the Senate. Now there is a growing realization that modern high speed rail service, or new forms of high speed ground transportation make a lot of sense in terms of energy conservation, land use, and efficiency, but we have yet to make the large-scale investments required to provide a balanced transportation system we need.
I am very deeply concerned at the dilemma that confronts us.
On one hand, we clearly face long-term problems that will profoundly affect the quality of human life in future decades. On the other hand, our society and our institutions are focused on managing the crises of the moment.
I confess I have no easy solutions to this dilemma.
I do have some suggestions.
Obviously we should continue the efforts we have begun to strengthen the institutional arrangements of our government that deal with long-range planning and policies.
We should re-examine the incentives we have built into our economy and our government that promote greater growth, greater production, and greater consumption. For example, do we still want to encourage electric power consumption by granting lower rates to persons who use more power?
Ultimately, however, the best hope of turning our national attention to the problems of unlimited growth may rest in an old-fashioned virtue – statesmanship.
To cope with these problems, we must have public officials on the national level willing to turn from the politically profitable quick fix to the more difficult task of leadership.
We must have leaders willing to take the political risk involved in telling hard, unpopular truths.
And this is why I am sad at seeing the decline in political activism that is so apparent on our campuses today, for it is the campuses of today that should be the spawning ground for our leaders of tomorrow.
We do indeed face serious problems. I believe the problems are manageable – if only we can begin, with sufficient vigor to try to manage them.