The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [146]
And in any case, continues the pessimist, Africa cannot hope to boom because climate change will devastate the continent during the coming century before it can prosper. At the time of writing, global warming is by far the most fashionable reason for pessimism. The earth’s atmosphere has warmed, and it seems that the great 100,000-year experiment of human progress is about to be tested against rising sea levels, melting ice caps, droughts, storms, famines, pandemics and floods. Human activity is causing much of this change, especially by the burning of fossil fuels, whose energy has been responsible for raising the living standards of many of the world’s nearly seven billion people, so humankind faces a stark dilemma in the coming century between continuing a carbon-fuelled prosperity until global warming brings it to a calamitous halt, or restricting the use of carbon and risking a steep decline in living standards because of the lack of alternative sources of energy that are cheap enough. Either prospect might be catastrophic.
Africa and climate therefore confront the rational optimist with a challenge, to say the least. For somebody who has spent 300 pages looking on the bright side of human endeavour, arguing along the way that the population explosion is coming to a halt, that energy will not soon run out, that pollution, disease, hunger, war and poverty can all be expected to continue declining if human beings are not impeded from exchanging goods, services and ideas freely – for such a person as your author, African poverty and rapid global warming are indeed acute challenges.
Moreover, the two issues are connected, because the models that predict rapid global warming take as their assumption that the world will prosper mightily, and that the poorest countries on the planet – most of which are African – will by the end of this century be about nine times as rich as they are today. Unless they are, carbon dioxide emissions will be insufficient to cause such rapid warming. And at present there is no way to make Africans as rich as Asians except by them burning more fossil fuels per head. So Africa faces an especially stark dilemma: get rich by burning more carbon and then suffer the climate consequences; or join the rest of the world in taking action against climate change and continue to wallow in poverty.
That is the conventional wisdom. I think it is a false dilemma and that an honest appraisal of the facts leads to the conclusion that by far the most likely outcome of the next nine decades is both that Africa gets rich and that no catastrophic climate change happens.
Africa’s bottom billion
Of course, not all poverty is in Africa. I am well aware that there is terrible want in many other parts of the world, in Haiti and Afghanistan, in Bolivia and Cambodia, in Calcutta and São Paolo, even in parts of Glasgow and Detroit. But compared with a generation ago, thanks chiefly to progress elsewhere, poverty has come to be concentrated in that one continent as never before. Of the ‘bottom billion’ left behind by recent booms – Paul Collier’s phrase – more than 600 million are Africans. The average African lives on just $1 a day. Saving Africa has become both the goal of idealists and the despair of pessimists. Not only has Africa failed to join Asia’s boom since 1990, it has spent much of the time stagnant or going backwards. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of Africans living in poverty doubled. War in the west of the continent, genocide in the east, AIDS in the south, hunger in the north, dictators in the middle, population growth all over: no part of the continent has escaped the horror. Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone – the very names of countries have taken their turn as synonyms of chaos on the lips of newsreaders in the West.
Moreover, although Africa’s demographic transition has begun, it has a long way to go before population growth decelerates. Nigeria’s