Steve: This morning we are meeting with Ken Green. And Ken, what exactly is your title here at the Fraser Institute?
Ken Green: Well I have several titles. One title is Chief Scientist; another is Director of the Risk and Environment Center here at the Fraser Institute.
Now, what exactly is the Risk and Environment Center?
Well, we do research looking at the management of risks to human health and also risks to the environment. So, the question of what we do about air pollution, for example, is something we would study. The question of what we do about global warming is something we study. The question of how we manage chemicals in the environment is something we study.
What do you think are, this is an issue that comes up when we talk about the environment, and that is: What are the really important issues? What are the priorities? So, if I were to ask you what are the really meaningful or significant, or potentially dangerous issues, where should we be focusing our energies? And, conversely, which are the ones that are not so important that are distracting us from the important environmental issues?
You know, that's where I'm torn between the two words "risk" and "environment", because if you look only at risk to people's health, if you have a human-centered view, you then have to step back and say what are the biggest risks to humans health? And are they environmental risks, like air pollution or global warming, or are they risks from disease, starvation, and lack of sanitation and so forth, which kill about ten million children a year. So, it's difficult that way. But when you look only at the environment, you still can rank the problems. And so we do have some cities where the air pollution levels are high enough that it aggravates people's respiratory disease, and particularly in children. We do have water pollution problems. We have areas where wastes buildup and destroy, especially surface water, rivers and streams, because the way cities are designed, it concentrates all of the pollutants and runs them into the water at a high volume, a high rate of speed and causes destruction. We have a coastal water pollution problems, as well, where rain carries all the run-off from the cities and into the storm drains and so forth, out into the ocean and contaminates the ocean with bacteria and various kinds of chemicals that affect the fish and so forth. Those, I'd say, are where we really want to concentrate. The areas where we don't need to be investing as much resource in, in my opinion, is concern over extremely low dose, low exposures to chemicals. And I think we are far too fixated on global warming because of various political reasons, compared to the importance of other problems.
And you made the point that if we look at it from the point of view of risk-to-human-health, and I'm sure that is really the only sensible way to approach the environment, because if you approach the environment from the point of view of what is good for a microbe, or what is good for some other organism, that may not be a good thing for humans. And I got the sense that you were saying that some of the economic issues have a bigger impact on human health, if we look at it globally, than some of the fashionable environmental issues.
Well, I think that's definitely true. One does have to, you do have to acknowledge, though, that even though human-centred environmentalism, or a human-centric world view is one we hold, may hold. Increasingly, though, are people who are not human-centered, including groups like the David Suzuki, his foundation, where they hold this idea that life, other life forms including all the way down to insects and microbes, have an intrinsic value that is outside of humanity and that our value, in ourselves and to our children is not, to them, more important than the value they place on an insect species or on a microbial species, for that matter. They haven't gotten into 'microbe rights' yet, but it's only a matter of time. But you're absolutely right. One of the things that's interesting about the environmental movement is they were the ones who first reminded everybody that everything is connected. That's a mantra in the environmental movement is that everything is connected. We forget about our connectedness to the world. In fact, David Suzuki has a column out today that talks about this, the fact that we lost our connectedness. Well, the problem is that he then goes on to slam economics, which is, really, it's a study of human connectedness in the way of our actions. The way I describe this to classes, is that if the currency of a forest is sugar, and that sunlight gets turned into sugar, which moves around the forest in different forms, it gets eaten and transformed into different things. The currency of the human ecosystem, of course, is money. And to ignore economics is really to do exactly what environmentalists always condemn: it's to fraction your world view into little compartments and treat them as separate when they're not. I mean, it's always seemed to me that you could argue from the perspective of all other forms of life, the worst economic problem is the explosion of the population of humans. Because the humans are taking space away or are changing the ecosystem, possibly to the advantage of some other species but very certainly to the disadvantage of others. So that the fact that the human species is doing well, because the population is increasing, is an environmental problem for others, for other species.
Well, right, but of course all species do that to each other. When you have an explosion of cows, right, if you have a growth in your cattle population it's going to be at the expense of other animals that are pushed out of that particular living space. If you have an explosion of your bear population, it's going to be at the expense of the prey animals that otherwise were going unhunted, and at the expense of other predators who are going to face more competition for food and so on. So, that makes us no different in any regard from the animals. If anything, however, if you think about the sheer number of things, humans even at our six billion, we don't even compare to some of the insect species or bird species, bird populations. So it's not as if we're taking over the entire planet through our mass. Nor our footprint, for that matter: In North America, the development level is only about 5% or less, is land that's developed including farms. The rest is parks and wilderness areas, so we have a pretty small presence when it really comes down to it.
However, when you, say, over-fly British Columbia, it's hard not to see the different areas where, you know, the forest has been harvested. And, of course, very often if you're not at ground level you can't see that these different patches are different. There's different levels of tree cover on them: From thirty thousand feet, you can just see this has been harvested, this hasn't. So do you include the sort of economic forest as untouched or?
Well, I think you have to find a balance. You want to protect your ecosystems, and it is undeniable that human populations receive what are called 'ecosystem services' from forests. I mean, they do, after all, turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. They do offer habitat for wildlife. They do tend to slow water when it rains. If you have a forested hillside, it's going to change the way the water runs down, it's going to trap water, hold it for groundwater, protect the land below and so forth. You have to protect those things because they're services that humans need. On the other hand, humans also need to use the resources that are available to them in order to raise the quality of life for not only Canadians but everyone around the world. And the more we have trade, in which we use resources, the more the lives of people around the world improve. So, you have to find the balance.
Do you think that the problems with the environment are larger in the developed world or in the under-developed world?
Well, I think they're clearly larger in the developing or the under-developed world, in that the developed world has already started to turn the corner on environmental, in fact has long passed turning the corner, on fixing the environmental harms that were the result of their development. The developing countries, because they have such huge populations and when they go through their industrialization and development curves, they're going to rack up much bigger outputs of pollutants than the developed world did because it was so much smaller when it did it. Now how about, though, the argument, and this applies particularly to global warming, that the developed world is hogging the resources, producing a disproportionate amount of the CO2, and so therefore the bad player, the bad actor in this is the developed world?
Well, you have to unpack that several ways. First, it's not clear that CO2 has caused or is likely to cause a significant extent of warming. There are many possible suspects in the investigation as to why it got a little warmer in the last, it seems to have gotten warmer in the last fifteen years. And I say seems advisably because we're not even sure if it's gotten warmer, because of the difficulty of figuring out what the heck an earth-average temperature means. But, even setting that aside, the question are we hogging the resources? Well, we may be hogging resources that we use more than our population and even more on a per capita than other countries, but do we invent more drugs per capita than other countries that they benefit from? Do we invent more technologies per capita than other countries that they benefit from? Have we developed more economic systems per capita than other countries, and do they benefit from those things? There's nothing inherently wrong with using more of one particular resource than everybody else does if you're producing something of value for them to use. And how, touching again on the developing world, China or India, is it possible that they could develop the same kind of industrial capability as the developed world without causing a tremendous increase in pollution?
That's going to be very difficult for them. It's going to be very difficult because first of all, they have such huge populations and have such dramatic needs. They have yet to get adequate sanitation and plumbing and access to clean water for vast swaths of their population. It's going to be very hard. They also don't have a lot of economic - they haven't had a lot of economic freedom, and consequently their economies are not the strongest performers. That means they don't have the luxury of taking a more expensive technology if they can get away with a cheaper one. And so, even though some people say, theorizing, "What we'll do is we'll take the technology from the developed world, our clean gas firing power plants, and we'll give them to China and to India. Rather than have them burn their local coal, we'll somehow give them the gas plant and pipe the gas in for them to use. I just don't see that happening, given their economic nature, their economic status. Plus they're going to view it as technological imperialism, which it would be because they wouldn't have the infrastructure to maintain those plants or service them, and everyone would have to be trained by the developed countries that build the plants and everything. It's going to be very difficult for them to not go through a phase of intense polluting, if they're going to give their population's quality of life. Um-hmm.
Which is not unlike what we had in the developed world. Our cities were quite a bit more unhealthy a hundred years ago than they are today.
Absolutely. There's a standard curve that societies pass through as they develop. When they're first meeting their basic needs, they place food and housing, and education and physical safety above environmental cleanliness, and they go through a polluting phase. They reach a certain level of income and quality of life and then they can turn around and say, "Now, I like this but I'd also like it in a clean environment with clean air and clean water and protected forests and lots of parks." But first they have to get the basic necessities of life down before they can have the luxury of affording any of those things. The challenge is going to be that when the developed world went through this, there really weren't all that many of them. When the United States went through it in the 1800's, there were a hundred million perhaps. When you're looking at China, now, a billion people, it's going to be a bigger curve. There's virtually no way around it. Plus their land has already been much more exhausted by thousands of years of civilization.
Yes, that's right. They don't have the resources to begin with. Now, a question on the environmental movement: I think there's a lot of hype, a lot of ideology, there's a lot of sort of anti-establishment, almost Marxist type of motivation that goes on there. But, do you also think that they have been useful in stimulating people to think perhaps a little proactively about things they can do to mitigate, say, the impact of economic development on the environment? Has it been a positive influence or a negative influence?
I think it's been a positive influence, but, regrettably, it's been a positive influence through a negative approach. Good things can happen even from bad effects. So the fact that they've taken an adversarial approach where they sue rather than They've decided that the industry and economy are the enemy is the regrettable part. The fact they've pointed to the importance of environmental systems, that was very good. And the fact that they pointed out that environmental problems were happening which were not visible, for instance lots of leaking underground storage tanks polluting waterways, killing fish, etc, and thick chemicals building up in some areas, industrial chemicals building up to the level that people were dying in significant numbers - those were all valuable things. Now, I think many of them would have been done without ever having the name of an 'Environmentalist Movement' or having the ideology, sort of, of environmentalism, which is, as you pointed out, pretty much Marxist in its ideology and in some cases outright anti-human. You have some environmental movements where the people, they've characterized humans as being a cancer on Earth, and they think the best thing for the environment would be a virus that kills all the humans off until there's only a few thousand left. Mark: Maybe those particular environmentalists should lead the charge, in that regard.
Yes, lead by example, early.
I'm sure they've heard that, been given that invitation before. I think they did some good in pointing early on, in the '70's when you had Lake Erie, which was heavily polluted, and you had, for instance, one river which actually caught fire because it had so much oil on the water. Right .
And you had substantial bird population die offs, and nobody's quite sure why. They provided a valuable service then. Now, I think that less and less as time goes on.
Mark: One of the things you touched on earlier, and I've read some Fraser Institute material that spoke about it, was that, a lot of the sort-of militant environmentalists, the same type of people that - they're the anti-globalization type of people - harping on the negatives of capitalism and so on. That in fact, only in the countries where capitalism has increased the standard level of income and the standard of living, are those countries able to then change their environmental policy.
Yeah. I break it into two groups. I think of them as sort-of 'old-school' environmentalists, which is they adopted this idea from the '60's, sort of the whole revolutionary ideology that was involved in the Central American disputes and protesting the Vietnam War and so forth, which is essentially that capitalism is bad, it's inherently destructive to the environment and humanity, human nature, and it needs to be wiped out. So they hold this as a fundamental tenet, that if you give people economic freedom the first thing they'll do with it is something destructive. And any kind of freedom, for that matter, actually, they don't really like much of anything in the way of freedom that empowers you to do something because they view what you're going to do with it as being bad. Because maybe you'll want to go hiking. Well, if you're going hiking then you're probably putting a trail through the forest somewhere and they don't want that. Maybe you want to go swimming. Well, if you're going in the ocean, well, you're going to carry your sunscreen with you and you're going to get chemicals in the water so they don't want that. So they have this view that economic freedom is evil, and yet, as you pointed out, if you look around the world and ask where it is that you can maintain a healthy environment, where you can get children access to clean water and good medical care and have them grow up and have a good chance of them growing up, it's precisely the countries where they have more economic freedom. And it's inproportion just the higher you get on the economic freedom scales, the better your indicators are for children's health, environmental quality and access to medical care and good food and all that. Perhaps a final question: What are the, if you were to rank the top three risks to human health in Vancouver and British Columbia, lower mainland, what would they be?
Well the top three risks to human health in Vancouver, lower mainland are probably going to be heart disease, cancer, and then accidents.
If you would say environment-related risks to human health?
None. I think there's a behavioral link to cancer in that people's lifestyle choices increase their risk. Their lifestyle choices in regard to heart disease and accidents, of course, are unrelated to environmental quality. So I'd say that the major things, in your daily life, in the daily life of a Vancouverite, what's going to hurt you or your children. It's going to be disease, accidents, other people, perhaps, crime - although it's not a huge problem here - or your own behavior. It's not likely to be chemicals, it's not likely to be the ozone layer, it's not likely to be air pollution. It's not likely to be water pollution. And that's going forward twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, I mean to the extent that we can predict? That disparity will become bigger because we're improving. Our air quality is improving all the time. Our water quality is improving; we're taking better care of that. We have less enduring chemicals, so the chemical exposures we're getting are declining over time. So the environmental issues in Canada, the developed world, really, we're well past, well over the hump, and headed on the slope to having as pristine an environment as is reasonably possible to achieve. Let me ask one more question, then, because this interests me. The whole fish issue. We hear about the cod running out, we're running out of cod. There's this whole argument about fish farms, which I don't understand even though certain local commentators are getting totally berserk. Well, they say we're A.) Running out of salmon, but also that fish farms is a bad idea. On the other hand if you look at a place like China, if they didn't have fish farms they wouldn't be able to eat fish with their population. What's the whole fish? Maybe delve a little bit into the fish scenario.
That's a tricky one, because there's lots of different scenarios here. One question is: In the deep oceans has over-fishing led to the depletion of large fish?
Right .
Like tuna, like swordfish; big predator fish. The evidence there, although, of course, there's only a few studies, but the evidence there is that there is an over-fishing problem because nobody owns the fish. And so there's absolutely no incentive to save fish or leave them in the ocean to pick them up next year if somebody else is just going to scoop them up out of the water when your boat goes back to port. So you catch as many fish as you possibly can, for as long a time as you possibly can, and that does seem to have lead to unsustainably high catches of fish.
And you include the cod in that?
No, now the cod. The commercial fisheries offshore, like cod and things, they also seem to have had this problem, which is because of the lack of property rights, there's no incentive to leave fish in the water for next year. Right .
Now, the problem is that the state has come in, regulators come in, and they correctly identify a problem, that you're catching less and less fish because you're running out. The biologists tell them your fish are getting smaller all the time because you're catching the big ones, you're not letting them breed and so you're running out of fish. So they've identified the right problem, but they go to a regulatory person first without thinking about the incentives. Why you have this problem. Instead they say, "Well, we have too few fish so we're going to limit the catch. You can only catch these fish from this month to that month." Well then the market responds by having people build either bigger ships or they have more ships, or they have better nets. Then they say, "Well, we're going to shrink the season down and limit the number of boats." So you can only have one boat. But then somebody builds a very big boat, right. That's very effective. They fail to change the underlying incentive, which is that without a reason to steward the resource, you lose by leaving fish in the water.
Right .
So that's a real problem. So that's a genuine problem. We have a book coming out on this question, which says, "What do you do about these fisheries?" Well, you find a way to assign what are called 'tradable credits'. You figure out first and foremost, you have the biologists figure out what's the maximum number of fish you can take out of the water in a given year without knocking the population back so that it can maintain that level, and even grow if you want it to grow back to where it was, you can have more fish. Then you take those credits and you allocate them to the existing fishing fleets, and every year you assess how many credits you have. They, then, know how many credits they're going to get each year so they can catch the amount that's on their permit. Then they stop. They can plan their operations. They have an incentive; they know there will be more fish next year. And anybody who tries to poach is taking away fish from a legitimate credit holder, so they have their own motivation to enforce it, as well. That's been done around the world in various places and it's worked very, very well on different kinds of fish, as well as shellfish. Um-hmm.
The other question you asked is, "Well, what about fish farms?" That's sort of a different subject because, though they run into each other. The fish farm issue is one of concentration. There's an environmental saying which is "The answer to pollution is dilution." There's a saying in the environment that dilution is the answer to pollution. Fish farms make it very hard to dilute things. What they do is they gather a large number of fish into a small place, in a waterway? Now when you gather that many fish at high concentration you get several things: 1., You have to put a lot of fish food in the water and the fish don't eat all of it, so it drifts down and lays in a blanket at the bottom of the ocean and when there's enough of it, it takes the air out. The organisms eat it and it becomes an anaerobic zone, and nothing can really live down there anymore. So you do have a big footprint underneath the fish farm. Another problem is you have to, when you have that many fish close together they serve as a very good population for parasites, for diseases. I mean it's like with humans: When you crowd humans together they become susceptible to a lot of things that when they're spread out, they don't get. So, lice, right?
Right .
And, in fact, sea lice is part of the problem. You have the fish farms where the sea lice tend to. They see a big target and they reproduce very rapidly. Now, they come from wild fish, they're brought in from wild fish. So it's a wild fish that contaminates the fish farm in the first place. Then the fish farm can really amplify the problem.
Right .
Then they have to throw drugs, right; they have to use antibiotics in order to cure them, to clean them out. So it is challenging to not have that pollution cause a problem. Then if the diseases do amplify then the local fish stocks, which may have already been hammered by over-fishing.
Right .
They're hammered yet again by an accidental side blow from the fishery. It is a challenge. But as you pointed out, it's not one we can afford to write-off or pick. We have, the world's going to have about eight billion people in 2050, 2050-2100. And it's irrational to think we're going to provide those people with all the protein they need without, by wasting this kind of technology, without using this kind of technology. And if we don't use the fish farming, well, what kind of protein are they going to have? Because the other methods of raising protein also have a footprint.
Right .
There's nothing humans do, actually, that leaves no footprint. So if you're going to run cattle, well, cows are not exactly environmentally benign. If it's going to be pigs, the same thing. If it's going to be chickens, poultry, etc. they're all troubling. And humans are really not designed to thrive only on vegetable protein. And in fact there are good studies that show that if the whole world was vegetarian we'd be far worse off, because there are very few places in the world where you can eat local vegetation and have a fully balanced diet. You have to bring things in, and if you were to do it on a scale that was necessary globally, to do all the vitamin concentrates and everything else that leads to a "healthy vegetarian lifestyle" in the developed world, you'd cause immense environmental destruction. Because you'd have to transport vast bulks of food around the world, whereas protein, of course, is actually the most concentrated form of nutrition you can move around. So it's much more efficient to try to move that than it is to try to move five hundred tons of soybeans. You know, I think that's a good place to stop because you have reintroduced the question of connectedness and everything is connected. And I thank you very much.
