Clik here to view.
The author of Ten Billion on how we might avert a population catastrophe, his attempts to replicate photosynthesis, and why G8 leaders ought to wear ties
Watch Stephen Emmott reading extracts from his book. Reading this on mobile? Click here
Why have scientists and politicians been slow and reluctant to confront population growth?
It might be useful to first distinguish between growth and behaviour. The problem is less the current number of us in itself (yet) but more the way the majority of the 7 billion of us live and consume. This is principally the cause of almost every global problem we face. Critically, every one of these problems is set to accelerate as we continue to grow. "Confronting", as you put it, the way we live and consume is not something politicians want to do. Doing so would be immensely unpopular. And politicians do like to be popular. Indeed, our entire political systems are set up for the opposite: to promote and encourage us to increase our consumption and irresponsible behaviour. As for scientists – my colleagues, I should add – the vast majority choose to do what I have chosen not to do; to keep their heads well below the parapet on this lot.
Do you think Thomas Malthus was wrong only in terms of timescale?
The Reverend Thomas Malthus (FRS, no less) was wrong about many things. Indeed the chap held a fairly broad range of opinions which fell into the "dubious to odious" categories. But on population, his basic argument – that when the population exceeds the means to sustain it, the result is going to be "misery" (in Malthus's words) – remains remarkably difficult to reject. It's interesting that he wrote this despite being witness to the benefits of the agricultural revolution, and the emergence of the industrial revolution, which to most were seen as "a new age" of human progress. So, was he wrong only in terms of timescale? Well, he doesn't really set out a timescale in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population, so the answer has to be no.
When did you first become engaged with these issues? Was it something you dwelt on, growing up in Yorkshire?
Up until a decade ago this was not natural scientific territory for me. I am a neuroscientist by training. But my life for the past decade has been devoted to creating and leading a new laboratory dedicated to better understanding the systems we all rely on, and which are changing rapidly: the climate, the global carbon cycle, the planet's ecosystems. Although I don't have a particularly optimistic view of our future, as a scientist I have a responsibility to do all I can to try to find solutions. So we also do research into energy, specifically a potentially radical new form of energy – artificial photosynthesis, and into "programming life" – that is, the rational design of biological function, to, for example, "program" plants to be resistant to water stress, pests and fungal diseases.
Is your conclusion, that "we are fucked", a good place to start the debate from?
The problem is that I don't see much debate happening. So it's hardly surprising that I think we're fucked. The whole point in writing the book is to try to get us to think about the problems we face in a way we just haven't thought about them before, and hopefully to act as a catalyst for a global debate. But this needs to be a different debate than just some one-dimensional discussion about "population" or "climate" or "going green". The debate we urgently need to have is about us – about how billions of us live, behave, consume irresponsibly, about how billions more want to live, behave and consume. And about how another 3 billion that have not yet been born will, or want to, do the same.
You mention that your lab is engaged in replicating photosynthesis. How close to that goal are we?
Not as close as I would like. We have a research effort under way in artificial photosynthesis, in collaboration with some brilliant colleagues at the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University. I am aiming to have a proof of concept of a scalable system in under five years. Ours is not following the typical approach, that of the search for a solid-state material to split water and extract the resulting hydrogen, but the direct production of electricity by exploiting the kind of quantum-coherent effects that photosynthetic organisms (plants and bacteria) employ. I think this is a better direction to pursue but it is also an incredibly ambitious one.
You presented Ten Billionon stage at the Royal Court in London last year. Was the theatre a good medium for this message?
It was enjoyable. The obvious limit of theatre is that it imposes a fairly heavy constraint on getting the message out – only a small number of people can listen. Interestingly, overwhelmingly, the people who came to speak to me at the talk, and everyone in my lab, and all my friends, all said: "Everyone should hear this message. You must write a book." So I did.
If you had been around the table at the G8 last week, what three priorities would you have been pressing for?
First, to get all those chaps to get their ties put back on. It looks wrong, that open-shirt caper. Or perhaps to have taken Barack to one side and reminded him that the chancellor is not called Jeffrey. Can I have four? The two most important priorities would have been to urge them to treat the situation we're in with the same urgency we'd give if we'd just discovered an asteroid on a collision path with Earth, likely to wipe out 70% of all life. And I'd have pressed them to live up to their role as leaders, and marshal government, businesses and scientists worldwide into unprecedented action to address the problem with the same seriousness we would give to the asteroid scenario.
Do you drive a car?
Yes. Once a week I drive a used hatchback I bought secondhand about five years ago to Waitrose. And back.
Should we forget about windfarms and put our energies into nuclear power?
We should put a lot more of our energies into reducing our consumption of energy, not least the energy needed to produce and transport and power all the stuff we consume that we don't need. But given that it's safe to assume that this isn't going to happen, then the answer to the specific question you ask becomes somewhat complex. Windfarms are definitely not the answer. They (and other "green technologies") might turn out to be part of the answer, but I struggle with claims that this is likely. Nuclear power could solve our energy challenges for the next half-century or so, but where's the massive building programme needed for this to become a reality? Nuclear power is so unpopular that I don't see it happening. In fact, rather than doing all we can to reduce our reliance on carbon and hydrocarbons, we're increasing our efforts to find, extract and use them. We (in Britain) look to the US shale gas and oil "revolution" and want to do the same. Our government recently issued 197 new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea: the largest number since 1967. And our use of coal for electricity production increased by no less than 31% last year.
The market economy and the insistence on growth is clearly currently a large part of the problem. Can it ever be part of the solution?
That's a very good question. Our entire market economy and the way corporations work need to be changed. We need to urgently move away from corporate success being based on who is most effective in influencing government regulation, avoiding taxes and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities to maximise the returns of just one stakeholder – shareholders – to one based on resource conservation, genuine innovation (not just technological innovation) and the satisfaction of multiple stakeholder demands.
Given the apparent impossibility of educating people to stop, say, using plastic water bottles, shouldn't politicians be legislating them out of existence?
Many people will say that, on the contrary, it's anything but impossible to get people to change their behaviour, with current thinking being that this can be achieved through "nudge" efforts. Isn't there a "nudge unit" in No 10? I struggle with much of the rhetoric of the nudge claims. Legislation has to be part of the solution. The principal reason lung cancer has declined is because of legislation on smoking.
Would you favour the adoption of Chinese-style birth rate policies across the world?
No.
Did your work influence your own decisions about family?
I don't have children. My work has not influenced this outcome (other than perhaps as a consequence of doing little other than working).
Are you vegetarian?
I'm an omnivore. That said, I don't eat a lot of meat.
All cultures and societies throughout history have had a strain of apocalyptic prophecy – why should we think we are different?
There is no evidence that we have reason to believe we are different.
How has the financial crisis affected this debate?
It's had no effect whatsoever. This is remarkable since it's patently clear we're creating the equivalent of this so-called "once in a century" financial crisis every year in terms of the purely economic cost of the degradation and loss of the services nature provides for us, and which we are entirely dependent upon. It's just that we don't have to pay the cost of this now. But the cost of the loss of the things that nature provides for us will have to be paid for – by our children and grandchildren.
How do you sleep at night?
I've usually been working from 8am to 1am, so getting to sleep isn't a problem.