Forests Saved by Fossil Fuels and High Farm Productivity

American forests were disappearing between 1850 and 1910 due to the need for wood as fuel and the increases in farmland.  After 1910, the extent of our forests was stable and then they began to expand as crop yields increased dramatically.  High-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and corn were developed.  Fossil fuel use spared the forests from use as fuel.  See Ronald Bailey's article Peak Farmland?, which is largely based on a lecture by Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University in December 2012.

U.S. corn production from 1860 to 2010 increased by a factor of 17.  Corn yields in America are now averaging 180 bushels per acre, while worldwide yields are 82 bushels per acre.  Increasing yields should continue, since non-irrigated yields of about 300 bushels per acre are already being produced with new varieties.

The story of India is instructive.
 In 1960:

• Population = 435 million
• Diet = 2000 calories a day
• Farmland = 398 million acres (slightly more that 2 times the size of Texas), 0.91 acre/capita

In 2010:

• Population =  1.155 billion, increase of 2.66 times
• Diet = 2330 calories a day, or one-sixth more
• Farmland = 420 million acres, or 5.5% more, 0.36 acre/capita

If Indian wheat production had not improved since 1960, an additional 161 acres of farmland would have been needed to produce the same amount of wheat.  Thanks to Indians flocking to the cities since then, Indian forests have actually expanded by 37 million acres.

China in the post-Mao period has a similar history.  The population doubled, GDP increased 45 times, farmland planted in corn doubled, but corn yield was 4.5 times greater per acre.  The corn yield increase kept 297 million acres of land from being used to produce this corn.  Chinese forest land increased from 1990 to 2010 by 30%.

Without crop yield increases from 1960 to 2010, about 7.4 billion more acres of farmland would have been needed worldwide.  This land area is almost twice that of South America or equal to that of the USA, Canada, and China combined.  Fortunately, farmers today are producing almost three times as much food on the amount of land used in 1960 for farming.

Ausubel and colleagues estimate that the world average corn yield in 2060 will be about equal to that of the USA in 2010.  General increases in crop yields will release between 360 and 990 acres of farmland by 2060.  In addition, about 40% of the world's grain is used for livestock.  A biotech company called Modern Meadows wants to use 3D printers and tissue engineering to make meat.  If that idea works, less farmland still will be needed.  The forests are saved.

Viewers of An Objectivist Individualist by Nation

Having just discussed who does the most searches on Ayn Rand related topics and who visited the website of the Ayn Rand Institute the most in my previous post, I thought it might be interesting to share where the readers of this blog come from.  Of course, this blog is not primarily about Ayn Rand.  It is about many topics of interest to me, which I discuss in a manner consistent with my own commitment to reason and to morality.  I believe my values are very consistent with those of Ayn Rand, but I do not claim they are identical.  And it must be said that my selection of topics is quite different than was Ayn Rand's.

The pageviews of the last month have been by:

United States, 7002
Russia, 941
United Kingdom, 699
Canada, 221
France, 177
Germany, 155
India, 126
Australia, 98
Spain, 62
Netherlands, 48

The pageviews history for all time have been by:

United States, 86,960
Russia, 8252
United Kingdom, 7455
Canada, 5486
Germany, 2989
India, 2985
Australia, 2822
South Korea, 2272
France, 939
Slovenia, 777

It would be of great interest to me to know who my readers are and why they read this blog.  I wish to invite my readers to either make comments or to tell me why they read this blog in e-mails sent to charles.r.anderson@gmail.com

It is a rather curious thing to me that I have had so many readers in Russia, for instance.  If readers there would be kind enough to shed light on that, I would be most appreciative.  I suspect that part of the reason is that I discuss man-made global warming and energy issues with some frequency and Russia is a giant energy producer and many Russians are rather skeptical about catastrophic man-made global warming.  Either personal reasons for being a reader or general insight into why Russians might read this blog would be welcome information.

While Scandinavians may be big readers of the Ayn Rand Institute website, they are not such big readers of this blog.  Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland do pop up on the list occasionally when I look at the statistics of pageviews for a given week, but this is not a regular thing.  I see South Africa fairly often in such shorter timescales also.  Spain and the Netherlands are also frequently on the list for shorter timescales.

Article on Ayn Rand in the Economist

The Economist of 20 - 26 October 2012 has an article called Ayn Rand: Who's shrugging now? Sub-headed: The individualist philosopher has fans in some unlikely countries

The article reports that the movie Atlas Shrugged Part I cost $8 million and earned less than $5 million.  Atlas Shrugged Part II was funded with $20 million and it is hoped it will earn $10 million.

Ed Hudgins of the Atlas Society says they have 11,000 non-American monthly visits to the Atlas Society website now, which is up from 7,000 two years ago.  Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute says their website's visitors are mostly from Britain, Canada, India, and Scandinavia.

Excluding English speakers, Swedes are the leading "Ayn Rand" searchers on Google.  A free-market think-tank in Stockholm named Timbro has sold 30,000 copies of Ayn Rand's books since 2005, which compares very well to sales of 90,000 copies in Britain with six times the population.  Despite this, when Annie Loof, the enterprise minister called Rand "one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century", she was given a very hard time about it.

After the U.S. and Canada, India leads the world in English-language searches on topics relating to Ayn Rand.  There is a massive market in pirated copies of her books in India, according to Barun Mitra of the Liberty Institute, an Indian think-tank.

The article closes by noting that Ayn Rand's books outsell those of Karl Marx by a factor of 16.

GDP and Industrial Output Comparisons by Country

I needed to find out if China was the number 1 manufacturing nation in the world or was it the United States?  This proved a bit more difficult question than I thought it would be.  But the CIA World Factbook had the information needed to determine this and to calculate the actual value of each of the three sectors into which they divide the GDP for the year 2010.  These sectors are Agriculture, Industry, and Services.  The results I found for the 7 nations with the largest GDPs expressed in dollars with purchasing power parity are given in the following table:

 

The answer to my original question is that the value of China's industrial output, which includes mining and construction, is $4.73 trillion, while that for the United States is $3.24 trillion.  China's industrial output is 46% greater than that of the United States.  No other nation comes close to having so much industrial output as China or the United States.  The value of China's agricultural output is also the largest in the world.  In this case, it is 6 times that of the United States.  It is the delivery of services that the U.S. excels in doing.

The per capital GDP for the United States is more than 6 times that of China.  Germany has the second highest per capita GDP on the list and that of the U.S. is 32% higher.  The United Kingdom and Japan both have per capita GDPs very nearly as great as that of Germany.  This group has a per capita GDP more than twice that of Russia, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of China, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of India.

Socialism Kills: The Human Cost of Delayed Economic Reform in India

This entry summarizes an interesting report by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, a research fellow at Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, who was the editor of the two biggest financial daily newspapers in India, the Economic Times and Financial Express.

India isolated itself from the rest of the world in trade terms and attempted to become economically self-sufficient for the first three decades after its independence in 1947.  During that period, India became more and more socialistic under the influence of the Soviet Union and was more and more managed and controlled by the government.  India's share of the international export market fell from 2.2% upon independence to 0.45% in 1985.  India, being very backward, did grow at at rate of 3.5% per year, but this was slow growth compared to other once backward Asian nations who were more export-oriented.  Since India's population was growing rapidly, it per capita growth in this period was only 1.49% per year per person.  The reforms which started in 1981 started freeing the economy and growth rates increased.  These reforms were undertaken more certainly after the balance of payments crisis in 1991.  In the relatively free period from 2000 to 2008, the growth rate was 6.78% and social indicators were much improved.

But what did a decade of economic development delay cost India?  As is always the case with socialism, the results are ugly.  One decade of delay in economic freedom killed 14.5 million children, kept 261 million Indians illiterate, and kept 109 million Indians unnecessarily in poverty. 

India Disputes Man-Made Global Warming Alarmism

Back in June 2008, India produced its National Action Plan on Climate Change in which it disputed the UN IPCC and Al Gore claim that man has caused global warming and it will become a disaster. Sensibly, India believes it is important to save its people from poverty and to join the developed nations such as the United States of America in producing the per capita CO2 emissions that translate into the good life. Indian scientists looked for reasons for concern in the actual climate of India and found nothing unusually alarming. They found no evidence for man-made warming.

Indian scientists noted that in a century, the average surface temperature had risen 0.4 degree, but did not think that reason for alarm. They examined the quantity of rain, floods, droughts, and the growth and recession of Himalayan glaciers. Al Gore specifically claimed that the recession of Himalayan glaciers was catastrophic. The Indian scientists found that some glaciers were retreating, but that others were advancing. They concluded that a number of hypotheses about why some were advancing and some were retreating simply needed yet to be evaluated.

V. K. Raina is India's leading glaciologist and he says only 5o of 9,575 glaciers in India have been studied carefully. However, nearly 200 years of general data seems to indicate to him that nothing abnormal has occurred with respect to the Himalayan glaciers. He believes that a few sensationalists are hyping the retreat of some glaciers to cause alarm.

The President of the Geological Society of India, B. P. Radhakrishna, believes that global warming has occurred as part of the natural glacial-interglacial cycle of the earth. He believes that man can and will adapt to such changes of the earth's climate as will naturally occur. He does not believe man can control the climate by reducing CO2 emissions.

Even the Indian engineer and economist Rajendra Pachauri, the UN IPCC Chairman has said that he will look into the "apparent temperature plateau so far this century."

I believe there are some wise men in India.