Professor Al Bartlett famously challenged anyone to name even one environmental problem that was not driven or exacerbated by population growth. If current changes in climate are indeed driven more by human activities than by natural phenomena, then surely any numerate person can predict that the use of energy and resources that drive climate change will increase as the number of climate changers increases. Lifting people out of poverty will necessarily increase their use of energy and resources and so Africa, with the help of China, is on track to begin to seriously develop its coal reserves while China is going gangbusters on developing its own.
Meanwhile, agreements reached under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (such as the recently ended COP27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh) require stronger commitments of emissions reductions from developed countries than from developing countries. Despite being the second largest economy in the world and the world’s highest total emitter of greenhouse gases, China is still considered a developing country.
The price of denial
In his recent article, The human eco-predicament: Overshoot and the population conundrum, (available online and to be published in print in 2023), University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus and PIC patron Dr. William Rees calculates that population growth accounted for about 80% of the increase in the total human ecological footprint between 1961 and 2016, despite the much larger average per capita consumption levels of rich countries (see Figure 3 and accompanying text of the paper).
Yet it seems that every serious problem is depicted through the lens of climate change, while to bring up population growth is suspect. The Guardian columnist and climate change activist George Monbiot has long disparaged concerns about population growth as a fig leaf by rich overconsumers to detract attention from their own greed. But as John Meyer, president of Canadians for a Sustainable Society points out in his recent article, “George Monbiot is an Environmental Disaster,” the constant inflow of foreign workers from overpopulated poor countries benefits cheap-labour businesses in rich receiving countries and drives the lower-income earners in those countries out of their jobs and even out of the housing market. Overpopulation is a bread-and-butter issue to working people in both poor and rich countries.
The Avaaz solicitation mentioned at the beginning of this article referred to “the face of the climate crisis.” But what about the face of the population crisis? As far as the mainstream media and many of our leaders are concerned, there doesn’t seem to be one. Climate change is highlighted as a driver of phenomena in which it plays only a minor role, if any. In his article “Climate refugees or overpopulation escapees?” Professor Philip Cafaro dissects a New York Times Magazine article whose headline “The Great Climate Migration” belies the model cited by its author, which predicted that only 5% of the migrants in question would be driven by climate change.
The fact is, the human population is in overshoot; that is to say, it has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth. As Dr. Rees notes in the above-cited paper, “Mainstream approaches to alleviating various symptoms of overshoot merely reinforce the status quo.” Applying this to the desperate situation in Somalia, we can say that feeding the hungry without reversing population growth will simply lead to more hungry people to feed in the future.
We can also agree with Dr. Rees that in the absence of a contraction of both the material economy and the human population, the future of our civilization — quite sadly but not shockingly — looks like Collapse. |
Brilliant!