Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Climate Change, Overpopulation Fears Are a Bad Mix for the Left
Global birthrates are declining, but not fast enough for some environmentalists and climate-change worriers. A new piece by New York Times economics columnist Eduardo Porter suggests one way to reduce carbon emissions is by reducing population growth. Porter writes: “As the threat of climate change has evolved from a fuzzy faraway concept to one of the central existential threats to humanity, [some scholars] have noted that reducing the burning of fossil fuels might be easier if there were fewer of us consuming them.” He quotes one expert as saying:
“There is a strong case to be made that the world faces sustainability issues whether it has nine billion people, seven billion people or four billion people,” said John Wilmoth, who directs the United Nations Population Division. “Nobody can deny that population growth is a major driving factor, but in terms of the policy response, what are you going to do?”
First, we may be closer to zero global population growth than many realize. The UN projects the world’s current population of roughly 7.2 billion will rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and then to 10.9 billion in 2100. But demographer Sanjeev Sanyal of Deutsche Bank thinks the UN is way off. His calculations points to a population peak around 2055 of 8.7 billion, declining to 8.0 billion by 2100 — a level 2.8 billion below the UN’s prediction.
Second, Duardo’s piece plays into the view that the way to deal with climate change is through less: less population, less energy. The reality is that we are a high-energy planet. Going forward, we are going to need more energy, not less, as we bring more of humanity out of poverty and into the middle class. We are going to need — as the Breakthrough Institute puts it — cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy.
Third, what is the deal with the left and population growth? Phil Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, addresses the issue in a 2007 interview:
It’s fair to say that most self-described “progressives” don’t agree with me that low fertility is a problem. Many environmentalists, for example, believe that fewer people means a cleaner environment. Other progressives suppose that a decline in population would increase the amount of food and other resources available to the poor. Many feminists, gays, and “childless by choice” people in general feel threatened by suggestions that society needs more children. And when it’s pointed out that the lowest birthrates are generally found among the most “progressive” people, then the conversation gets really heated.
On all these counts, I believe progressives are in denial. Today in the United States, for example, we have far cleaner air and water than we did in the 1940s, when the population was just half its current size. That’s no paradox. Population growth is a spur to more efficient and cleaner use of resources, so our cities are no longer choked with smoke from steam engines and our cars get far better mileage and are far less polluting. Similarly, population growth is what drove us as a society to find far more productive ways to grow food. Thanks to increased crop yields, per capita food production is higher than ever, even as world population surpasses 6 billion. At the same time, there is more forested land in the United States than in the 19th century because so much less acreage is needed for farmland.
Progressives also tend to forget that many of their positions on human reproduction, such as a “woman’s right to choose,” only won widespread support when fears of overpopulation began to pervade the culture in the 1960s and ’70s. Until then, bans on abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, for example, were justified in many people’s minds by fears of underpopulation, which left questions of human reproduction too important to be settled by individual “choice.” They also forget that if progressives themselves “forget to have children” then the future belongs to people who have opposing values. Finally, progressives forget that without a growing population, such “crown jewels” of the welfare state as Social Security lose their financial sustainability.
Photo Credit: Flickr user sean dreilinger.
Published in General
I think from the hardcore environmentalist point of view, fewer people is always better. The equation that Ehrlich and Holdren proposed to describe environmental impact is I =PAT, where I is impact, P is population size, A is affluence, T is technology. I is always assumed to be bad. If P was zero, there wouldn’t be any A or T, although environmentalists don’t like those either.
I think less hardcore environmentalists who don’t want human extinction focus more on the A and T. I see lots of Facebook posts about how solar power is about to replace fossil fuels. I think this allows people to embrace environmentalism while still enjoying their lives (if you can get the T down really low, then a high P and A will be okay). There’s probably some truth to that, but I think the main problem with the IPAT model is that it assumes that all impacts are harmful. (continued)
(continued) I’ve seen lectures by both Milton Friedman and his son, David, where they each basically made the point that the sum of “externalities,” the external costs and benefits of a transaction not borne by the buyer or the seller, and hard to calculate, are not obviously a net positive or net negative.
Whoop! There it is. The leftist totalitarian eugenicist homicidal impulse. Of course, he has something in mind “to do.” It’s population control — and he’s going to insist that you (we — especially deniers) go first.
Folks, we really have to stop talking about AGW as a real thing. The next time someone tells you “case closed,” ask them to point you to the computer model which predicted the seventeen-year pause in global temperature increase. Let’s have some “evidence.”
The whole CAGW scam was concocted to create a argument for forcing the developing world to stop developing and being able to feed their people. It was the left doing a slo-mo international repeat of Stalin’s Ukrainian Genocide.
The stuff that liberals know! How many people there should be in the Whole World. What the world’s climate should be. How to fine tune the optimum climate just by adjusting the global average temperature. How to create an efficient, comprehensive, effective health-care system with just insurance regulations.
P.J. O’Rourke observed that those who advocate population control usually focus on the excess number of black, brown and Asian people in the world. It’s nothing more than a politically correct way for liberals to practice racism. As P.J. said: “Just enough of me, way too many of you.”
I’m completely infavor of all Progressives leading the way on this one.
If the problem is too many people, well, it’s time for them to “take one for the team”.
Forward!
And those people, progressives like Margaret Sanger & company, were not particularly quiet about their racist motives and end game. But today, progressives (and the left in general) seem to have purposely forgotten their hero’s history.
Deniers.
These same progressives want all of the excess population to come to the United States.
I would come down with Michael S on this. Many of the most populous places on earth (like the Netherlands and New Jersey) are among the most livable. Maybe not your cup of tea, but livable.
It is amazing how America’s population has grown over the last half century and that growth has been coupled with major improvements to the air and water quality wherever it is measured. The overpopulation argument has not changed since Malthus’ time and it is pretty tired by now.
If readers are interested in the counterargument, you could do worse than the Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg which is somewhat based on the classic The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon.