Funny, I was under the impression the post-industrial societies were edging toward population stabilization on their own.
If we don’t solve for population reduction, all else is pointless.
What irks me is the emphasis on various machinations for clean energy, carbon taxes and the like when they aren’t going to reduce the total amount of carbon we put in the air. At best any proposed measures I’ve seen only reduce the rate of growth in the amount of carbon we put in the air. And since we’re already putting in too much, and the burgeoning population wanting stuff like we Westerners have keeps on procreating, the whole alarmist trumpet feels like a Great Cause to me–fun to Get Involved, but ultimately pointless. It’s like proclaiming Hell without a Plan of Salvation.
The idea that we’ll get growing populations to stop procreating by making them economically prosperous becomes even more risible when you consider that the way to get them economically prosperous is by getting them stuff. That means (with today’s energy grid and current production mechanisms) vastly increasing carbon out so we get fewer people so we eventually stabilize the number of people producing carbon footprints in the first place. Whut?
There are too many people in this world, and too many more about to show up for us to do much of anything actually effective in terms of protecting the natural (i.e., unruined-by-humans) ecosystem. You cannot have as many people as we have on earth (plus 30% more even by the most conservative estimates) who are living at a current Western level and not have an earth which is pretty much ruined or substantially altered for all other species.
The species war is over. “Natural” ecology has lost, irreversibly. Humans have won, and will remain victors until the next Big Comet or something knocks back the human population. Overpopulation is overwhelmingly the largest driver of carbon output, and worrying about how to best tax carbon is like worrying about what rules to make around urinating in the ocean while raw sewage is getting dumped into it. Wrong focus. Not to mention that a few extra degrees is nowhere near as damaging as actually paving over prairie.
PS: GB, can you help clarify for me in what sense Mr Gore is a boogeyman? He seems like a decent enough guy to me, even if he, like the rest of us, loves his consumption.
And “edging” is the safe way to do it. Avoiding catastrophic population changes – either way – is in the world’s best interest.
However, it is worth noting that, after the Black Death, European citizenry had a brief boom of personal liberty and wealth. For one thing, there was a lot of unclaimed property to be picked up for a song. For another thing, with a labor shortage, workers were more valued, and thus had a little more say in their own affairs.
Now, I’m not actually advocating this kind of approach… (But you should see what I’m cooking up in the genetics lab in my basement…)
He’s a boogeyman because many people pre emptively bring him up as if he is some ultra respected scientist whom everyone takes their marching orders from. Then they can feel good about themselves when they knock him down a peg after they’ve set him up as the strawman standard bearer for climate control.
As to being a private individual who loves his consumption, that’s yet another way in which he is boogeymanned. I’m not aware that he is in favor of illegalizing any consumption: if he is I stand to be corrected. It is possible to incentivize reduction of consumption by taxes, so that people can consume more if they can afford it, while reducing consumption overall. Gore, unlike many, does (artificially) pay more for his consumption so it is not as if he does not think this should apply to him.
So not only is he accused of holding a radical view which he doesn’t hold (namely that a certain level of consumption should be banned,) but then held as a hypocrite for not following his own strawman view.
QFT, and the **Chief **completely missed the point. Family planning does not depend on being economically prosperous, it is another straw man. And there was nothing to deal with the point made about what we already did before even with an increasing population: switched to other technologies and used regulations to reduce the phosphates in the water, the acid in the rain, to reduce the CFCs. Reducing the levels of a product of our technology does not depend on an increase of the numbers of humans. And the recommendation that we all have to plan our families stays in place as in the big picture the issue will be easier to deal with the less we are.
And global surface temperatures have risen 1.5F since 1880, according to NASA. There’s going to be other, more substantial climate change events long before we get that 6C rise in global average surface temperatures to support your uncited comment.
The key here is ‘edging’ and ‘post-industrial societies’. The problem of overpopulation versus the environment doesn’t care what type of society you live in or even how those societies are distributed around the globe. You can’t just be responsible, seal your borders and make yourself immune to the effects of everyone else. It is a truly global problem so that people in California can be as green as they want only to see whatever (small) gains they make wiped out many times over by a single rising city in China or India.
I have written about this exact topic a few times here and I am not even especially liberal so I don’t think it has gone unnoticed by everyone. It is more the case that no one knows what to do about it. My position is that the world has been overpopulated for well over 100 years already in terms of sustainability and it is only projected to get much worse before it levels off at about 10 billion people. It would take an unprecedented catastrophe to kill off approximately 8 billion of those people before the numbers would be right again.
China is the only country that has gotten part of the solution so far. If the whole world would do the same thing, we could get the population numbers down with much less drama and heartache in 150 years or so but that isn’t going to happen. One reason (besides simple individual reproductive freedom) is that most modern economic systems are built on modified pyramid schemes that really hate population stagnation let alone declines. Sadly, it is an almost unsolvable problem but nature will find a way to correct it eventually. There is no long-term choice that let’s us shrug off that threat.
The so-called positive news about falling birth rates in many developed parts of the world means exactly zero for this discussion because the overall world population continues to rise past its already vastly unsustainable levels. It is simply a red herring that gives people an excuse to ignore the overall issue.
Not really.
India went from a growth rate of around 4.0 in 1970 to a current rate of about 1.3 without resorting to China’s “one child per family” rule. And India’s current rate is only as high as it is because the poorer parts of the country are still having kids at around the 3.9 level. Those parts of the country that have industrialized and entered the 21st century are very close to China’s rate of approximately 0.5 without any government interference. Similar figures show up in other countries, particularly in Europe. With no direct governmental efforts, France has a lower growth rate than China and Germany has a growth rate of less than half that of China.
That is what I am talking about though. I didn’t propose any specific solution for the whole world. China got their population down rapidly to avert a population time-bomb that they (rightfully) saw on the horizon. The fact remains that the world population is still growing rapidly and will continue even after today’s unsustainable levels.
You can cite all the statistics about falling birthrates around the world and the reasons for them but that does not matter at all in the overall sense especially at the environmental level. The only measure that matters is that the population is still going up rapidly well past today’s sustainable levels and a crash has to come eventually if only because of finite natural resources. The doom and gloom population prophets from the 70’s were not correct about the timing of such a crash but that does not mean that their whole point was moot. It is still as applicable today as it ever was.
Chief Pendant is correct in characterizing that type of thinking as insane. Naturally declining birthrates happen when a given society has prosperity and education but you have to expend resources to make that happen. That is a death spiral and not an overall solution. Those resources do not exist for the current 7 billion people let alone the projected 10 billion by the end of the century. Those are mind-mindbogglingly large numbers of people and most of them cannot have nice houses, cars, electronics or even enough clean water and food at current Western standards because there isn’t enough of it to go around and there isn’t ever going to be.
You can try to sustain such large numbers of people reasonably well in very short time-frame (50 - 100 years at most) but you are raping the planet at the same time just so that present day societies don’t have to endure as much hardship as needed to set up longer term sustainability.
2013 seems to be the first year the birth dearth has progressed to the point where a bare majority of the world’s nations (113 out of 224) are at least a smidge below the 2.1 replacement fertility rate. See:
Overpopulation has been a theme in Western literature for almost 4,000 years:
Malthusianism is an ancient and persistent paradigm that is, I think, in the process of being thoroughly discredited. But this could take a generation of two.
It may depend on whether the family of ten has a few two-stroke-engine motor scooters. (And whether the family of four live in a city apartment, as more of us do lately, or underwater in a distant suburb.)
A more serious objection to your example is that Nepal has a fertility rate of 2.36 and Indonesia has a fertility rate of 2.20, compared to 2.06 in the United States (see first link in this post). So I don’t know where you came up with your family size examples.
Lots of people no poorer than Gore live in luxury apartments or condos. Steve Jobs, who lived in a nice but ordinary-sized suburban home, probably had a lower carbon footprint than the Gores despite having far more wealth. Gore’s way of life is just bizarre given his political views. It doesn’t prove his views wrong, but it does seems like a strange own-goal to me.
This is just once again ignoring that we changed the resources of what we used in the past, although I do not agree fully with the optimistic view, there are researchers that point that many of your numbers are exaggerated and miss a lot of context.
I would still insist on more family planning, what has been clear is that there is a lot that needs to be done in that front and in poor developing nations the idea of planing a family is not avoided as many assume, the problem has been one of lack of resources and one should not forget that there is a lot of conservative organizations that constantly fight to make that task harder.
Speaking of the issue that has been related to this one, the Climate Change one, as I pointed before, the experts do think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Indeed that is a lot different than the assumption by the **Chief **and others that the only way to deal with the issue of climate change in regards to the population issue is to destroy our standard of living, that is not the expected nor the recommended way to do it, and the population issue is not ignored.
Actually what the media got about Gore was wrong. Gore’s point is to be carbon neutral, true, it would be easy and less expensive to live in more modest places. One can make the point that he should do more on reducing his emissions (and he is doing that BTW), but that is not what Gore was/is promoting.
Well…it’s obvious there has to be some finite upper limit! Can we agree that the earth absolutely could not support 10^25 people? The petri dish may be larger than anyone had thought, but it is finite.
Clearly we should be encouraging China and India to engage in a hugely destructive war that will embroil and slaughter most of emerging Asia before they can work their way up to a post-industrial level of consumption.
Maybe they can drag Africa into it, too.
Humanity, yes. One billion humans, not so much.
Yes.
Now, can we also agree that in the earth of today and tomorrow, low economic growth and sub-replacement fertility are problems, while overpopulation is not?
Didn’t think so.
It could be that in a thousand years, people who believe in low family size will have mostly died out, and all that are left will be high birth rate groups like the Mormons and Hasids. I don’t believe culture evolves like that. However, if I’m wrong, this will eventually make overpopulation a problem. But preaching to people who live in sub-replacement societies won’t prevent such a far future problem.
Right now, we are on a road where total world population goes into decline within the lifetimes of most posters on this board. I won’t likely live so long, but others will learn how that goes.
Global warming is caused by total carbon in the atmosphere, not by the number of carbon positive people. If the problem is as serious as Gore says then he has the moral obligation to reduce carbon as much as possible, not just be carbon neutral. The fact that he has not reduced his carbon footprint as much as possible, means that either he does not really believe that global warming is that big a problem, that he is an evil person, or that global warming is such a big issue no one person can hope to have any effect on it however much they give up.
It seems to me that the most likely option is the last. This is the problem with global warming. Even if you cut your emmissions to nothing and move into a tent in the wilderness, eating nothing but berries, the global temperature will not be affected at all. People are being asked to make huge sacrifices without any hope of the the problem getting better.
So if even Al Gore still flies around the country seeking favors from masseuses what chance does the rest of humanity have of changing?
It seems likely that you barely know anything about China’s One-Child Policy.
First of all, you say that China is “the only country” that has part of the solution. The fertility rate in China is around 1.4, while other countries such as Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Greece have reached a much lower fertility rate without any need to restrict births by law. Those countries have used heavy-handed means such as ad campaigns that shame large families, but they’ve stuck with voluntary means. If you actually wanted to glorify low fertility rates, there’s no reason to praise China’s use of force in the matter when other countries have reached lower fertility rates without force.
Secondly, you’re confused about why China has a One-Child policy. In the 70’s some environmentalists started believing in “the population bomb” and advocating for legal restrictions on childbearing. While all free countries ignored their suggestion, they saw China implement restrictions on childbearing and assumed that it had to be for environmental reasons. In point of fact, the Chinese government never said that it was implementing the One-Child Policy for environmental reasons or to curb overpopulation. It wasn’t. The Chinese government in the 70’s couldn’t have cared less about the environment or world population goals. The One-Child policy was implemented to further communist goals; women with fewer children would supposedly be more dedicated to collectivist ways of thinking and living.
Lastly, you imply that China’s policy will reduce “drama and heartache”. To those of us who know the truth about the matter, that sounds like a sick joke. When people go to jail for having kids, when women are forced to have abortions at 8 months, when they have to become refugees to protect the life of their second child, when couples murder their baby girls because that’s the only legal way they can have a baby boy, that sounds like increased drama and heartache, not decreased.
I agree that even with buying carbon offsets, living a modest lifestyle is preferable to an extravagant one (and I don’t really know or care how extravagant Gore’s really is, but let’s assume it is for the sake of discussion.)
But considering his visibility, what he should not do is live out in the woods somewhere, off the grid living only off of solar and berries. Even if it would personally make more of a difference, people would look at him and say “what? He’s expects us all to do THAT? No way!”
And as pointed out he is reducing his emissions even though what he recommends is a concession to modernity, what is missed is that the carbon credits he uses are an investment towards renewables that will in the long run benefit not only Gore but others with more developed alternative fuels in the near future.
Straw man, the policy makers already conceded a lot by concentrating on a 2 degree limit to work with, (sounds to me a lot like the democrats compromising before even negotiating on the health care issue by dropping single payer or a national plan before going to the table), however that sounds more like the old discredited point that it is just natural or that it is too late.
The problem with that is that then we run to the contradictory nature of the modern contrarians, the latest buzz is to claim that the warming will not as bad as the surface temperature is not increasing as much, as misleading as it is the contradiction comes when one notices that the best of what they can claim is that slightly higher concentrations of CO2 are needed to become a problem, **but **that means we still have time to prevent even the mild but still expensive changes.
No. What the experts ask is like paying for the difference between the priceless quality of having clean water and a healthy population, vs having many dying of cholera. Back then there were people that also claimed that dealing with the issue of clean water and sewage was too expensive to deal with and so we should not even try, they were also wrong.
A better chance than relying on straw men and misinformation from supposedly “reliable” contrarian sources.