I’ve said it before and will repeat myself here. Overpopulation is not driving global environmental destruction; overconsumption is. Using CO2 as an example:
[QUOTE=Fred Pearce ]
the world’s richest half-billion people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.
[/QUOTE]
You want to use “population control” to save the environment?..use it on the world’s top 7%; and don’t shift blame to some imaginary African born 60 years from now.
You’ve said this before … 20 or 30 times. I’ve made the same response 3 or 4 times:
Yes … but you seem to be missing the whole concept of government and public interest. The “libertarian” idea that Al Gore and Chief Pedant should do whatever they want and the Gods of The Free Market™ will then magically lead us to the Perfect Universe™ is an absurd idea. Al Gore, myself, etc. do not propose that human nature should change. We propose that government should make mandates to further the public interest.
Chief, which side do you take in the sub-dispute between puddleglum and myself?
Be careful. Your views will be distorted to read: “Instead of making the world’s poorest people richer, we need to make the world’s richest people poorer (or dead :smack:).”
The U.S. could help a lot. It produces over 18% of humans’ CO2 emissions with roughly double the per capita emissions of other developed countries and, as of 2009, triple the per capita emissions of China. (China may be closing that gap. 
)
Anyway, to suggest that over-population in poor countries is not a problem is absurd. Forests have been destroyed; water supplies are in jeopardy; traditional agriculture is inadequate; pollution is severe; etc.
A lot of Chinese are serviced along the sea board, but I was under the impression that the further from the sea, the less likely you have anything resembling modern infrastructure.
Are those per-capita calculations including those lacking infrastructure? In other words, just taking the total population of china and dividing by the total estimated emissions. Wouldn’t that be unfair as a comparison to places like Europe or the US where you may be able to find someone without built infrastructure, but they are few and far between?
I saw this complaint somewhere and I never followed up on it, but I’d be interested to know what those per-capita emission numbers are based on within China.
The problem is that Europe and the US are basically giving blank checks to many third-world countries. Most of these countries are clamoring for “money to combat climate change” but are just using it as a vehicle to get more money into the government pockets in those countries.
If we were actually going to fix their issues, we would be sending the technology used by European and US farmers to produce more crops on less land and other things to reduce pollution (and reclaim polluted sites). But those ideas are unpopular as they would hurt competition for the European and American exports not only going to those countries but increases competition for our exports with other countries. (Mainly food)
There are efforts to actually DO something, but they aren’t as well funded as, perhaps, they should be. And they tend to be things very, very useful for photo ops with what I consider some logical holes.
For example, I saw a several-page spread in an airline magazine last year that was extolling how it supplied purified water to remote African villages by installing solar-powered pumps onto water wells, and a solar-powered filtration system of some kind. My thought was (and actually still is, I couldn’t find followup information) “So…did you give them spares and show them how to fix it when a branch falls on and breaks the solar panels? What happens when they break all 3, assuming you left spares, and they need more? A village of 200 subsistence hunters on the savanna doesn’t seem like it’d have enough money to hit up their local solar panel dealer and buy some more.”
But…but…we’re supposed to be fruitful and multiply:
So they say.
I don’t follow your and puddleglum’s sub-dispute…can you link it?
I do not think the Free Market will lead to a perfect universe. If it’s really a free market, it might destroy us, just like bad government might. I don’t really know any of Al Gore’s positions, really.
I simply make the observation that, as humans, we are all self-interested first, and only secondarily interested in the Larger Good. We won’t make real personal sacrifices, on average, in the name of a Larger Good, because we won’t trust all others to make the same sacrifice. Therefore the default decision (wrt carbon footprints) is to live as we please while the living is good, and hope chaos does not ensue during our lifetime.
To the extent that we can afford it, we’ll pay higher taxes. We’ll live with more regulation if it doesn’t directly affect us living large personally. We’ll contribute time and money voluntarily to a Cause we believe in. But ultimately, we won’t actually sacrifice in any substantive sense.
Mr Gore is the epitome of that approach. He lives well. He apparently makes some effort to ameliorate his carbon footprint, but not at the cost of him living less well. And if we all could live like Mr Gore, we all would (except for that one actor guy Ed Begley). The rest of us are not switching to bicycles, dammit. And if we do ride bicycles, we want a garage full of really neat bicycles, and we’ll get a new one when we want a new one.
There isn’t enough clean energy or carbon offsets (assuming they actually work) for us all to live like Mr Gore. There are too many of us.
What is required to actually back up carbon output is an immediate, severe, catastrophic reduction in how well we westerners live. That way, we can give back some carbon output to the third world so they can live better. That ain’t gonna happen. Sure; we need to find ways to get back up to living well after our reduction. But if you crunch the numbers generated from the overpopulation problem, you realize immediately that we humans have already been too reproductively successful.
I should mention that it’s a farce to look at falling CO2 output in the western world wherever that CO2 has simply been shifted elsewhere for production. For example, if my new golf clubs are from China when they used to be made in Ohio, that CO2 bill accrues to me and not China…and Al Gore and I are gonna buy new clubs as soon as we think a new set might knock a stroke or two off our game. We are gonna stay at the Ritz because we like the new carpets, nice bathroom fixtures, and so on. We are all uber-consumers as soon as we get the means to consume. (Except Begley, jr, apparently)
There’s such a knee jerk for alarmists to defend Al Gore that I don’t think they ever actually understand me saying, “I am Al Gore.” (figuratively)
As you do not know his position, what you have there are just more arguments from ignorance.
Me too. I recognize it is a gigantic problem in the medium if not the short term yet I freely admit that I am not personally going to do jack shit about it. I will reap the rewards from those natural gas strikes on my family’s property until I die and the U.S. economy and the people alive today will be better off for it. The enviornment will be marginally better off than if kept on a path to coal and foreign oil dependence as well but it is still going to be an amazingly fast burn rate for a natural resource that took a mindboggingly long time to produce in the first place.
What I want people to understand in this thread is how severe the overall problem really is and that even the popular environmental extremists don’t even well represent how many severe and catastrophic issues loom if the global human population is not arrested and reversed almost immediately. In terms of environmental concerns, that is THE single biggest issue by far and everything else is a distant second or 50th place.
Anything less than unprecedented and drastic reductions in consumption worldwide but especially in the Western world will not do it. The only way to do that is through population reductions and we are still trending fast in in the opposite direction. Those extra billion people or two you have seen added in your lifetime may not seem that bad from a percentage standpoint but all of them have as much effect as when the world population was only 1 or 2 billion total.
You can pat yourself on the back for buying a hybrid vehicle or recycling shopping bags but that is just pissing into the ocean that this whole problem presents. I don’t expect anyone to solve it however. It goes against human nature and there is no government that can enforce the measures necessary. It will be up to natural forces to orchestrate the eventual mass death to restore equilibrium to the whole ecosystem. That isn’t a choice that man can make. It can and will happen on its own because humankind is just a still just a weak force in the natural world despite what we like to think.
Still no good support for what you claim, as pointed before, if you are correct then controlling acid rain, controlling the emission of CFCs, bringing clean water and controlling sewage, controlling phosphates, etc, are not possible to do because more people were born since the days those problems were identified.
News to me.
We can control other bad results of our civilization, like our global warming gas emissions without reducing the population*; as reported before, and the use of Gore as points out, the reasons why to make a big issue about population above all else is driven by politics, and lack of ideas of how to make a good argument against doing something about AGW.
And as pointed before, there are also political reasons why the population issue is not brought forward more, you guys need to deal with many of the climate change deniers **also **.
Actually, I think you underestimate the extent to which human nature can be malleable on such issues. Note that
I doubt that we’ll ever see an actual majority of couples even in developed countries choosing not to have children, but I think individual choices can be much more responsive to environmental concerns than you seem to imagine.
What we’ll see, I’m inclined to think, is not so much a popular revulsion against having kids as an increased level of popular acceptance of not having kids. People who are really eager to become parents aren’t going to change their plans and probably never would, no matter what the circumstances. And I doubt that there will be a huge increase in the proportion of people who can’t stand kids at all.
But the large number of adults who don’t feel that strongly about parenthood one way or the other are going to be experiencing less social pressure to push them into parenting, and deciding not to have kids will be less stigmatized. I definitely feel that my own eventual decision not to have any kids was made easier by the “big picture” of population pressure.
We’re also going to see (and already are seeing) workforce-extension policies like raising retirement ages and senior-wellness initiatives and so forth to make up for the decreasing proportion of young workers. What we could use now, IMHO, is improved access to birth control and abortion so that the people who do have kids are more likely to be doing so because they actually want to.
None of those factors actually constitute a plausible solution to the problem of population increase on their own, of course, and I agree that catastrophic situations are likely to play a bigger role. But I think you’ll be surprised to see how much of the eventual stabilization of population is actually due to voluntary factors.
While you have environmentalists calling for less children, you also have governments with pro-natalist policies. As more and more countries (already a bare majority) move into sub-replacement fertility, the pro-natalist policies seen in Eastern Europe, France, Sweden and Japan will become ubiquitous. I don’t see how environmentalist agitation can overcome the obvious idea that fewer people mean little support in your old age. Another reason that outdated Malthusian ideas can’t control fertility rates is that governments have more money to spend on advertising than do environmentalists.
The birth dearth was no more caused by environmentalism than the old eight child family had to do with patriotism. Instead, the main cause of birth rate change is prosperity, and a big part of that is how it makes birth control more available. And birth control still has a lot of room for improvement. Condoms still reduce sensation. Birth control pills still have side effects, and are for women only. As the cheapest birth control pills are at least three times the cost of the cheapest among other types of prescription drugs, costs can still go down.
Science is going to make it continually easier for people to not have children, even in a world without the overpopulation meme. This, rather than adherence to outdated overpopulation fears, is why an end to declining fertility rates is not in sight.
So, just how are you going to give everyone in Africa a high level of technological development and wealth without increasing the numbers of cars and other pollution causing machinery?
The population time bomb isn’t in the west, it’s in the poor nations.
Never mind, Gaia will sort the population problem, but humanity won’t like it much.
BTW, you may not have noticed, but India is very possibly going down the economic gurgler- so much for their prosperity.
Try selling that theory in Somalia or Darfur!
BTW Islam, which is followed by a very large number of people is against birth control, as is the Catholic Church, which explains the huge overpoulation in the Philippines.
Poland is arguably more Catholic than the Philippines, and Poland has a fertility rate of 1.32, compared to 3.10 in the Philippines. In case you are going to say that communism killed Catholicism in Poland (which it did not), I’ll mention that Catholic Italy also has way below replacement fertility (1.41).
As for Islam, Bosnia and Herzegovina has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, 1.25. Perhaps only half the people there are really Muslim, but more heavily Muslim countries with sub-replacement fertility include Qatar, Tunisia, Maldives, Bahrain, and Libya.
Fertility rates are declining in most countries, regardless of religion. Poverty better explains why high fertility rates persist in some countries than does religion. There must be other causes as well.
P.S. Fertility rates from the 2013 CIA World Factbook list here: List of countries by total fertility rate - Wikipedia. 2.10 is used as the cutoff for replacement fertility, although it can be higher in developing countries.
Fair enough, I’ll accept that. .
However, even a wealthy Islamic country like Saudi has a very high birth rate. When I was there, it was acceptable for a woman to have at least 8 children.
Not much poverty in Saudi, but lots of religion.
Conversly, Thailand, a country with lots of very poor people does not have a high birth rate. It seems that few people have more than 2 children.
This is such a gracious reply that I am on the fence with relying in an even slightly negative way. It’s true that Saudi Arabia has above replacement 2013 fertility (2.21), while Thailand is below replacement (1.66). Religion could certainly be a factor.
However, I think there are bigger ones.
As recently as 1982, Saudi fertility was above seven. Ten years ago it was 3.48. Two years ago, 2.74. And now, 2.21. And Saudi Arabia is still Muslim. Maybe there has been a small decline in devoutness. I don’t know. But it still is a highly religious society.
And in case someone thinks women’s rights explain the fertility decline, Saudi women still can’t drive.
What has changed tremendously, in the last thirty years, besides the fertility rate, is the availability of primary health care:
Health care in Saudi Arabia - Wikipedia.
My link doesn’t mention birth control, but I am thinking that Saudi women are having fewer children because they went to the doctor and asked about birth control.
Do I have proof of why birth rates are collapsing? No. But I do have proof that they are.
Could they jump right back up? Evidence says no. Big pronatalist campaigns in France, Sweden, Hungary, and Japan have had some effect but cannot put fertility back up to replacement levels.
Well, the option you’re leaving out is that people lack a degree of self control over their own consumption. Gore can sincerely, honestly believe that AGW is a terrible problem and still not have the self discipline to control his own use of carbon, just as a person can know full well they need to save more money but spend it incessantly anyway.
<more people living in dense cities is better for the environment.>
Hardly. That has given us the devastation of industrial farming.
Now, if city dwellers ate only farmed fish, seaweed and hydroponics, I would agree with you.
It’s when those people pass laws that you HAVE to save money, and then they steal your savings, that’s what people really don’t like.