Population is key to cutting emissions
December 21, 2007 at 1:19 pm (Climate Change, Green Development, Greening BRICs, Greening India)
Michael Backman in his latest Age column writes about the issue of population and its connection to greenhouse gases.
WHAT is the ultimate cause of greenhouse gases? Excessive reliance on cars? Coal-fired power stations? Clear-felling forests? The answer is none of these. The ultimate cause is people and population growth.
Having one child with your partner instead of two or more is the biggest contribution to reducing greenhouse gases you can make. Have one child instead of two and you will be directly responsible for cutting your family’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 50% in the next generation.
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Determining which countries have been responsible when it comes to population growth generates a different picture when it comes to developing countries. China is a big and growing greenhouse gas emitter. But it has one of the lowest population growth rates in the region due to the success of its one-child policy and also due to its rising wealth levels — richer people tend to have fewer children.India, on the other hand, is not yet as big a gas emitter as China. Gas emissions per head are about three times less — but its population is growing much faster than China’s. Its population will overtake China’s in the 2030s, when both countries can be expected to have populations of about 1.5 billion. But South Asia, taken as a whole, is already the clear winner in the population stakes. Had partition not taken place in 1947, then India would have overtaken China for the No. 1 spot years ago. The combined population of pre-partition India today (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) is 1.4 billion, compared with China’s population of 1.3 billion.
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Indeed, the population of pre-partition India is expected to rise by another 900 million people in the first half of this century. Changing to energy-saving light bulbs will be a drop in the ocean compared with this
John Brisbin said,
December 28, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I have to completely disagree with Backman and think he’s acting as a patsy to the consumer culture.
The only obvious thing about sustainability is the per capita resource usage.
The unquestioned principle behind Backman is that “of course *everyone* wants and will demand a 1990’s style deep fried double wide Walmart-powered lifestyle…it’s just human nature….”
Obviously this is the suicidal principle that must be called into the open and critically evaluated…on a materials economy basis we already need another planet…what happens when India’s savvy consumer class actually makes their demands felt in the manufacturing sector? We will surely need two or three more planets.
Technology may one day deliver these to us, but not before an almighty crash this time around…
So what about the idea of having heaps of kids and living in simple style, wired into a global meditation space where the games are far more seductive and interesting than the simple materials-based status qquests we are currently satisfied with?
What will be the measure of the “right number” of people to live on earth…only 2 billion so we can all live like Gold Coast (Australia) idiots? Or 20 billion living in peaceful resonance with the planet and requiring only the simplest of material inputs??
Dani said,
January 7, 2008 at 2:44 am
What a stupid analysis. One its own USA consumes more per capita of EVERYTHING than South Asia. If anything. Getting rid of all americans will drop carbon emissions far more quickly than all the population control in South Asia.
Population - A Human problem « World is Green said,
January 8, 2008 at 12:59 pm
[...] Thinking, Greening BRICs, Greening India) Last month I quoted an article by Michael Backman writing about population and emissions. Backman assets that population is the major contributor to emissions [...]
Petri said,
February 19, 2008 at 7:03 pm
“of course *everyone* wants and will demand a 1990’s style deep fried double wide Walmart-powered lifestyle…it’s just human nature….”
It seems to me Backman and many others confuse *human nature* and *learned behaviour*. Ultimately, having a set of high-consumption material wants is a result of years and years of learned association between sets of ideas, values, attitudes and things with one’s basic needs. I do not want to discount free will so let’s just say that this learned behaviour sets the context within which free will has to operate.
Given that neither governmental, political nor voluntary-participation entities typically promote increased consumption, the culprit is of course the long-term exposure to omnipresent corporate marketing messages. Human social nature that manifests in basic needs such as belonging, appreciation by others, being desirable etc. is what those messages exploit.
I started thinking they also exploit another human characteristic that I guess must be an evolutionary thing: we *are* by nature *reactive* - very good in changing our behaviour according to outside impulses targeted at us, but not very good in changing our behaviour actively on our own. It is hard to change one’s energy, travel and material consumption behaviour on your own, versus quite easy if taxes on those things go way up, making them more expensive. This is of course obvious, but it’s rather interesting that all the tax increase really does, from larger perspective, is make the impulse (environmental crisis) into a more tangible one at a personal level, thus more effectively forcing a response from us.