Population is just a sidekick to the real big baddie – consumption
Oct 29, 2011
By George Monbiot for the Gardian
It must rank among the most remarkable events in recent human history. In just 60 years, the global average number of children each woman bears has fallen from 6 to 2.5. This is an astonishing triumph for women's empowerment, and whatever your position on population growth, it is something we should celebrate.
But this decline in fertility, according to the United Natinos report published on Wednesday, is not the end of the story. It has also raised its estimate of global population growth. Rather than peaking at about 9 billion in the middle of this century, the UN says that human numbers will reach some 10 billion by 2100, and continue growing beyond that point.
That's the middle scenario. The highest of its range of estimates is an astonishing 15.8 billion by 2100. If this were correct, population would be a much greater problem – for both the environment and human development – than we had assumed. It would oblige me to change my views on yet another subject. But fortunately for my peace of mind, and, rather more importantly, for the prospects of everyone on earth, it is almost certainly baloney.
Writing in the journal Nature in May, Fred Pearce pointed out that the UN's revision arose not from any scientific research or analysis, but from what appeared to be an arbitrary decision to change one of the inputs it fed into its model. Its previous analysis was based on the assumption that the average number of children per woman would fall to 1.85 worldwide by 2100. But this year it changed the assumption to 2.1. This happens to be the population replacement rate: the point at which reproduction contributes to neither a fall nor a rise in the number of people.
The UN failed to explain this changed assumption, which appears to fly in the face of current trends, or to show why fertility decline should suddenly stop when it hit replacement level, rather than continuing beyond that point, as has happened to date in all such populations. I expected yesterday's report to contain the explanation, but I was wrong: it appears to have plucked its fertility figure out of the air.
Even so, even if we're to assume that the old figures are more realistic than the new ones, there's a problem. As the new report points out, "the escape from poverty and hunger is made more difficult by rapid population growth". It also adds to the pressure on the biosphere. But how big a problem is it?
If you believe the rich, elderly white men who dominate the population debate, it is the biggest one of all. In 2009 for example, a group of US billionaires met to decide which threat to the planet most urgently required their attention. Who'd have guessed? These men, who probably each consume as many of the world's resources in half an hour as the average African consumes in a lifetime, decided that it was population.
Population is the issue you blame if you can't admit to your own impacts: it's not us consuming, it's those brown people reproducing. It seems to be a reliable rule of environmental politics that the richer you are, the more likely you are to place population growth close to the top of the list of crimes against the planet.
The new report, inflated though its figures seem to be, will gravely disappoint the population obsessives. It cites Paul Murtaugh of Oregon State University, whose research shows that:
"An extra child born today in the United States, would, down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra child in China, 55 times that of an Indian child or 86 times that of a Nigerian child."
And it draws on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which makes the first comprehensive assessment of how changes in population affect carbon dioxide emissions. It concludes:
"Slowing population growth could provide 16-19% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change."
In other words, it can make a contribution. But the other 81-84% will have to come from reducing consumption and changing technologies. The UN report concludes that "even if zero population growth were achieved, that would barely touch the climate problem".
This should not prevent us from strongly supporting the policies which will cause population to peak sooner rather than later. Sex education, the report shows, is crucial, as is access to contraception and the recognition of women's rights and improvement in their social status. All these have been important factors in the demographic transition the world has seen so far. We should also press for a better distribution of wealth: escaping from grinding poverty is another of the factors which have allowed women to have fewer children. The highly unequal system sustained by the rich white men who fulminate about population is one of the major reasons for population growth.
All this puts conservatives in a difficult position. They want to blame the poor for the environmental crisis by attributing it to population growth. Yet some of them oppose all the measures – better and earlier sex education, universal access to contraception (for teenagers among others), stronger rights for women, the redistribution of wealth – that are likely to reduce it.
And beyond these interventions, what do they intend to do about population growth? As the UN report points out:
"Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations."
In other words, it's a hangover from an earlier period. It has been compounded by another astonishing transformation: since the 1950s, global life expectancy has risen from 48 to 68.
What this means is that even if all the measures I've mentioned here – education, contraception, rights, redistribution – were widely deployed today, there will still be a population bulge, as a result of the momentum generated 60 years ago. So what do they propose? Compulsory sterilisation? Mass killing? If not, they had better explain their programme.
Yes, population growth contributes to environmental problems. No, it is not the decisive factor. Even the availability of grain is affected more by rising livestock numbers and the use of biofuels – driven, again by consumption – than by human population growth.
Of course we should demand that governments help women regain control over their bodies. But beyond that there's little that can be done. We must instead decide how best to accommodate human numbers which will, at least for the next four decades, continue to rise.
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Comments (2)
David Sirkin:
Jan 22, 2012 at 09:36 PM
Is Mr. Monbiot living on a different planet than I am, one with different facts and different logic?
Here in the US, blaming economic problems on population growth is a rare opinion overall, but when it does occur, it is more likely to be a liberal rather than a conservative position. For example, Population Connection, the new name for the Zero Population Growth organization started by Paul Ehrlich, is a liberal environmental organization. Some conservatives rail about immigration, but these are mainly working-class conservatives. I suspect that for every "rich, elderly white man" who says we should be concerned about population growth, there are a dozen more who quietly but gleefully urge on the growing numbers of consumers and cheap workers that will increase markets while keeping down labor costs and thereby increase profits. Western-style capitalism is as much population-growth-driven capitalism as it is consumption-driven capitalism.
The fact that a person in the US consumes and pollutes many times more than a person in China, India, or Nigeria is hardly a reason to be complacent about population growth. It might have been, were it not for the fact that many in China, India, and Nigeria would like to consume at US levels, and are making strides towards doing so, and for the fact that the US population is still growing at about 1% annually: the US's fertility rate is still slightly above 2 (see the CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html ), and it also has net immigration.
And the statement that there is nothing we can do about population growth is both uninformed and dangerous. First of all, we have a considerable way to go in providing access to a full range of family planning products and services to all the world's women who want them. Secondly, much more could be done worldwide with education programs to explain the desirability of and the means to keeping fertility low. Thirdly, the governments of several wealthy countries could be persuaded and pressured to end their ridiculous pro-natalist policies: They need to abandon not only their propaganda efforts, but also their tax and welfare laws that reward women for having more children, rather than incentivising small families. Fourthly, governments in poor countries could also incentivise small families by various means. If we do not do these things, and whatever else we can do to slow and end population growth in gentle ways, then "mass killing" is very likely to occur at an increasing rate: we will kill each other, and Mother Nature will kill us with famines and floods.
As Chandran Nair beautifully explains in his very important book, Consumptionomics, it is the huge size of the world's population that will force us to curtail our consumption. We avoid addressing population growth at our collective peril.
David Sirkin:
Jan 22, 2012 at 10:12 PM
Postscript:
I must give credit to Mr. Monbiot for supporting the continuation of efforts that have helped lower fertility rates so far (including sex-education, access to contraception, and empowerment of women) and for urging a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is also likely to help.
Obviously it is total consumption that is the problem, and total consumption is the product of population size and per-capita consumption. Given that total consumption is too high, but at the same-time per-capita consumption is intolerably low for much of the world's population, we must reduce wasteful and extravagant consumption, and increase fairness in distribution of wealth and consumption, but in the long run, we probably should look not only to an end to population growth, but further to an eventual shrinking of world population to a size at which all people could enjoy a high standard of living in a sustainable fashion in harmony with nature.
We must not be complacent with current progress towards ending population growth, but rather must increase our efforts worldwide to stop growing and then shrink to a comfortable size.