[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Population Bombs

[Bill Totten]

It's an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 29 2008)


I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a
clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new
report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time
the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for
emergency famine relief {1}. So why, like most environmentalists, won't
I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul
and Anne Erlich), population is "our number one environmental problem"
{2}. But most greens will not discuss it.

Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both.
Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the
fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people
like us are breeding too fast". For the prosperous clergyman Thomas
Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the
labouring classes {3}. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries,
eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations
in the 1970s the issue was overemphasised, as it is the one
environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But
the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number
one environmental problem?

The Optimum Population Trust cites some shocking figures, produced by
the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at current
rates, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300 {4}. This is plainly
ridiculous: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that
the world's population will more or less stabilise in 2200 at ten
billion {5}. But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that
that there is an 88% chance that global population growth will end
during this century {6}.

In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population
will grow by roughly fifty per cent and then stop. This means it will
become fifty per cent harder to stop runaway climate change, fifty per
cent harder to feed the world, fifty per cent harder to prevent the
overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase to the rate of
economic growth. Many economists predict that, occasional recessions
notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about three per cent a
year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right.
A steady growth rate of three per cent means a doubling of economic
activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption
will increase by roughly 1600%. As the equations produced by Professor
Roderick Smith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the
21st Century we will have used sixteen times as many economic resources
as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees {7}.

So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an
environmental issue as population growth. And, if governments, banks and
businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total
rises to 3200%, by 2138 to 6400%. As resources are finite, this is of
course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic
activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat.

Those who emphasise the dangers of population growth maintain that times
have changed: they are not concerned only with population growth in the
poor world, but primarily with growth in the rich world, where people
consume much more. The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) maintains that the
"global environmental impact of an inhabitant of Bangladesh ... will
increase by a factor of sixteen if he or she emigrates to the USA" {8}.
This is surely not quite true, as recent immigrants tend to be poorer
than the native population, but the general point stands: population
growth in the rich world, largely driven by immigration, is more
environmentally damaging than population growth in the poor world. In
the US and the UK, their ecological impact has become another stick with
which immigrants can be beaten.

But growth rates in the US and UK are atypical; even the OPT concedes
that by 2050, "the population of the most developed countries is
expected to remain almost unchanged, at 1.2 billion" {9}. The population
of the EU-25  (the first 25 nations to join the Union) is likely to
decline by seven million {10}.

This, I accept, is of little consolation to people in the UK, where the
government now expects numbers to rise from 61 million to 77 million by
2051 {11}. Eighty per cent of the growth here, according to the OPT, is
the direct or indirect result of immigration (recent arrivals tend to
produce more children) {12}. Migrationwatch UK claims that immigrants
bear much of the responsibility for Britain's housing crisis. A graph on
its website suggests that without them the rate of housebuilding in
England between 1997 and 2004 would have exceeded new households by
30-40,000 a year {13}.

Is this true? According to the Office of National Statistics, average
net immigration to the UK between 1997 and 2004 was 153,000 {14}. Let us
 (generously) assume that ninety per cent of these people settled in
England, and that their household size corresponded to the average for
2004, of 2.3 {15}. This would mean that new immigrants formed 60,000
households a year. The Barker Review, commissioned by the Treasury,
shows that in 2002  (the nearest available year), 138,000 houses were
built in England, while over the ten years to 2000, average household
formation was 196,000 {16}. This rough calculation suggests that
Migrationwatch is exaggerating, but that immigration is still an
important contributor to housing pressure. But even total population
growth in England is responsible for only about 35% of the demand for
homes {17}. Most of the rest is the result of the diminishing size of
households.

Surely there is one respect in which the growing human population
constitutes the primary threat? The amount of food the world eats bears
a direct relationship to the number of mouths. After years of glut, the
storerooms are suddenly empty and grain prices are rocketing. How will
another three billion be fed?

Even here, however, population growth is not the most immediate issue:
another sector is expanding much faster. The UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation expects that global meat production will double by 2050
(growing, in other words, at two and a half times the rate of human
numbers) {18}. The supply of meat has already tripled since 1980: farm
animals now take up seventy per cent of all agricultural land {19} and
eat one third of the world's grain {20}. In the rich nations we consume
three times as much meat and four times as much milk per capita as the
people of the poor world {21}. While human population growth is one of
the factors that could contribute to a global food deficit, it is not
the most urgent.

None of this means that we should forget about it. Even if there were no
environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still
support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education,
universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities
for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would
ameliorate almost all environmental impacts. But to suggest, as many of
my correspondents do, that population growth is largely responsible for
the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. A WFP official, speaking at the World Economic Forum, cited by
Gillian Tett and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, 26th January 2008. Food
supplies too scarce to meet relief needs. The Financial Times.

2. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, 1990. The Population Explosion. Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1990.

3. Thomas Malthus, 1798. Essay on the Principle of Population.

4. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Too many people: Earth's population
problem. http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.earth.html

5. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2005. World Population
Prospects. The 2004 Revision.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf.

6. Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov, 20th January
2008. The coming acceleration of global population ageing. Nature.
doi:10.1038/nature06516

7. Roderick A Smith, 29th May 2007. Lecture to the Royal Academy of
Engineering. Carpe Diem: The dangers of risk aversion. See Appendix 1.
Reprinted in Civil Engineering Surveyor, October 2007.

8. Optimum Population Trust, 30th May 2006. Mass migration damaging the
planet. Press release.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.release30May06.htm

9. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Too many people: Earth's population
problem. http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.earth.html

10. ibid.

11. BBC Online, 23rd October 2007. Population 'to hit 65m by 2016'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7057765.stm

12. Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Migration:
UK. http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.more.migration.uk.html

13. Migrationwatch UK, 13th June 2006. Briefing paper 7.7: The impact of
immigration on housing demand.
http://migration-watchuk.org/Briefingpapers/housing/7_7_NoLimits.asp

14. ONS, cited by Optimum Population Trust, 2007. Migration: UK.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.more.migration.uk.html

15. Kate Barker, March 2004. Final report of Delivering stability:
securing our future housing needs. Chart 1.3, page 16.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/E/3/barker_review_report_494.pdf

16. Kate Barker, ibid, page 16.

17. Population trends for England can be found here:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D9537.xls.
As only some years are given, I took the average growth rate over
1991-2001, divided it by 2.3 and then expressed it as a percentage of
total housing demand in 2000.

18. UNFAO, 2006. Livestock's Long Shadow, page xx.
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

19. ibid, page xxi.

20. ibid, page 12.

21. ibid, Table 1.5, page 15.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/01/29/population-bombs/

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