[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Consumption, Not Population Is Our Main Environmental Threat

[Bill Totten]

by Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360

AlterNet (April 14 2009)


It's the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population
growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we
are afraid to discuss it.

It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the
environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving
the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This
is a terribly convenient argument - "over-consumers" in rich countries
can blame "over-breeders" in distant lands for the state of the planet.
But what are the facts?

The world's population quadrupled to six billion people during the 20th
century. It is still rising and may reach nine billion by 2050. Yet for
at least the past century, rising per-capita incomes have outstripped
the rising head count several times over. And while incomes don't
translate precisely into increased resource use and pollution, the
correlation is distressingly strong.

Moreover, most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that
have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population.

By almost any measure, a small proportion of the world's people take the
majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of its pollution.

Take carbon dioxide emissions - a measure of our impact on climate but
also a surrogate for fossil fuel consumption. Stephen Pacala, director
of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world's
richest half-billion people - that's about seven percent of the global
population - are responsible for fifty percent of the world's carbon
dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest fifty percent are responsible
for just seven percent of emissions.

Although overconsumption has a profound effect on greenhouse gas
emissions, the impacts of our high standard of living extend beyond
turning up the temperature of the planet. For a wider perspective of
humanity's effects on the planet's life support systems, the best
available measure is the "ecological footprint", which estimates the
area of land required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and
other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution. This analysis has
its methodological problems, but its comparisons between nations are
firm enough to be useful.

They show that sustaining the lifestyle of the average American takes
9.5 hectares, while Australians and Canadians require 7.8 and 7.1
hectares respectively; Britons, 5.3 hectares; Germans, 4.2; and the
Japanese, 4.9. The world average is 2.7 hectares. China is still below
that figure at 2.1, while India and most of Africa (where the majority
of future world population growth will take place) are at or below 1.0.

The United States always gets singled out. But for good reason: It is
the world's largest consumer. Americans take the greatest share of most
of the world's major commodities: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc,
aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil, and natural gas. For many others,
Americans are the largest per-capita consumers. In "super-size-me" land,
Americans gobble up more than 120 kilograms of meat a year per person,
compared to just six kilograms in India, for instance.

I do not deny that fast-rising populations can create serious local
environmental crises through overgrazing, destructive farming and
fishing, and deforestation. My argument here is that viewed at the
global scale, it is overconsumption that has been driving humanity's
impacts on the planet's vital life-support systems during at least the
past century. But what of the future?

We cannot be sure how the global economic downturn will play out. But
let us assume that Jeffrey Sachs, in his book Common Wealth (2008), is
right to predict a 600 percent increase in global economic output by
2050. Most projections put world population then at no more than forty
percent above today's level, so its contribution to future growth in
economic activity will be small.

Of course, economic activity is not the same as ecological impact. So
let's go back to carbon dioxide emissions. Virtually all of the extra
two billion or so people expected on this planet in the coming forty
years will be in the poor half of the world. They will raise the
population of the poor world from approaching 3.5 billion to about 5.5
billion, making them the poor two-thirds.

Sounds nasty, but based on Pacala's calculations - and if we assume for
the purposes of the argument that per-capita emissions in every country
stay roughly the same as today - those extra two billion people would
raise the share of emissions contributed by the poor world from seven
percent to eleven percent.

Look at it another way. Just five countries are likely to produce most
of the world's population growth in the coming decades: India, China,
Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The carbon emissions of one American
today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, twenty Indians,
thirty Pakistanis, forty Nigerians, or 250 Ethiopians.

Even if we could today achieve zero population growth, that would barely
touch the climate problem - where we need to cut emissions by fifty to
eighty percent by mid-century. Given existing income inequalities, it is
inescapable that overconsumption by the rich few is the key problem,
rather than overpopulation of the poor many.

But, you ask, what about future generations? All those big families in
Africa begetting yet-bigger families. They may not consume much today,
but they soon will.

Well, first let's be clear about the scale of the difference involved. A
woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and her family will still
do less damage, and consume fewer resources, than the family of the
average soccer mom in Minnesota or Munich. In the unlikely event that
her ten children live to adulthood and have ten children of their own,
the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less
carbon dioxide than you or I.

And second, it won't happen. Wherever most kids survive to adulthood,
women stop having so many. That is the main reason why the number of
children born to an average woman around the world has been in decline
for half a century now. After peaking at between five and six per woman,
it is now down to 2.6.

This is getting close to the "replacement fertility level" which, after
allowing for a natural excess of boys born and women who don't reach
adulthood, is about 2.3. The UN expects global fertility to fall to 1.85
children per woman by mid-century. While a demographic "bulge" of women
of child-bearing age keeps the world's population rising for now,
continuing declines in fertility will cause the world's population to
stabilize by mid-century and then probably to begin falling.

Far from ballooning, each generation will be smaller than the last. So
the ecological footprint of future generations could diminish. That
means we can have a shot at estimating the long-term impact of children
from different countries down the generations.

The best analysis of this phenomenon I have seen is by Paul Murtaugh, a
statistician at Oregon State University. He recently calculated the
climatic "intergenerational legacy" of today's children. He assumed
current per-capita emissions and UN fertility projections. He found that
an extra child in the United States today will, down the generations,
produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra
Chinese child, 46 times that of a Pakistan child, 55 times that of an
Indian child, and 86 times that of a Nigerian child.

Of course those assumptions may not pan out. I have some confidence in
the population projections, but per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide
will likely rise in poor countries for some time yet, even in optimistic
scenarios. But that is an issue of consumption, not population.

In any event, it strikes me as the height of hubris to downgrade the
culpability of the rich world's environmental footprint because
generations of poor people not yet born might one day get to be as rich
and destructive as us. Overpopulation is not driving environmental
destruction at the global level; overconsumption is. Every time we talk
about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying that simple fact.

At root this is an ethical issue. Back in 1974, the famous environmental
scientist Garret Hardin proposed something he called "lifeboat ethics".
In the modern, resource-constrained world, he said, "each rich nation
can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the
ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like
to get in." But there were, he said, not enough places to go around. If
any were let on board, there would be chaos and all would drown. The
people in the lifeboat had a duty to their species to be selfish - to
keep the poor out.

Hardin's metaphor had a certain ruthless logic. What he omitted to
mention was that each of the people in the lifeboat was occupying ten
places, whereas the people in the water only wanted one each. I think
that changes the argument somewhat.

_____

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is
an environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of
recent books When The Rivers Run Dry (Beacon Press, 2007) and With Speed
and Violence (Beacon Press, 2008).

(c) 2009 Yale Environment 360 All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/136449/


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