More and more activists in the sustainability movement are coming to the conclusion that carbon emissions can’t be reduced to a safe range without curbing population growth. However at present it’s considered politically incorrect to even mention population control. The right accuses you of infringing on God-given personal rights – to have babies and own guns. And what passes for the left accuses you of being naive and impractical for trying to address something that inflames the right.

Thus I feel compelled to begin with a disclaimer: I am not about mandatory sterilization, abortion or eugenics (mandatory sterilization and/or abortion for those considered “unfit” to reproduce). Nevertheless I believe those of us in the developed world face a stark choice: either we substantially limit our population growth or we massively – and I mean massively – downsize our high tech lifestyles.

Fossil Fuel Depletion: A Bigger Threat Than Climate Change

Unfortunately extreme weather events and other complications of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations aren’t the only major crisis human kind faces at present. Fossil fuel depletion also poses a major threat because of its implications for food production. Our industrialized system of agriculture is totally dependent on cheap oil and natural gas – not only to run farm machinery and transport produce to market, but in the production of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Even the oil companies acknowledge that production of oil and natural gas isn’t keeping up with the exploding demand from a new, very large middle class in India and China. Although it will be decades before we totally run out of either, we have definitely reached a point where relative scarcity has significantly increased the cost of driving and heating our homes – and, in many parts of the world, the cost of food.

Has the Earth Already Exceeded Its Carrying Capacity?

 

The basic problem humanity faces is that we live on a finite planet with finite resources – which means we cannot provide food, water and other resources for an infinite number of human beings. Some in the sustainability movement – pointing to the 1.2 billion people who are essentially starving to death from an epidemic of famines (due to increasing desertification, combined with the increasing frequency of tropical storms, floods, droughts and wild fires)  – believe that we have already exceeded the number (at 6.8 billion) that the earth can support.

Without the availability of cheap fossil fuels, the number of hungry people will increase exponentially. Agricultural scientists predict that subsistence level agriculture (replacing farm machinery with horse, oxen and human labor) can only support around two billion people.

The big question obviously is how we address population growth without infringing on personal freedoms.  I, for one am absolutely opposed to mandatory population controls. For the simple reason that I don’t trust the global elite that controls our so-called democracies to legislate population measures fairly. They will always pass laws that allow the privileged classes to reproduce, while mandatory abortion and sterilization is imposed on populations they consider inferior to themselves.

 

Ignoring the Elephant Won’t Make Him Go Away

 

I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers, but agreeing not to discuss the population issue definitely won’t get us there. The first step in my mind is to understanding the different pressures driving population growth (why, for example, does the US have a fertility rate of 2.1, when the rest of the developed world hovers between 1.1 and 1.4?) and then developing policy that addresses these specific pressures.

To be continued with an examination of first and third world population pressures.

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