Dale Wyngarden: Population growth has to be part of climate talks
Last fall, the 27th meeting of COP (Council of Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change) met in Egypt. That session produced no substantive initiative to change human activities contributing to atmospheric degradation. It did, however, establish a fund whereby industrialized nations most responsible for global warming would compensate nations suffering the most from its consequences.
Today the latter consist mostly of a few Pacific islands sitting within inches of sea level. Tomorrow it could include great coastal cities around the earth. Time will only tell if the fund actually gets funded, or if it makes a difference to those who may sink from the margins to underwater.
The great nations that convene in such gatherings are probably sincere in their desire not to wreak suffering on poor small countries that will be the first to be impacted. But only if it doesn’t mean any drastic cut in consumption or sacrificial lifestyle changes. When it comes to the atmosphere, we’d rather pay to pollute than change our ways.
Climate convocations focus on fossil fuel consumption. Coal, oil and gas are the culprits. Rarely does the corollary contributor to climate change make it to the agenda: human population explosion. Several weeks back, headlines noted the milestone of global population reaching 8 billion. It’s projected to peak at 10 billion some time this century. By themselves, those are just great big numbers. But in context, they ought to be alarming. Or terrifying. The year I was born, 1941, world population was 2.3 billion. In 81 years it exploded from 2.3 to 8 billion. Demographers estimate it took 400,000 years or so for population to reach the first billion. Imagine adding 5.7 billion in eight decades.
A minuscule fraction of those people live isolated in the jungles of Amazonia or New Guinea. The rest live in developed or developing countries where modern communications flood populations with images of the good life. People around the world want electricity, refrigerators, central heating, air conditioning, hot showers, buildings with elevators, cars, trucks, airplanes and trains. They want beef from Argentina, wheat from Russia, electronics from China, and Lithium from Australia. They want comfort and convenience. And stuff. Stuff comes from bustling economies and bustling economies thrive on energy consumption. With economic growth semi-sacred, it’s easier to target production than people.
There are reasons. For ages, the divine mandate to go forth and multiply ruled much of the world. Birth control meant abstinence, and anything else was evil. More is better applied to people as well as wealth. And people crave comfort, convenience and abundance, not austerity or living with less. The consumerism that gives us more thrives on growing populations. Declining birth rates in any first world nations are deemed worrisome.
In addition, arguments for limiting population have lost persuasiveness. Two centuries ago Robert Malthus raised the specter of doom with population outpacing the capacity of earth to feed it. Global population was around one billion in 1800. The industrialization of agriculture since then has eroded that argument. China’s 35-year One Child policy to limit population growth was scrapped. Instead, economic policies were shifted, and over the last forty years some 800,000,000 Chinese rose from poverty to sustainable prosperity. Genetic engineering yields more crops. Fracking releases more natural gas. Technology provided solutions for growth, and will keep doing so. We hope.
Populations only decline if there are fewer births or more deaths, and lurking in the shadows of the latter are wars, plagues, famines or genocide. The topic of reducing population is fraught with landmines, so we avoid it. After all, population growth has walked in paradoxical lockstep with emergence of the great global middle class. It may in fact have contributed to it.
So we convene climate conferences that talk about reducing use of gas and coal, driving electric cars, building solar farms instead of power plants, and perhaps eating carrots instead of cows. But curtailing global warming seldom talks about shear numbers of people being part of the problem. It seems to me that global growth from 2.3 to 8 billion in the span of one lifetime is a crisis crying for consideration. Instead, we give it a blind eye. Some day we will wish we hadn’t.
— Community Columnist Dale Wyngarden is a resident of the city of Holland. He can be reached at wyngarden@ameritech.net.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Dale Wyngarden: Population growth has to be part of climate talks
