Brits Break Silence On Population-Climate Change Links
by April Streeter, Gothenburg, Sweden on 07.28.08
Green technology may well still save the world. But two British family planning and reproductive health experts, Dr. Pip Hayes and Professor John Guillebaud, say the best green move any British couple can make is to have just two kids, or at least one less than they were perhaps planning on.
A British baby makes 160 times more GHG emissions than an Ethiopian baby
That's a calculation not from the British experts but from the Optimum Population Trust. But the experts do point out that with 79 million people being added to Planet Earth each year - the equivalent to erecting a mid-sized 1.5 million person city each week - every nation would do well to have a defined population policy (Britain does not, ditto the U.S.).
6.7 billion humans and counting
Guillebaud and Hayes say better availability of and access to contraception rather than coercion are needed worldwide to get women to plan smaller families. The idea that population is going to emerge as a bigger issue in the food, energy and climate debates is key in the recently published book The Dominant Animal, Paul and Anne Erlichs' follow up to their 70's book "bomb" The Population Bomb. Much of the wide-spread famine the Erlichs' predicted back then was solved by improvements in agricultural technology. But Earth's carrying capacity (estimated at approximately 2 billion, though debated) is now being far exceeded for techno fixes, they surmise. Guillebaud told the Guardian:
We are not criticising those people in Britain who had large families in the past, because a lot of people had no inkling about the sustainability implications.
Zen And The Art Of Population Management
Another recently published book More: Population, Nature, And What Women Want by Robert Engelman (a Worldwatch Institute director) follows a bit of the Erlichs' way of thinking. Engelman suggests in less strident tones than the Erlichs that it might simply be smart to start slowing down our population growth, globally, by giving women the tools they need (information, education and condoms, more or less) to space their families as they would like and thus get to sustainable population levels. Via ::Science Daily
More on overpopulation:
The Elephant In The Room: Overpopulation
Get involved in the debate at the TreeHugger Forums:
Do We Have The Right To Reproduce?
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It's about time someone starting talking about over-population. Over-population is the number one environmental problem. Every time I make a comment about over-population on Treehugger my post does not get posted...Will see what happens this time...
Everyone tip-toes around this issue, because reproductive freedom is a basic human right, Ironically, however, peop;le who want to limit reproductive freedom by restricting abortion and birth control are the ones who scream and cry when you suggest population growth is out of control
"A British baby makes 160 times more GHG emissions than an Ethiopian baby"
And if he happens to be Jeremy Clarkson, you can easily multiply that by 10.
Or even 1000 if you take into account the fact that he encourages people to burn as much petrol as possible...
-----author queries-----
Who is Jeremy Clarkson?
Hopefully it becomes trendy to talk about it. Hopefully before we're 9 billion and counting.
Jeremy Clarkson - he is the presenter of Top Gear a program in the UK that is, well, quite into high powered cars.
It is indeed prudent to talk about population control. Thankfully, by far the most effective way of slowing population growth need not involve coercion or meddling from the government. Simply increasing the average age at which most women have their first child by 5 or more years would have a huge impact over the longterm - more so than restricting immigration or curtailing the number of children people are allowed to have. And the best way to do this? Increase the number of women going on to higher education, which of course has its own benefits. Education, it's a win win proposition (See: "Solving Population Growth the Easy Way").
@ Rob
I fail to see the irony. Irony would imply inconsistent positions, but the people who oppose birth control are also the ones who insist that there is no population problem. That's completely consistent.
@ timbuktu
Education is definitely a huge factor in preventing explosive population, but there are other factors too. Wealth is a huge one, with industrialized nations reproducing much later and at much lower rates than third world nations. For example, Japan's current trend is a population reduction from 120m today to 90m by 2050 without any explicit population reduction policy. And gov'ts have a huge role to play. China's policy, while harsh, has been very effective where it has been enforced. China's population wouldn't have grown from 1 billion (where it was when the policy was implemented) to 1.2 billion today if the policy had been enforced in the countryside as well as the city. While this would be hard to do in most Western countries, there are other things we could do, like reverse the child tax incentives. Making children more expensive, especially after the second one would tip the balance for many families.
"A British baby makes 160 times more GHG emissions than an Ethiopian baby"
Yes, but a British baby will have an average lifespan of around 78 years, while the Ethiopian baby will die by age 48.
The British baby will also have access to modern healthcare, education, and nutritious food, and will not be as likely to be quite as oppressed by their government.
If that's what a little "greenhouse gas" buys you, then I can live with it, quite happily.
I bought this issue up in the past as well, suggesting that rather than giving out contraception (at a cost) one might offer sterilisation to suitable candidates and sell the resultant carbon credits at a profit.
Some would argue that dropping sperm counts around the globe are a natural manifestation of the environment trying to correct itself. That being the case, I can see it becoming a lot more difficult to conceive in 20 years time...the problem will likely control itself but agreed that a population control agenda should be set in the near term to reduce the overall devastation wrought.
how about birth control for guys? I'm tired of hearing about more hormones for women and not enough vasectomies for men. birth control for women is certainly NOT green in any way, shape, or form. it also causes a whole bundle of health problems for women and for future generations. what about all the resources that get used to produce the pill, the packaging it comes in, the paper pamphlet that comes along with it and etc. I do agree that over-population is a BIG issue when talking about global warming but I don't think it is the biggest. As a mother I would like to have another child someday ( I have one already) and I'd like to think that there are mothers out there who agree with me. I know the world is messed up and a lot of things need to change but we can't deal with something as large and as personal as overpopulation overnight.
Human over-population is already destroying our beautiful planet, why don't politicians ever discuss it?....
Many reasons, but mainly economic; much like oil, population is linked to economic growth, but it has been now been proven that low carbon economies can be very successful. We now need a model for a low carbon economy who's population is stable but who's economy is strong. (the Scandinavians are closest)
Much like carbon emissions we need politicians to come together and agree caps on world population.... or a reduction of a couple of billion would be good!
Otherwise we are heading for catastrophe :)
Yes, but what about "Idiocracy"?!?!
Really, that movie scared me. If all the folks who read treehugger stop having kids, but right-wing Christian conservatives don't, then we get another version of the future presented in the movie.
A film review by David Bezanson - Copyright © 2006 Filmcritic.com
The film begins with a narrator explaining: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence." Instead, it rewards "those who reproduce the most." To illustrate this, we meet an over-educated, attractive couple who want to have kids, but they're still getting settled in their jobs, the stock market's bad, his sperm count's low… and it doesn't happen. Then we cut to Clevon, Jr., a white trash Lothario who sleeps with every woman in the trailer park and who (thanks also to a stem cell research breakthrough) is the ancestor of dozens, then hundreds of children. As this nationwide phenomenon progresses over time, the Bell curve of the U.S. population inexorably slides over to the dumb and trashy side.