"...there's something not right about the "more people cause more emissions" argument, and something very wrong with promoting the idea that birth control for the "Third" World will slow climate change."

Population Growth, Pollution and the Global Environment
"People Are Not Pollution"

by Vi Ransel

One of the most divisive arguments within the environmental movement is population growth, whether by increasing births, or via immigration.

But population figures conceal more than they reveal. They seem to suggest that the cause of climate change is too many people, and that a growing population means growing greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we should encourage people to have smaller families because it's "a lot easier than retooling our economic system." (1) And further, that we must slow population growth where it's greatest, e.g. the "Third" World, where population is "exploding."

In Chapter Three of his "Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography," David Harvey gets to the bottom of this argument by dissecting the three pillars on which it stands - subsistence, resources, and scarcity.

The argument first posits an absolute and unchanging subsistence level, the bare minimum people need to stay alive. But this level has been defined differently over time, according to the society in which people were living. The subsistence level in Europe's Dark Ages was defined very differently from that in the European Union today. And today's subsistence level is defined very differently in Uganda than it is in the United States.

This argument further categorizes nature as a "supermarket" of resources available to be made useful to humans. But this perception has also varied according to the level of historical, technological, and cultural development within particular societies.

The third absolute in this argument is scarcity, defined as intrinsic to nature. But this, too, is rooted in views of particular societies and modes of production. Societies seek particular goals/ends, and it's these goals/ends and the means used to achieve them, as much as a lack of natural resources, that define, even manufacture, scarcity.

Much scarcity is, in fact, created by the activities humans choose to engage in, according to the way their societies have been organized. The scarcity of available land in cities like New York and London is a result of human activity, not nature's. And if this scarcity were not manufactured, the rents in London and New York would not be so wildly lucrative.

In such a scenario, a "crisis of overpopulation" happens when the scarcity of available resources no longer meets the subsistence needs of most of the population. In other words, there are too many people in the world to allow "us" to continue to live in the way in which we've organized our society, based on available natural resources that we could be using to continue to live the way we've been living - if only it weren't for all those people making subsistence demands and potentially preventing us from living in the way to which we've become accustomed. (Think "non-negotiable American way of life.")

But there are things we could do to change this scenario and adapt, which has been the hallmark of our species across millions of years. We could redefine our goals by changing the societal organization that creates scarcity. We could change our view of nature as a resource supermarket with value only insofar as we can make use of it. We could change the things to which we've become accustomed. Or we could try to reduce the number of people with subsistence needs to be met.

All of these options would be explored in relation to each other if there were real concern with environmental issues.

But it's easiest by far to focus on population, especially other people's population, and further, their overpopulation in view of the "scarcity" of resources we've created as a result of the way we've organized our society and how we go about implementing its goals.


"Somebody, somewhere is redundant, and there is not enough to go round. Am I redundant? Of course not. Are you redundant? Of course not. So who's redundant? Of course, it must be them. And if there's not enough to go round, then it is only right and proper that they, who contribute so little to society, ought to bear the brunt of the burden." "And if we hold that there are certain of us who, by virtue of our skills, abilities, and attainments, are capable of 'conferring a signal benefit on mankind' through our contributions to the common good and who, besides, are the purveyors of peace, freedom, culture, and civilization, then it would appear to be our bound duty to protect and preserve ourselves for the sake of all mankind."(2) (emphasis added)

The population growth argument starts and ends with one idea - Earth with lots of people is bad, and Earth with more people is worse. The argument goes that one person's carbon footprint is X, two people's, 2X, three people's, 3X, and so on. In this way we arrive at the conclusion that the effect of population on the environment is proportional to the number of people.

The whole of a country's emissions are represented as the sum of each person's, or per capita, emissions. This makes it look like total emissions are a function of the total amount of people in that country. But unless you know before hand what the total emissions are, you cannot calculate per capita emissions. Per capita emissions can only be determined when total emissions are already known, not the other way around. Total emissions are not arrived at by adding up each individual's contribution.

Per capita is simply total emissions divided by total population. The total remains the same whether every individual creates an equal amount of emissions, or one person generates them all. It's impossible to tell how much of the total each individual is responsible for when only the total is known. Per capita reveals nothing about individual contributions.

In the US, each individual's per capita share includes a share of the emissions created by commercial air travel, the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas, factory farms, the military, and the manufacture and use of pharmaceuticals and oil-based fertilizers and pesticides. If one-third of the population of the US moved to Canada overnight, the per capita share of the remaining population would shoot up in the US and fall in Canada without any change in individual consumption or total emissions having occurred overnight in either country. But US citizens would still be held responsible for the rise in per capita emissions which was created primarily by industry.

So that per capita math magic, those numbers examined in a vacuum, tell us next to nothing, and need to be looked at in context. Ian Angus did just that with his article, "Dissecting Those 'Overpopulation' Numbers." In "Part One: Population Where?" he worked with actual global population and emissions figures for 2006 - and shredded the "more people equal more pollution" argument with the facts.

The population growth argument ignores what the total fertility rates in the G-20 countries, which describe themselves as "the systematically significant industrial and emerging-market economies," and the total fertility rates in the world's nineteen countries with the lowest levels of CO2 emissions illustrate.

The total fertility rate is the average number of children each woman in a country will have in her lifetime. The higher this number, the faster the population is growing. A stable population, that is, one that's neither growing nor declining, has a total fertility rate of about 2.3 children per woman.

In the G-20 countries, which generate 90% of the world's Gross National Product, this rate is as low as 1.21. The G-20 includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US. (The "twentieth" is the European Union.)

In the world's nineteen countries with the lowest CO2 emissions, however, the total fertility rate is as high as 7.75. All of these countries, with the exception of Afghanistan, are in Africa. They include Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Let's contrast total fertility rate with total CO2 emissions per country for 2006. These range from a high in China of 6103.49 million tonnes* to a low of 273.71 million tonnes in Turkey. The G-20 total was 22566.76 million tonnes. (*These are British 'long' tons.) The nineteen countries with the lowest rate of CO2 emissions range from a high of 6.01 million tonnes in Ethiopia to a low of 0.2 million tonnes in Burundi. Their total was 29.3 million tonnes. In other words, the countries with the lowest population growth rates are producing the bulk of C02 emissions, more than a whopping 770 times as much as the nineteen countries with the highest rates of population growth.

Angus has done the math. Per capita, each American's CO2 emissions were 132 times more than a person's in Madagascar, 197 times more than a person's in Mozambique, and 400 times more than someone who lived in Mali or Burkina Faso. And these amounts don't include the concentration of CO2 emission sources in G-20 countries like their militaries, extractive and agricultural industries, and commercial air travel.

Total emissions do not depend on population density. The high-emitting G-20 includes densely-populated countries like Japan and India, but also the sparsely-populated countries of Canada and Russia. This is equally true of the nineteen countries with the lowest emission rates. Rwanda and Burundi are densely populated. Chad and Niger are not. So it's obvious that low population density can co-exist with high emissions, and high population density with low emissions.

If emissions are dependent on population density, it would appear that high emissions cause low population growth (G-20), or that high population growth causes low emissions (the nineteen countries with the lowest rates of CO2 emissions). These statements are equally absurd. Both population growth and CO2 emissions depend on socioeconomic factors, not biological ones.

So there's something not right about the "more people cause more emissions" argument, and something very wrong with promoting the idea that birth control for the "Third" World will slow climate change. Focus on population growth distracts attention from issues like production and consumption, policies of technology and globalization, poverty and women's status in world societies, and the boom and bust of our economic system's cycle itself. But the population control argument keeps reappearing as the solution to poverty, hunger, and now climate change. The simple theory: more people equal more pollution.

In "Peoplequake," Fred Pearce makes the point that the poorest three billion of us emit only 7% of CO2 worldwide, while the richest half billion of us create 50% of them. (There are 6.9 billion of us.) He says that a woman in rural Ethiopia with ten children does less damage, and uses fewer resources than one middle class family of four in the US, the UK or Germany. And even if all ten of that Ethiopian woman's children reach adulthood, which is highly unlikely, her entire extended family of over 100 people would still emit only about as much CO2 every year as one American.

So to suggest that the greatest threat to escalating climate change is too many children in Ethiopia, Somalia or Uganda is both disingenuous and dangerous. The population "bomb" of the 20th century has been defused. In fact, the rate of global population growth is slowing down. According to the US Census Bureau International Data Base (December 2008), it peaked in the 60s and has fallen consistently ever since. Yet the rate of greenhouse gas emissions is skyrocketing out of control. Some however, continue to claim this increase in emissions is a function of population growth, though the rise in energy and resource use has vastly outstripped population growth.

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24467