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Page added on March 12, 2014
Stunting Consumption Growth Through Population Control
Countdown (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), by Alan Weisman, details the burgeoning effects that human population growth has on our environment. Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable way of balancing this impact. This excerpt explores the reality that although population control is a possible solution, consumption growth is projected to continue.
Mass starvation was what Paul Ehrlich began to fear back in 1966, after he, Anne, and their daughter, Lisa, found themselves on a mobbed Delhi street, their taxi marooned in an ocean of humanity. This was before the Green Revolution; as a population biologist, Ehrlich knew the mathematics of doubling times, and when he and Anne compared the human race’s spiraling numbers with crop data, they concluded that by the 1970s, famines would kill hundreds of millions of people — unless, as they wrote in the prologue to The Population Bomb, dramatic programs to increase food production stretched the Earth’s carrying capacity.
“But these programs,” they said, “will only provide a stay of execution, unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.”
Even as their book was published, Norman Borlaug’s miracle hybrids were coming to first harvest in India and Pakistan, and the famines the Ehrlichs predicted for the 1970s were averted. In subsequent decades, pro-growth economists made Paul Ehrlich and his forebear Thomas Robert Malthus their favorite punching bags, never missing a chance to ridicule them. Except, among scientists, no one was laughing. Ehrlich is today one of the world’s most esteemed ecologists, winner of the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, given in disciplines where there is no Nobel Prize, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, a Heinz Prize (with Anne), and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the British Royal Society, among many others.
Neither was Norman Borlaug among his detractors, issuing the identical warning in his Nobel acceptance speech that Green Revolution crops were only buying the world time, unless population controls were implemented. Yet Ehrlich’s name has continually incited derision outside of scientific circles, especially after a famous wager with economist Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, a free market think tank.
Simon, the cornucopian author of The Ultimate Resource 2 who argued that human ingenuity ensured that resources would never run out, frequently challenged environmental scientists to prove otherwise. In 1980, he bet Ehrlich and Berkeley physicists John Holdren and John Harte $1,000 that the price of five commodity metals of their choosing wouldn’t rise due to scarcity over the coming decade. They selected chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten — and ten years later lost the bet, having failed to anticipate a global recession during the 1980s that suppressed demand for industrial metals.
The outcome became a publicity windfall for free marketeers, and is still widely cited as proof that Ehrlich, Malthus, and the authors of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report to the Club of Rome, were and always will be wrong.
Yet in the new millennium, several economists — and The Economist of London — have noted that Ehrlich’s mistake was only one of timing: the following decade, he and his friends would have won. Ehrlich also would have won a second bet he proposed to Simon: that fifteen environmental indicators — including global temperature, CO2 concentration, croplands, forests, and human sperm count — would worsen over a decade. Simon declined to wager.
A few years later, in 1994, Simon would write: “We now have in our hands — in our libraries, really — the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” With world population then growing by 1.4 percent annually, the Ehrlichs checked his math and responded that this was unlikely, because at current growth rates, within six thousand years the mass of human population would equal the mass of the universe.
Ehrlich’s vindication is no surprise to him, although there is no joy in being right about matters so disturbing. The unlikely agriculture miracle that he and Anne hoped for in The Population Bomb, which unexpectedly arrived with the Green Revolution, also postponed the timing of what increasingly now looks inevitable. With crop ecologists expecting grain harvests to drop 10 percent for each 1 degree Centigrade rise in average temperatures, and with the world now headed beyond 2 degrees C at present rates of emissions, population will be up, food production down, and dikes may have to protect much of the world’s rice production. Even at a 0.8 degree C increase, China barely missed losing its winter wheat crop in 2011. Thanks to last-minute March rains, the harvest was saved; few dared imagine the chaos had shaky Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, been forced to bid against China for grain.
And no one can predict what North America’s massive 2012 drought portends for future crop disasters. With most of the world’s meals dependent on a few critical monocultures of rice, wheat, and corn — once three rare weeds, until we made them the most abundant plants on Earth — humanity may be just one disease away from a catastrophe that could shake civilization’s foundations. In the past century in North America alone, it happened to elms and chestnut trees. The chance of an epidemic like Ebola wiping us out is far less likely than pathogens blown around the world collapsing our food supply.
The week before Rio+20 — the June 2012 UN conference held twenty years after the original Earth Summit — the world’s 105 science academies, led by the Royal Society of Britain, warned that failure to act on population growth and over-consumption would have “catastrophic implications for human wellbeing.” It was no shock to Paul Ehrlich that Rio+20, billed as the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, ignored the question of population, for much the same reasons that the Earth Summit did. As in 1992, the Vatican courted support from human rights and feminist groups, contending that population programs unfairly blame poor women for the world’s environmental ills. But as he drives his pickup back into Palo Alto, down six-lane El Camino Real, which formerly passed through orchards, not miles of commerce, Paul Ehrlich has no doubt that the most overpopulated country on Earth is his own.
“There is no condom for over-consumption,” he says, sorrowing at the unabashed displays of Silicon Valley purchasing power. How to curb human acquisitiveness is more vexing a mystery than finding a unified theory of physics. In the last fifty years, world population more than doubled, but world economic growth increased sevenfold. With luck and contraception, world population might stabilize, but consumption grows on, almost exponentially, as the more people have, the more they want.
“Yet to separate consumption from population,” says Ehrlich, “is like saying the length of a rectangle contributes more to its area than its width.” The United States is the world’s highest per-capita consumer, and its 315 million people are headed to an estimated 439 million or more by 2050. And a new factor has intensified the Impact in the I=PAT formula that he and John Holdren wrote in the 1970s: Population, Affluence, and Technology are further exacerbated by Time.
“The next 2 billion people we add will do a lot more damage than the last 2 billion,” says Ehrlich. Those of us already alive have already plucked the lowest-hanging resources. Like wringing oil from rocks, from now on acquiring things we use will be much harder, involving much more energy and leaving much bigger messes in our wake.
21 Comments on "Stunting Consumption Growth Through Population Control"
MSN fanboy on Wed, 12th Mar 2014 11:17 pm
Good, lets increase population more and more. why stop at 10 billion, why not MORE MORE MORE MORE. MORE CARS MORE POLLUTION MORE GROWTH MORE SPECIES EXTINCT MORE DEBT MORE PLASTIC RUBBISH MADE IN CHINA MORE FOOD MORE WATER MORE HOUSES MORE DEAD ZONES ETC ETC….
MORE DEATH WHEN THIS GRAVY TRAIN CRASHES.
Is it just me, or do any of the rest of you WANT too see this crash.???
I admit watching 9+ billion die (my prediction for when we crash) while im at my BOL drinking captured rainwater makes me smile. No LAUGH OUT LOUD.
What can I say, im an optimist 🙂
J-Gav on Wed, 12th Mar 2014 11:53 pm
“Much bigger messes” is a pretty safe bet, although no-one can say exactly what shapes that will take since it will surely be place-dependent. Cornucopians like Papasmurf, who fail to recognize the simple fact that we live on a planet with finite resources, are likely to be taken aback by just how messy things can get.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 12:32 am
The carrying capacity overshoot issue is an affluent developed world problem and the high population growth developing world problem. I get tiered of the same old song and dance that the developing world has a right to develop and the developed world should make the sacrifices. Likewise the developed world has no interest in slowing down the consumption. The developed world population growth as leveled off but it still contributes by excessive consumption. You can’t have your cake and eat it. Both issues are part of the same equation. It appears to me nature will take the lead with curbing both consumption and population growth. I do see consumption growth ending in the global world when the financial correction occurs yet, this will not be enough. We will need deep cuts in standard of living and population. I see no way to stop the population growth in the developing world. How do you tell young people in love not to consummate and have kids? Most countries do not have the willpower China had to implement the one child policy. Religions are the worst obstacle to change. If the Christians and Muslims would proclaim it God’s will to reduce population we might make some headway. So both sides of the equation are needed to stem this runaway train and I see no incentive by either. It is like the rape of the commons but unfortunately this commons is our global “home” “Mother Earth”.
rollin on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 12:39 am
There is a condom for over-consumption, it’s called self-discipline.
It’s unmotivated corollary is lack of money. The poor can’t over-consume.
Erlich was correct, millions have died of starvation, it just hasn’t become an epidemic yet. As long as the starving and poor are kept far away and out of sight, it will take a large calamity to get the attention of the TV/car crowd. Maybe when they can’t get more beer and pretzels or wine and cheese they will start to pull their heads out of their holes.
The wolf may not be at your door, but he is checking out your neighborhood.
DC on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 12:50 am
Humanity has shown little appetite for voluntary population controls right up to the current day, so it will fall to IN-voluntary controls to do the job for us. Needless to say, no one will care that option one little bit. Funny this, the so-called ‘Green Revolution(tm)’, was both cure and cause. It wasn’t Borlaug’s plants that did the trick, it was the massive expansion of chemicals and petroleum use that did it.Either way, the ‘Green Revolution’ is what is draining aquifers and making people sick and obese eating GMO nutrition-free petro-foods the world over.
The ultimate progress trap.
ghung on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 1:10 am
I agree with those who understand that there will be no ‘we’ limiting population growth, globally. The eventual mechanism will be physical limits to growth: resource availability, ecology, and climate change.
Human responses to these things will be largely reactionary and forced, and will include war, famine, and plague; all of the above before human population falls below the natural carrying capacity of their environment. Populations that voluntarily limit their growth and consumption will be overwhelmed by those that don’t in the scramble for remaining available resources and viable territory.
Of course, we’re seeing all of this now. How much deeper into overshoot humanity’s cleverness can take us and how many earthlings will survive this extinction event is anybody’s guess.
Boat on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 2:12 am
38% of human population still heat with some form of biomass. 18% don’t have electricity. Why is it such a failure to live like them.
PapaSmurf on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 2:37 am
China already had 415 million people back during pre-industrial time without fossil fuels. Since then their population has tripled to approximately 1.3 billion.
Frankly, I doubt starvation in the United States is really an issue with Peak Oil.
China arable land
4.1 km2 per 1000 population
United States arable land
13.1 km2 per 1000 population
So the United States in the year 2013 has roughly the same amount of arable land per capita that China had (before fossil fuels and green revolution) in 1900 with a population of 400 million.
While the economy may have recessions or even depressions due to energy issues during any transition phase, I doubt it will lead to starvation of significant numbers of people.
It remains to be seen if countries like China and India can produce enough food if they are faced with the same math of arable land per capita when confronted with these issues.
The areas of the world likely to face issues are those which import a lot of food. Grain for Egypt comes to mind as a likely area of conflict.
GregT on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:01 am
Populations everywhere, will revert back to the carrying capacity of the lands that they occupy. Human energy generation is a temporary means that is allowing overshoot. The trade off is environmental destruction. The longer we generate energy, the more environmental destruction we do, and the less people that will be supported by the environment.
Arable land does not include soils that have been depleted of all natural elements. Modern agricultural practices, especially in North America, have killed our soils. Big Ag is nothing more than injecting chemicals into dead Earth, to grow GMO crops, that are reliant on a cocktail of poisons. Completely reliant on fossil fuels. Oil prices go up, food prices go up. Oil becomes less available, food becomes less available.
Food production decline is coming to a ‘supermarket’ near you soon. Learn to grow your own, or learn how to be hungry, or starve.
PapaSmurf on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:18 am
GregT,
Your mental masturbation in not substantiated.
Makati1 on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:25 am
I don’t see 10 million ever. Why?
Approaching financial crash is going to take the ability to consume away from just about everyone on the planet.
Energy depletion is going to contract globalization and the ability to purchase unnecessary junk. (95% of mall contents.)
Climate change is going to seriously limit population in the consuming countries of the world, especially the West as the cost of survival will go up and up.
War is also going to escalate and, when it turns global, it will not last 5 years like the last one. Maybe 5 weeks, months at most, as it will likely end in a nuclear exchange. End of consumption.
xman on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:47 am
PapaSmurf — Been lurking here for a quite a while. Your statement “Your mental masturbation is not substantiated” motivates me to comment on what a constant ass you make out of yourself. Your idiocy IS substantiated, as is your rudeness, your obnoxiousness and your total lack of civility. What a pompous p.o.s. you are.
It had to be said.
PapaSmurf on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:55 am
Makati1,
Everything you just wrote is rank speculation and supported by ….. nothing.
============
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Northwest Resident on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 4:56 am
GregT and Makati1, just keep on with your “mental masturbation” and “speculation supported by nothing.” Me, I’m continuing with my “fetal position”. Don’t let the big obnoxious bully discourage you from continuing to express your ideas, your speculations and your thoughts here. What the smurf man isn’t human or intelligent enough to understand is that a wide variety of speculative articles and peak-oil related articles dealing with food and population among others are posted here, and that normal people like to toss their ideas around, to have a conversation, to trade ideas and sometimes debate issues. That sort of normal and healthy human activity is beyond the smurf man’s ability to comprehend. The smurf man is just here to try to prove to everybody that he’s smart, smarter than any of us in fact, when that clearly is not the case, not even close. And he definitely isn’t sociable or a guy you’d ever want to sit down and have a beer with. Ignore the smurf man. His insults and name-calling are insignificant flatus from a sewer mind. I love reading what you write, and I hope you continue. Just pretend like the smurf man isn’t here — he deserves nothing but contempt and is unworthy of any amount of attention.
Stephen on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 8:30 am
It depends on how many people are willing to grow crops close to where they live and how many people are willing to farm without industrial chemicals and fossil fuels, hand weed, and re-learn the methods of winter storage that were used pre-refrigeration days.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 9:42 am
I have always felt a postindustrial carrying capacity for the US population might be between a Civil War population of 31MIL and 1900 population of 76MIL. PapaSmurf argument on the Chinese population in 1900 of 420MIL in my book is high for a US carrying capacity. I might add China was a net exporter of people at that time with frequent famines some very large lots of fossil fuel use in 1900 also. A Chinese population in 1700 of around 100MIL is a better benchmark. You really have to get to pre-industrial levels when considering a carrying capacity benchmark. A Cornell University study put the carrying capacity at 200MIL for a future 2100 US. (http://www.ecofuture.org/pk/pkcapcty.html). I have thought about this issues extensively being a “mild” doomer/collpasnik. My stab would be between 25MIL and 200MIL. This is a big range but there are far too many potential limiting factors. In most cases the limiting factors point to less carrying capacity not more. I would say closer to the Civil War 70MIL considering the important physical limitations caused by climate instability, land/water degradation, and habitat loss. The nonphysical is the most difficult in my mind to overcome. We have basically reduced our agricultural population drastically with fossil energy replacements. This small portion of the population with any skills is IMO the biggest obstacle. The old world skills are in the books but not in our heads so even the current AG work force lacks many postindustrial skills. There are few postindustrial tools nor the industries to manufacture them. We would need new machines, animals, land use changes, and storage/preparations infrastructure. This is a most daunting task especially considering there is little interest in the current population. I would say it would take a generation or more to replace these lost items. In a perfect world you transition to a nonindustrial living in an orderly fashion. Orderly is really not the case in a decent from a previous growth paradigm. The decent is very messy due to loss of infrastructure and knowledge to re-inhabit the arable land we currently have. It must also be acknowledged our US 470MIL acres arable land is decreasing every year by 3MIL acres (http://www.carryingcapacity.org/resources.html). We need to admit without fossil energy our land under cultivation will drop considerably. The Great Plains cannot support a human footprint like it has now post fossil energy. I am assuming AltE renewables are not a long term solution. We will go back to pre-industrial renewables energy. We will have some residual technology and knowledge but entropic decay will be high in a post fossil fuel decent. The big factor is how bad the initial decent will be and where will the reboot happen. This is the all-important message I always have is how much physical and non-physical infrastructure will we loose and where will a productive standard of living reboot. This will all be mute if climate instability does its dirty work. We could see a further significant reduction of carrying capacity to 35MIL or worse considering desertification and coastal loss. My biggest concern is the initial carrying capacity drop from systematic decay caused by a decent down the energy gradient of a complex global world where our local support system relies on the global for critical support items. The final issue is the inability to manage the nuk waste, nuk wmd, and all the other spectrum of other industrial man poisons post status quo BAU. This could further significantly reduce carrying capacity let us say another halving. So PapaSmuf cornucopia rude rabble of a person I say US carrying capacity is 35MIL postindustrial man!
Makati1 on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 1:19 pm
Davy, you are so correct concerning lost skills. As anyone who has tried to garden for the first time knows, failure is easy and success is difficult. That most farmers in the US are past their 50th birthday only adds to the loss. Another decade and farming will be almost a lost skill, except in the Amish families and a few scattered areas off the beaten track. Ditto for most other pre-hydrocarbon skills like blacksmithing, carpentry with hand tools, animal husbandry and various other necessary needs. How many people can do math without a calculator? Does anyone still have and know how to use a slide rule?
When the internet goes dead and computers are just museum pieces, at what level will civilization bottom out? Now is the time to learn the skills necessary for a life post BAU while there is still a grocery store, and your other necessities can still be bought locally when you need them.
Kenz300 on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 2:16 pm
The worlds poorest people are having the most children.
They have not figured out the connection between their poverty and family size.
If you can not provide for yourself you can not provide for a child.
Access to family planning services needs to be available to all that want it.
ghung on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 2:19 pm
Contraction is always far more difficult than growth; more people competing for fewer resources with less efficient processes and skill sets. Trial and error, relearning things, etc., take a big chunk of productive time and energy. And, like Papa Smurf, most folks these days only think in one direction: => growth => waste. They have no concept of how reliant we are on a surplus of virtually everything on an industrial scale. Our waste streams are out of sight, out of mind, but are a major part of our BAU overhead. Then there is specialization.
Most folks earn their livings doing very specialized tasks that will become obsolete and will have neither the skills or learned capacity for the generalization that adapting requires. I’ve always adhered to the saying; “I’ve been doing so much for so long with so little, I’m now qualified to do anything with nothing.” When you can build a solar tracker from a 30 year old satellite dish and make it work perfectly first time out, you’ll understand, but you have to be able to see it first; it’s called conceptualization. My wife just calls it “MacGyverizing”. You may not be able to make a silk purse from a sows ear, but you can still make a damn good purse.
noobtube on Thu, 13th Mar 2014 3:42 pm
The trash-producing nations still haven’t figured out (Europe but specifically the United States) that the reason their birth rates have declined to near zero is because the Earth cannot handle any more of them.
The non-trash producing areas (see Africa) can continue to have children because the Earth needs more African lifestyles and needs to not only stop the American (and European) lifestyles, but get rid of the ones it has.
I wonder when Americans will figure out that they are Earth’s biggest population problem.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 12:58 am
Noobtube said – The non-trash producing areas (see Africa) can continue to have children because the Earth needs more African lifestyles and needs to not only stop the American (and European) lifestyles, but get rid of the ones it has.
BS, Noobtube, overshoot is the same whether it is from affluence or quantity. This is especially true if you have the quantity working to be more affluent. You tell me a people that do not want to be more affluent please. I see nothing special about African lifestyles in fact there are some pretty mean suckers in Africa. Some serious exploitation of the rain forests and its animals is happening in Africa. Part of the reason Africans are killing each other is carrying capacity issues. I do not discount the rich developed world’s contribution to African woes. It continues today with wealth transfer policies inherent in the global economic system. In the developed economies the 1%’ers having first access to the money creation which gives them the ability to make something for nothing on the spread at the expense of the lower classes. The developing countries have to pay a “VIG” to the developed world to play in the global economic system. This “VIG” happens mostly through the FX markets. Developing countries generally offer resources in return for products and services. Resources tend to benefit a few while goods and services benefit many. I agree the developed world needs to rethink its standard of living but Africa needs to slow down the procreating. The sad reality it will take Nature to moderate both quantity and affluence.