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Page added on June 18, 2011
Can it be our survival that’s really at steak?
Last week, the United Nations Environment Program recommended we all move toward a vegan diet to fight global warming.
Meat-eating and milk-drinking, it said, are endangering the planet because of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions needed to sustain global beef and dairy farming.
That such a proposal would come from the UN is both utterly predictable and entirely hypocritical.
Predictable because the UN is always calling on the world’s population — particularly in the West — to do less of everything — eat, drive, fly, consume — in the name of saving the planet.
The UN’s hypocrisy lies in asking others to simplify their lives while the UN is infamous for waste, extravagance and excessive consumption — even at its never-ending global meetings on climate change.
More serious is the fact the UN’s approach of addressing climate change through a policy of imposed scarcity (see the Kyoto accord) is misguided.
The philosophy behind achieving sustainability through scarcity was most famously expressed by Rev. Thomas Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population.
Malthus theorized since the Earth’s resources were finite while population grew exponentially, the world would inevitably run out of resources.
The Malthusian theory is a favourite theme of environmentalists and other doomsayers.
They warn using fossil fuels to produce energy, combined with population growth, will inevitably end in global famine, disease and death. Eventually the Earth, depleted of resources, will enter a new dark age in which human existence will be under constant threat.
There have been many reworkings of the Malthusian theory over the years, one of the best known being Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich predicted nothing could avert a global famine in the immediate future as food production failed to keep up with population growth.
What Ehrlich failed to foresee, however, was the green revolution in agriculture, which made global food production far more efficient and steadily raised consumption in both the developed and developing worlds.
To be sure, there are, as there have always been, famines, which cause enormous suffering, for reasons of weather, natural disasters and geo-politics.
But the problem is not our inability to grow enough food. It’s uneven food distribution and our inability to get food to people who need it, often due to war and government corruption.
The theory of unchecked population growth itself overwhelming the capacity of the Earth to sustain life has also been discredited.
What the doomsayers failed to predict was that as nations develop and their economies grow, birth rates decline.
This because parents no longer feel the need to have large families to provide for their old age, which liberates women from their traditional role as child-bearers to enter the workforce.
Projections are the Earth’s population of 6.5 billion today will grow to 9 billion by 2050 and stabilize at 11 billion by 2200.
Considering global standards of living continually rose as the Earth’s population increased to its present level, there’s reason for optimism about its capacity to sustain 11 billion people two centuries from now.
This isn’t to minimize human suffering or suggest there will not continue to be famines, disease and poverty.
But it does refute the idea population growth itself poses an existential threat.
The real question is how do we best ensure sustainability?
Is it through imposed scarcity, advocated by the UN, or through pursuing economic growth, since it’s only when people and nations have sufficient food and security that they turn their attention to the environment and have the capacity to improve it.
Today’s doomsayers make the classic mistake of predicting the future based on the present.
They assume we will always do what we do today to produce energy — burn fossil fuels — until we run out.
Since this ignores thousands of years of human history, no doubt they’ll be proven wrong about that, too.
12 Comments on "Can it be our survival that’s really at steak?"
Lee on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 12:04 am
The article in itself is rather narrow minded in the way it addresses the issue of population.
Obviously there is more to global problems than this one factor, and more to dealing with them than the one statement focused on regarding human diet.
As for the last section, is it not also true that the (over-) optimists of the world also base all their predictions of the future based on the present? Why would the IEA have maintained their line for so long that everything was fine and we could just keep on increasing consumption, until they did their sums properly last year? Why is it that actual emissions, etc. are all following the IPPC “business as usual” scenario predictions?
Politicians just worry about the next election, so any actions will always be based on predictions made the present circumstances.
rangerone314 on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 12:12 am
The belief that science can ALWAYS solve our problems (including overpopulation and resource depletion) is itself NOT scientific.
It is more like religious faith. I’m sure other societies (Romans, Maya, Easter Island, etc) felt they could solve all problems that would face them but it would only take ONE problem that they fail to solve.
Invincibility is easily falsifiable.
Don S on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 2:38 am
Wow, totally clueless. Doomsayers predict the future based on our understanding of how the world works. The author seems to be saying that producing ever increasing amounts of food is no problem, while we’re observing fish populations collapsing, crops being wiped out by unpredictable weather (along with the inevitable rise in prices). And since he/she doesn’t think we will continue burning things to produce energy, I’m curious to know just what he/she thinks will provide our energy in the future…
green_achers on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 6:52 am
I looked in vain for some sign the word “steak” in the headline was an intentional pun. Apparently the author is as illiterate as ignorant.
Harquebus on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 10:23 am
Growing the food is one thing even if we could but, getting to the people before it spoils is going to be another.
The days of the 1000km caesar salad are over.
Oh, and Fertilizer mate, fertilizer.
pike on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 11:47 am
Takeing the moral high ground and converting to the vegan religion not help help any one survive in the post peak world we live in. The age of cheap energy age is gone and with it these people cheap moral high by not eating meat products.
Mankind has and will always eat meat to be strong and healthy and with out meat human would devolve to a much more primitive form. This is why the idealistic values of the vegan are unhealthy and unrealistic with out cheap energy.
Adapt or die vegan.
Makati1 on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 12:13 pm
Population projections are like Wall Street projection…all based on history.
Problem is…we are going into uncharted waters. We are in on a dying planet, wasting the last of the fuel reserves that took millions of years to build up, and we think that disease, wars and famine are going to allow us to keep populating the word like rabbits? I doubt it!
The religion of science and technology is as laughable as all the rest of the religions. Based on faith and the hope of a miracle to rescue us from our own stupidity…not gonna happen. Best we can hope for is some common sense and enough time to adjust to a post petroleum world.
AgentR11 on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 12:32 pm
You guys fall back to carrots and rabbit pellets.
More t-bones for me.
Bloomer on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 12:50 pm
Live simply, so others can simply live.
pike on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 3:10 pm
Why not use population control so instead of living simple people can live equally. Because nobodys going to take up being vegan because eating veges all the time is not healthy.
A balanced diet is a healthy body and mind and you wont take that away from most people. By promoting a message based on some weak morale high ground.
Frank Kling on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 5:05 pm
I would like the London Free Press to balance this equation: Every 12 months the world’s human population expands by 80,000,000 while during this same time frame an estimated 22,000 animal and plant species are driven extinct. Now amount of technology hubris will solve this problem.
Norman Pagett on Sun, 19th Jun 2011 7:42 pm
Anyone holding the fixed belief that we can go on with infinite growth should google Professor Albert Bartlett. He exposes the truth of such nonsense far better and more scarily than I can. Malthus was, and still is right. His forecasts on population growth were skewed by 200 years worth of fossil fuel energy input. That was a one-time anomaly that will not be repeated, and we are now reaching the end of it.
Our society has been created on a century of cheap energy, but energy is no longer cheap, hence the frenzied attempts to maintain that illusion of ‘growth and profit’ will become more desperate. However well meaning, no politician can make more oil flow, still less reduce the demand for it. The actual date of peak oil is irrelevant. Everything we do functions on cheap oil. Not just our food supply, but everything is directly and irreversibly dependent on it. Without artificial fertilizer we starve. Without mass food transport we starve. Let’s not mince words here. In the last fuel distribution strike of 2001, the UK government was given the stark warning that we had 3 days worth of food between social cohesion and anarchy. There is no ‘technological fix’, renewables are unlikely to supply more than 10% of our energy needs. Humanity is living well beyond the sustainable resources of the planet, because our cheap oil has allowed 5 billion people to exist who otherwise wouldn’t be here, and another 3 billion are expected in the next 40 years. We have no chance of stopping this horror from becoming reality. The planet cannot support many more people than existed before the industrial revolution. Future optimists make the mistake of looking into the future using a rear view mirror. Human beings, collectively, are not nice creatures. We have evolved to eat and procreate, and as James Lovelock puts it: we are tribal carnivores, not gentle gardeners. The lucky ones amongst us live in a pleasant stable society only because we and our neighbours have full stomachs. Already 40 million Americans are on direct food aid. That food is supplied because cheap energy is available to do it. I leave it to your imagination to think of what will happen when that energy is no longer there. Already federal food aid budgets are being cut