Posted by
Scott Bowden on Monday, June 04, 2007 1:13:11 PM
I am puzzled by the lack of mention of the expanding 6.6 billion global population and its effect on climate change in the current global warming debate.
If global warming is indeed a crisis, then part of the plan for addressing this challenge should be to focus on limiting the growth of the human population. Every net additional human on the planet requires additional resources to survive:
-Wood for housing or fuel which increases deforestation and thus reduces the amount of CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere
-Food which requires land for agriculture instead of alternative fuels (ethanol)
-Water which takes away from that used for irrigation which could be used for growing crops of alternative fuels
-Depending on the level of development, an additional net human being means more cars on the road burning more fossil fuels
-Since the majority of the world's population lives near the coasts, and since the coastal regions would be at risk from sea level increases associated with global warming, adding more humans just puts more people at risk which makes global warming seem worse (it's a vicious circle)
I could list impacts for hours, as each person on the planet consumes additional resources and adds his or her small or large carbon footprint to that of the planet overall.
I wonder why population control is not part of the debate? My assumption is that those who believe that global warming is indeed occurring, is a problem, and needs to be mitigated through changes in human behavior, fear that any argument about population control would brand them as extremists. However, even if we made changes to our lifestyles (alternative fuels, lower carbon footprints), we'd merely be tinkering with the problem at the margins while millions more humans would enter into the equation further exacerbating the problem.
Any discussion of how we are impacting the planet must take into account population growth. I recognize that previous scholarly work on the population explosion (Paul and Anne Ehrlich) has been berated, but at some point we as a species need to think about whether we should continue to add more and more people to this already overburdened planet.