Naomi Klein

She says it best:

Half of us are in denial about climate change, while the other half are in denial about the concerns of the first half. Naomi Klein explains those who feel threatened by “science” actually are threatened by the loss of their world view of the freedom of our “democratic” way of life.

My view is that, no human person has (or should have) unfettered freedom, and particularly we do not have freedom to do whatever we choose to the ecosystem without severe repercussions, and that is a reality no human can control. Science (basic science, not technology) is and always has been a TOOL that helps us to UNDERSTAND The Creation, as it is and as it was created. Basic science is a window through which we can view The Creation. Science can not change anything about the innate rules (presumably set up by God — and I don’t think God says anything about people having freedom to do anything they want to do). Basic science simply REPORTS the rules that permit the ecosystem to function. Basic science doesn’t CHANGE anything, from whenever was the beginning of our time. The best science can do is tell us when we are threatening our own freedoms by trashing the opportunities that were given to us in our earthly Garden of Eden.

Whose population growth has the most environmental impact?

Guest Author – Dot Bennett

There are few if any environmental problems that are not made worse by the growth of the human population: depletion of fresh water, depletion of ocean fish stocks, depletion of oil and minerals, degradation of topsoil by farming, loss of biodiversity and others including the excessive carbon dioxide emissions that produce global warming. Detailed studies indicate that many countries already contain more people than can sustainably be supported by their land area (more below), and if we take no action, then the population in ever more countries will increase to that unsustainable point. Assuming nobody in their right mind wants to increase the human death rate, our only choice to tackle overpopulation is to find ways to reduce birth rates. Some people however feel uneasy about taking action to encourage lower birth rates. There are various reasons for feeling this way, including religious reasons, but one widely held reservation is that this amounts to “rich white men telling poor black women to have fewer babies”. It is often supposed that the main location of the problem of excessive population growth is in poor nations such as those of Africa, and that we have no right to preach to those people about their families.

The figures analyzed here lead to a different conclusion: that the major impact of population growth on our planet comes from places that many people would not have thought of. This article compares population growth rates with the environmental impact per country, using CO2 emissions as an available and very relevant measure of impact. CO2 emissions reflect energy usage, likely to be roughly proportional to other factors like resource consumption that would affect the environment, and exact figures are not crucial here. The aim is simply to get a broad picture of the environmental impact of population growth in different countries.

The table shows these figures. It includes both the world’s 20 most populous countries (current figures) and also the 20 countries with the highest CO2 emissions per person. These two sets overlap partially. For each country are listed recent estimates of the population (column 3), the annual % population growth (column 4), and their current annual absolute population increase per year (column 5, e.g. 6.5 million people/ year in China). In column 6 come the CO2 emissions per person per year (per capita per annum, or pc pa for short) in each country. These vary hugely, from 0.1 tonne of CO2 pc pa in Ethiopia to over 20 tonnes pc pa in Australia.

Column 7 brings us the central theme of this article. We can get a relative measure of the environmental impact of each year’s extra citizens (the population increase), by multiplying that number by the CO2 emissions per person to give the resulting yearly increase in CO2 emission per country. The countries are listed in order of this overall impact. While we should bear in mind that every number in the table is an estimate and will have some margin of error, this column does seem informative and perhaps contains some surprises. It seems that the country whose population growth matters most for the planet is no poor, black nation at all, but the USA. Saudi Arabia and Australia may be two other surprises for many of us, to be found in the top 5 of this column (highlighted in red). The UK ranks at number 17, quite a high ranking among the world’s 196 countries, but still with an impact for its population growth of only a few percent of that for China or the USA.

But, (one might object), this ranking is rather unfair on China and India, who are the other two members of the top five only because their actual populations are so large. They are both doing far better than some other countries in terms of low CO2 emissions per citizen. The last column provides a response to this concern by presenting the environmental impact of a country’s population growth, relative to its population size. Now there are no black populations at all in the top 5 (now highlighted in blue), but only some of the world’s richest nations.

One can make more comparisons by browsing the table. For example it is noticeable that population change works out as having a negative environmental impact in some highly-emitting countries, because in these countries the population is currently falling. That is a good thing for the planet, although governments tend to see falling populations as a problem. But this is a “problem” that most or all nations will have to face for a period, to avert worse problems like hunger and resource wars, given that (as already mentioned,) actual populations in many countries are already higher than current estimates of carrying capacity, the number of humans that each land-area can support sustainably. If any readers are not yet familiar with these figures, see for example the Global Footprint Network http://www.footprintnetwork.org.

More generally, we cannot stabilize humanity’s impact on the planetary ecosystem without stabilizing population.

One key conclusion is that, from the viewpoint of global environmental impact, the country that most urgently needs to address the issue of its population growth, far from being “poor and black”, is the USA. Saudi Arabia and Australia are also in a position to make a contribution. China and India have already been working on this issue for some decades and do not need anyone to tell them to go on doing that. But the countries of Africa hardly feature at all in this league. We see only Egypt, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the top 20, ranking between 12th and 16th, and with the impact of the population growth for all three combined totalling less than one seventh that of the USA.

So addressing global birth rates for the sake of the planet is not at all a question of rich white men telling poor black women to have fewer babies. It will certainly continue to be important to provide education and the means for couples in every country to avoid the many unwanted babies that are currently born. But what is more urgently needed than we may have realised is for many of those rich men and women to start to realise that they themselves need to consider having fewer babies.

Dot Bennett
London, March 2011

Table: “Environmental impact” of population growth in different countries, using CO2 emission as a simple measure of impact.

*pc pa = per capita per annum (per person per year). Data in columns 3 and 4 are from the Geohive database (www.xist.org), originally from the American CIA. Column 5 is calculated by multiplying the figures from columns 3 and 4. Column 6 data are from US Department of Energy web pages: (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8). 2008 figures are used for the CO2, since more recent figures may be distorted by the subsequent economic crises. Column 7 figures are obtained by multiplying columns 5 and 6, and column 8 by multiplying 4 and 6. A line indicates the top 20 countries by “population growth impact”. See text for further explanation.

Table URL: http://factfictionfancy.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/table-dot.jpg

Just One More Small-Town Texas Funeral

Santa Fe

The tree really looked like this in the setting sun.

Hard Times for Buttercups

Spring Again

I can’t believe it. In the last two days the wild plum blossoms have fallen off. Also the peach/apricot (can’t remember which is which) and the dewberries are already bursting forth. Now we want some RAIN! so we will have some dewberries and we can have a picking party at the ranch ? :]

A beautiful view of the world. Here.

Really Early Morning at the Peach Clubhouse

Bare Bones Biology 047 – E O Wilson

You know what folks, I have not won the Nobel Peace Prize. I wrote a book once, but I’m not all that famous, nevertheless, and sometimes I get the idea that people think my opinions about the functions and future of the ecosystem are just opinions – no more knowledgeable than anybody else’s. And, yes, they’re opinions all right, but just to point out that there isn’t all that much controversy in the scientific community, and that really, really famous people have the same opinions that I do, I will give you a quote from E O Wilson (ref):

“The natural world in the year 2001 is everywhere disappearing before our eyes. Cut to pieces, mowed down, plowed under, gobbled up, replaced by human artifacts. Little more than a billion people were alive in the 1840’s. They were overwhelmingly agricultural, and few families needed more than 2 or 3 acres to survive. The American frontier was still wide open, and far away on continents to the south, up great rivers, beyond unclimbed mountains, stretched unspoiled equatorial forests, brimming with a maximum diversity of life. These wildernesses seemed as unattainable and timeless as the planets and stars. That could not last because the mood of American colonists was Abrahamic. The explorers and colonists were guided by a Biblical prayer. May we take possession of this land that God has provided and let it drip milk and honey into our mouths forever.

“Now, more than six billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor. Nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives any way they can. That unfortunately includes the conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing at a hundred times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century.

“An armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity. The race is now on between the techno-scientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment, and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck(1) of overpopulation and waste consumption. If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.

“The situation is desperate, but there are encouraging signs that it can be won. Population growth has slowed, and if the present trajectory holds is likely to peak between 8 and 10 billion people by century’s end. That many people, experts tell us, can be accommodated with a decent standard of living, but just barely. The amount of arable land and water available per person globally is already declining. In solving the problem, other experts tell us, it should also be possible to shelter most of the vulnerable plant and animal species. In order to pass through the bottleneck, a global land ethic is urgently needed. Not just any global land ethic that might happen to enjoy agreeable sentiment, but one based on the best understanding of ourselves and the world around us that science and technology can provide.

“Surely, the rest of life matters. Surely our stewardship is its only hope. We will be wise to listen carefully to the heart, then act with rational intention with all the tools we can gather and bring to bear. The living world is dying; the natural economy is crumbling beneath our busy feet. We have been too self-absorbed to foresee the long-term consequences of our actions, and we will suffer a terrible loss unless we shake off our delusions and move quickly to a solution. Science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find our way through and out.“

Bare Bones Biology 047 – E O Wilson
KEOS Radio, 89.1, Bryan TX
For an audiocast of this program click here

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Additional notes and recommended reading:

This quote is from The Future of Life, by E. O. Wilson, read by Ed Begley Jr., Pub. 2002 by New Millenium Audio.
Dr. Wilson’s book heavily stresses species survival, but he doesn’t clearly explain why the ecosystem needs all those species in order for itself to survive. The ecosystem is a living thing, with parts, similar to us as living things, with parts. We can assume that all the parts have functions that are useful in keeping the thing alive, or they probably wouldn’t be there. It reminds me of the Biblical verse: “I am the vine, you are the branches (etc.)” All the parts contribute to the whole and we aren’t knowledgeable enough to know exactly how they contribute, so we are just flailing around when we permit parts of the ecosystem to be removed. The term for this is resilience (http://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/survival-of-the-fittest/, which is a major component of sustainable balance

A more readable book that describes our history from a somewhat different perspective is Collapse, 2005, by Jared Diamond.

See also the population articles in National Geographic, January 2011 and March 2011

(1) A “bottleneck” in biology, is an event during which the population of a species collapses, leaving only a relatively few members of the species to re-establish its presence in the ecosystem. It is too late to avoid the bottleneck. So our goal, of course, is to come out of it with a more positive and sustainable culture to pass on to the next millenium. I believe this will require that we merge our factual understandings of biology with our innate human compassion. Dr. Wilson seems to believe our innate human compassion will be automatic, but looking at Libya and other atrocities of recent years, I think we will have to work hard and intentionally to sustain and grow a compassionate culture. First, we need to understand that the disasters will become worse before they become better. Next we understand that compassion is far more than that “fuzzy bunny” feel-good that we enjoy in old-fashioned Disney make-believe, and learn how to make it real. More next time.