population growth gets some mainstream attention

Climate change is now in the news every day and, with the recent rise in oil prices, peak oil appears frequently too. No one denies these issues are influenced by the large and fast growing economies of China and India in conjunction with the massive economies of the USA and the EU. It’s now common wisdom.

One fundamental factor underlying all of this is increasing per capita consumption. In India and China car sales are skyrocketing. Everyone can appreciate the freedom of movement a car provides. People also want better housing, more leisure time, better food, better health care, more or even a little financial security, and to do more for their children — and currently the only way we know how to get those things is through traditional economic growth: produce more, consume more.

It’s a paradigm that’s worked for the developed countries, however even in those nations (USA, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia) people aren’t satisfied. They want more too. It’s not enough to have access to a car; every driver must have their own car. It’s human nature, at least as we know it today, and mostly accepted worldwide as good in itself. The result is traditional economic growth — also commonly thought to be good in of itself.

So what does it take to get the mainstream media to publish a different point of view, one that says “hey, there’s a rather obvious problem with increasing per capita consumption in a crowded world” and “you know, constant population growth in itself is a rather enormous problem”?

It takes someone with the knowledge, insight, humility, and drive of John Feeney.

Click on the picture to read John’s excellent essay “Humanity is the greatest challenge” on the BBC site. [Update: also see here for John's post on his site Growth is Madness! and the comments there.] In it, he tackles the elephant in the room. It’s not just rising per capita consumption that’s a problem, it is also the steadily increasing population of our planet. How can it not be so? If everyone wants the at least the lifestyle of today’s Americans, Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and Japanese, adding more people to the planet just adds more people who want that lifestyle which requires ever greater levels of production and consumption even if we hold per capita consumption constant.

Here’s the basic equation that John uses as a touchstone — even the math challenged can grasp it. If either the number of people grows or consumption per capita grows, then total consumption goes up. The thing is, both factors are increasing. Per capita consumption and the absolute number of people in the world are steadily growing. (Note: this equation has been around a long time. John is merely trying to get more people to attend to it.)

[note 2/25/08:  the math here isn't correct but the point comes across I think. I'm writing a post with the corrections.]  If only one of these factors was increasing we’d expect to see something near linear growth in total consumption over time. Actually, linear growth is what I’d project if per capita consumption was constant and only population was increasing. (See, for example, this post in which I make a case that current population growth is now near linear.) We know, however, that worldwide per capita consumption is increasing. Is it increasing linearly? Perhaps not. It could be superlinear which would be a bigger problem. Still, the point to drive home is that with one factor increasing linearly, total consumption increases linearly too, along with all the problems associated with it like increasing CO2 emissions, degradation of the environment, strain on resources like available fresh water, etc.

When both factors — per capita consumption and population size — increase linearly the outcome is nonlinear. In this case superlinear, meaning really quickly. I hope I don’t lose the non-math people here. The point is that linear increases are far more easily understood. If you know that a doubling of one input causes a doubling of the result, you can plan for it. However, if a doubling of one input causes a five-fold increase in the result and then another doubling causes a 25-fold increase, it’s a far bigger problem. It could be that both population size and per capita consumption are both superlinear (increasing more and more over time) which would be truly disastrous. I think, however, looking at both of them increasing steadily (mean linearly) is disastrous enough to get our attention. Look at the curve in the graph. How much of the world shall we use up? And how quickly? What should we do when the curve becomes nearly vertical?

I’ve known John for all of nine months having met him through our blogs and email shortly after I created Trinifar. He had started his blog, Growth is Madness!, a couple of months before that. As far as we know, we are the only blogs in the world (and it’s a big world of blogs) that focus on population growth itself being a real problem, a problem that can and should be addressed in a compassionate way. [Correction: I forget to mention Sustainable Population, the blog of the New England Coalition for Sustainable Population.] If you know of another such blog please let me know.

What’s so rewarding for me in seeing John’s essay get published on the BBC News website is the acknowledgement by a major media outlet that not only does increasing consumption matter — with all the problems it entails like CO2 emissions, water shortages, climate change, and decrease in biodiversity — but that increasing population is also a fundamental driver of consumption. That’s how dire the situation is. I’m not even looking for an intelligent discussion of population growth in the news media, just some bread crumbs that might lead to one.

No one wants to talk about the population issue. Strangely, we can now have an intelligent dialog about the problem of increasing per capita consumption even though the topic is fraught with class conflict as well as economic, philosophical, and political disagreements. Everyone can understand the need for people to improve their lives.

Overpopulation and the need to limit the number of humans on our planet is very different — in spite of the obvious contribution of population numbers to the equation which everyone accepts:

The mere suggestion that the number of people on Earth is a problem brings forth a tremendous emotional reaction usually with references to Nazis and eugenics. Both John and I repeatedly bend over backwards (we should be in great physical shape at this point) to say the only things we are suggesting as a means to limit human numbers are education, human rights, family planning, better health care, and advocacy for women. These are the things that can be shown to reduce people’s need to have large families.

Speaking for only myself, I want to see this topic taken up by the mass media in spite of the blowback. What’s wrong with pushing education? Who would deny basic human rights to anyone? Why not offer family planning knowledge and services to anyone who asks for them? And why shouldn’t women be first class citizens — just like men — in every nation on the planet?

And why not talk about our numbers — the global population of humans on Earth — as an important factor in the equation? The only other factor is per capita consumption and there’s a pretty good dialog around that. Divisive? Yes. But having the discussion is a starting point. So let’s start talking about overpopulation as well.