…what could be done quickly to start mitigation of our total set of global problems would be for the western world to immediately reduce their consumption rates through a combination of achievable efficiency increases, conservation, and the three Rs [reduce, recycle, reuse], followed by abandonment of … luxury consumption. — George Mobus
The key word there is “quickly.” How relevant that quote is depends on what you see as our set of global problems.
Environmental and human rights activists have a long list of problems that need attention. (Trying to raise awareness of a particular problem is precisely what makes an activist an activist.) A small sample of the many groups concerned about problems which have a global scope:
- women’s rights activists
- climate crisis activists
- population pressure activists
- economic justice activists
- peace activists
- environmental activists
While there is cooperation between these groups and much overlap in membership, the public attention they seek is a scarce resource so activists often resort to fighting among themselves: “My issue is more important than yours”; or worse, “let’s take your issue off the table because it distracts people from mine”; or better, “my issue is just as important as yours so let’s makes sure they get equal time”. It’s easy to see this as yet another, particularly ironic, version of the tragedy of the commons where here the commons consists of the media, funding sources, and access to politicians.
Betsy Hartmann is “a longstanding activist in the international women’s health movement.” Nearly a year ago John Feeney, an environmentalist who often emphasizes population pressure, wrote a two part series regarding her view that, as John put it, “population is a distraction from the real issues, works against women’s rights, and promotes racism and class bias.” He wrote:
Her argument seems to involve a kind of unnecessary “either/or” thinking: Either we address population or, out of concern for obscuring important issues of class and race, we instead address those issues directly, ignoring the issue of population.
Why can’t we do both? We can acknowledge the importance of population, acknowledge that the need to empower women is a crucial issue of human justice in its own right, and acknowledge that one of the benefits of doing so is to lower fertility rates, thus working toward population stabilization. However well intended, pushing aside the problem of population is to blur our vision of the issues with which we’re dealing. We’re better off exposing everything to the light and working with these interrelated issues accordingly.
John concluded:
Rapprochement and cooperation would only strengthen the work of both groups.
A more recent example of intra-activist conflict begins with a column by George Monbiot in the UK Guardian in which he asks,
Is population really our number one environmental problem?
His answer is no, and when publishing the same essay on his own website adds the inflammatory lead-in, “It’s an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.” The title changes significantly too.
- The Guardian’s headline: Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich
- Title on Monbiot’s website: Population Bombs [sic]
Some people (see below) quickly took Monbiot to task for his failure to put population pressure on par with growing consumption on the triage list of global problems. At first I agreed with the critics. Monbiot’s 1,200 word essay is not one of his best and, on its own, not convincing. However, after considering his work as a whole, I changed my mind.
Monbiot is a climate crisis and economic justice activist. Some of his more recent articles:
- The rich world’s policy on greenhouse gas now seems clear: millions will die: Rich nations seeking to cut climate change have this in common: they lie. … The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false.
- The real answer to climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground: …I have the answer! … Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called … leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
- Civilisation ends with a shutdown of human concern. Are we there already?: To prevent runaway climate change, we must cut the greater part — possibly almost all — of the world’s current emissions.
- If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels: It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.
- This crisis demands a reappraisal of who we are and what progress means: When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.
- See the list of Monbiot’s columns on the Guardian for more.
He’s also written a popular book, Heat (Allen Lane 2006, and paperback from Penguin Books 2007), about climate change and the urgent need to mitigate its worst effects or as Monbiot puts it, “about the survival of the earth’s systems, and of the hundreds of millions of people threatened by their destruction… .” (See this review and the press release.)
Monbiot is convinced that a climate crisis is occurring and, if we don’t take dramatic mitigation measures now, will cause permanent, catastrophic damage to the planet and therefore to people as well. We must constrain climate change to two Celius degrees (3.6 Farhenheit degrees) of warming above pre-industrial levels. You’ll find the same conclusion in the dry language of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report released last year and from many climate scientists and environmentalists. Lester Brown in his Plan B 3.0 suggests reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emmissions 80% by 2020. Others give similar figures.
In my book Heat, I estimate that to avoid two degrees of warming we require a global emissions cut of 60% per capita between now and 2030. This translates into an 87% cut in the United Kingdom. This is a much stiffer target than the British government’s — which requires a 60% cut in the UK’s emissions by 2050. But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasises that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050.
This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK’s emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%.
I tried to give a sense of how extreme the situation is in my essay your shrinking carbon dioxide allotment where, with milder numbers, I said,
Are you willing to drive 33% less, use 33% energy for heating and air conditioning, eat 33% less, buy 33% less, move into a house that is 33% smaller, have 33% less to give your children? That’s the scale of the change.
Using Monbiot’s egalitarian idea of distributing carbon emissions equally, Americans (like the Brits) must substitute 91% for the 33% in the above.
While there is a general awareness that climate change is real and poses a significant problem, I think few understand the vast scale of the economic, social, and political changes required to avoid a catastrophe. It’s in this sense I agree with Monbiot that population pressure is nowhere near the top of the triage list. The top of that list is occupied by things like
- decoupling government from big business and re-coupling it with the electorate
- addressing wealth and income disparity
- moving research funds from the military to renewable energy and other life-oriented projects
- letting go of the myth that “free” markets solve our most vital problems
- establishing (or re-establishing) a news media that delivers unbiased, important news that is essential to any reasonable understanding of the world
- changing the idea that all economic growth is good to one that delineates between healthy and cancerous growth — and understands that the end of growth is not a disaster but a natural, appropriate, and healthy outcome (some fish continue to grow larger throughout their lives but humans do not)
- recognizing that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are not only pollutants but deadly poisons
- learning that the current conditions in Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, the Congo, Kenya, Israel, and Palestine are a direct result of rich, prosperous nations ignoring the consequences of their past and present actions
I could go on, it’s a long list. Population and consumption as general issues get a place farther down. Yet that doesn’t diminish them one bit. On such a list the top thousand items are all vital and important.
Presented with a patient who has a growing brain tumor but is now having a heart attack, a doctor would be forgiven for ignoring the tumor to focus on the heart attack. For Monbiot, the climate crisis is a heart attack and population pressure a brain tumor. Both are deadly, but one will kill you right away.
What if, instead of a heart attack, the patient has diabetes? Untreated diabetes results in blindness, stroke, and amputation, but those things happen over a long time when compared to the effects a growing brain tumor. Again, both are deadly, but neither kills you right away. In this case the doctor has time to treat both problems even though they operate at different speeds. I think this is the more accurate analogy. Climate change is the brain tumor, population pressure the diabetes.
We can and should treat population pressure with awareness programs, universal family planning, efforts to promote women’s rights and opportunities — even tax incentives. We have the means to do all that yet the results of such efforts will necessarily play out over generations. With population pressure in mind, Brown in Plan B 3.0 presses for actions to achieve a peak world population of 8 billion in the 2040’s (the UN’s lower projection) rather than 9 billion later on (the medium projection).
The climate crisis tumor, however, is more immediate. While every compassionate reduction in human numbers ameliorates emissions, population reduction plays out on the scale of decades, yet the climate crisis is here now demanding immediate mitigation. To achieve drops of 80% in GHG by 2020 or 90% by 2050, we need dramatic action in the next few years, a time scale so small population concerns are not relevant. Hence the Monbiot triage.
As Dr. Feeney says, “We’re better off exposing everything to the light and working with these interrelated issues accordingly.” Let’s bring the real depth and scale of the climate crisis into the light right along side population pressure. In terms of decades they are intimately interrelated, but, in the near term, on the scale of years, climate change requires a big response right now. If we don’t address that, how we respond to population pressure takes on a very different, much darker, cast.
Thankfully, the measures to address population pressure are, to my mind, a subset of those to counter climate change and similar to those on the top of the triage list.
notes
Reactions to the Monbiot essay:
- Growth Is Madness! (The discussion here is very interesting and is what motivated me to write this post.)
- AlterNet
- Green Scotland
- Letter’s section of the Guardian
- lefthandpalm
- The J Continuum
- Zone5
I had originally intended to write about the IPAT equation and its simplification
both of which are important in this space. However, I failed in my initial attempt to make these issues more accessible to a general audience. I’ll keep at it.
More of John Feeney’s fine writing concerning population and current environmental thinking:
- Are environmental writers choosing avoidance over truth?
- A different feminist take on population
- Environmental writers, what does the opposition want you to do?
credits
Photo credit here.
more
See also IPAT & rates of change.
Trinifar,
I appreciate your kinds words. But I still disagree.
While an analogy can admittedly become strained, suppose the patient’s diabetes (or tumor) had progressed to some point whereby it would kill him in just one more hour if left untreated. And suppose it takes an hour to treat it. Now the doctors are faced with a heart attack and another life threatening problem and have no choice but to attend to both simultaneously. (While one team is dealing with the heart, another is operating on the brain – or some such.)
I believe it is much like that with population versus, say, economic growth (Monbiot’s pick for the “top of the list.”) For the long term wellbeing of humanity and all other species, precisely because it does take time to influence population numbers, we need to start now on population, at the same time that we address other issues with all possible vigor.
Otherwise, we’ll bring CO2 emissions down, for instance, but then, as a result of neglecting population, may well be faced with results of carrying capacity overshoot which, due to our past neglect, will have progressed too far for us to save ourselves. Issues such as the sixth extinction just won’t wait.
Incidentally, I would contend population concerns are relevant even with regard to changes between now and 2050. If we could peak at 7.5 billion, say, rather than 9.2 billion that would make a large difference in CO2 emissions. Certainly our eventual success at reducing CO2 emissions to sustainable levels is not at all independent of whatever success we have or don’t have in addressing population. This is why Al Bartlett sometimes writes, “[I]t is an Inconvenient Truth that any proposals to solve the global warming problem that don’t include reducing populations to sustainable levels are gross intellectual frauds.”
While I’d love to be on the same page as Monbiot, Hartmann, etc. the dismissal of the importance of population is much like the denial of anthropogenic global warming. It’s not easy for those who recognize the reality of AGW to get on the same page as those who don’t. And climate scientists have had a great deal of success in bringing the importance of AGW to public attention simply debunking the AGW dismissals.
I appreciate your kinds words. But I still disagree.
That’s fine with me, John. Disagreement among friends is okay.
I believe it is much like that with population versus, say, economic growth (Monbiot’s pick for the “top of the list.”
One of the failings of Monbiot’s essay is that he doens’t say what should be the “top of the list” — at least not that I could see. He just knocks population pressure off the top. The list I presented is one that I made up and could support.
Incidentally, I would contend population concerns are relevant even with regard to changes between now and 2050.
With respect to 2050, me too. I haven’t changed my mind about the importance of population reduction one bit. All I’ve done here is nod my head to the notion that GHG emissions need to be curtailed starting now; a serious program for doing so needs to be in place in the next few years in the US. Failing that, I don’t see how we get to 80% reduction by 2020 or 90% by 2050 — a failing that would reduce carrying capacity (and thus any future stable population level) permanently. It’s only in this very short-term time scale that I see efforts to reduce GHG trumping everything else.
Certainly our eventual success at reducing CO2 emissions to sustainable levels is not at all independent of whatever success we have or don’t have in addressing population.
Right in the long term. In the short term, however, if we don’t take some dramatic steps in the next few years, steps which may be independent of population reduction measures because such measure have a larger latency, I think we reduce carrying capacity (and thus any future stable population level) permanently. To me, the next few years are all about commiting to GHG reduction — and progress during that time on population is gravy. If we can get to serious GHG reduction, then the population rises up the list of issues, IMO.
While I’d love to be on the same page as Monbiot, Hartmann, etc. …
I present (or wished to present) Monbiot and Hartmann as separate cases. I think it is important to be on the same page as Monbiot because he’s saying something accurate about the need to act in a certain way very quickly (big reduction in GHG emission in a few years). Hartmann, however, is not. There’s nothing urgent (or accurate) behind her dismissal of population pressure with respect to women’s rights; it’s misguided and unsupportable as you said in your posts.
The “happy” note in all of this is that some specific efforts to reduce population and GHG emissions are similar even at the scale of a few years, like finding footholds from which to exert political pressure.
Trin,
Next step. Put probability of accomplishment in, say, the next ten years next to each item in your list. What is the likelihood that: “decoupling government from big business and re-coupling it with the electorate” will reach a level of effect in ten years to make a difference? (Of course that is if we even have ten years to produce a noticeable effect!)
This will force you to consider how these points are to be operationalized.
Until we are talking about not just what needs to be done, but also how to do it and how powerful will the result be, I continue to be on the gloomy side of the discussion.
You and John are going back and forth on what is more important to do first. But neither of you seem to be saying how what you think is important should be done and how quickly and how successful you think it would be, or at what costs. If you want to accomplish this de-coupling and re-coupling, etc., how do you think it will be done? How likely is it to affect anything before it is too late?
John, how should the population be reduced? How quickly? By what means? Ken Smail has outlined some plans for how he thought it could be accomplished without coercion over a century or two, but now admits that he assumed we had more time than seems to be the case with the confluence of CC and Peak Oil. This really is the cogent question.
I’d really love it if we could get past the ‘which is more important’ discussion and recognize that the time scale does not permit just doing one thing or even just a top-down portfolio of things. There are parallel actions that need to be taken very soon to ease (not avoid) the disaster of a nature-mandated population reduction.
Let me give a for instance. Trin, you say:
That is what you say needs to be done. How? I can imagine organizing an effort to do what Rupert Murdoch has done – buy up the papers and media outlets. You’d have to out-Murdoch Murdoch. Can it be done? Perhaps if you could get Bill Gates to bankroll the project it might be possible. What is the likelihood? Or bring a huge endowment to NPR, bigger than Joan Crock did.
Here is the problem. People don’t buy papers or listen to news casts for news. Yeah, some of us do, but the majority want sensationalism. They want sports news and weather and the latest screw-up of some young Hollywood bimbo. They want political horse race news, not issues and proposals. They especially don’t want to hear about things that can cause the end of the world – you’ve brought this up yourself. So if you provide real news through this re-organized medium, no one will buy the papers and listen to the news casts. Advertising dollars will plummet and you’ll be in the shoes of Charles Foster Cain (or is it Cane), losing money on every copy but making it up in getting the message out.
You can’t re-establish the real news media unless the masses are willing to listen/read real news. That isn’t going to happen any time soon. And besides I can guarantee you that until you fix the mess that we call education the masses won’t even have a clue as to what you mean by real news.
Sorry to be so cynical. I actually believe there is a way forward and I have written at some length about that way. But as long as we rely on statements about what should be done without supplying some idea of how and when and at what cost and how likely to succeed, and then get into endless debate about which is more important, I’m sorry but we are pissing away an opportunity to succeed.
I hope we can start to have conversations about proposals to reduce population in a timely fashion, to fix education in a timely fashion, to decouple big business from government in a timely fashion. The truth is they all need to be done simultaneously in order to take effect. Some may require more overt effort than others. Some may be accomplished with a small amount of effort but rely on amplification effects to work. But they are all needing attention.
If you think about all of these needs the one thing they seem to have in common is the need to first re-educate the public. Everyone. We need to re-educate the masses in terms of their values, their aspirations, how the world works, what we are doing that is messing it up, etc. We need to get people to stop assuming the world as they know it is the right one, and start asking questions about what is really real. I think that is what most of us have thought to do with these blogs.
But somewhere along the line we also need to act. We need to start answering questions and take action to correct the situation. I’m betting that will be done, not by the masses, but by a few sapient beings. Or if we wait until it’s too late, by a few merciless dictators responding to the crises. In any case, I’m betting the solutions won’t involve democracy in action. Just as with free-market economies, we can see where these experiments have gotten us.
Just my $0.02
George
George,
Yeah, same here. (How presumptuous of you to jump to effective actions.)
As a college professor in regular contact with young people, George, you can probably probably supply the appropriate locution I wish to use here. Something akin to the out of fashion, “awesome, dude, that rocks,” or older and closer to my own era, “groovy, man, now what?”
In my previous post I wondered: Is civil disobedience part of the answer? That’s the only thing that comes to mind involving “boots on the ground,” a movement by the people for the people — something equivalent to Gandhi’s salt march. But Gandhi could move people to civil disobedience because the end result was something tangible (pushing out the Brits) and not too far away (India’s independence occured 18 years after the salt march). The neo-Gandhi asks for a similar effort for something far more nebulous in a much tighter timeframe. Hard to see it happening.
One can think of King and the civil rights movement as well. A little quicker; if you take Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Act as rough end points, about 8 years. Still, a much more focused, tangible goal than mitigating climate change, and one not involving taking toys away from the rich.
So, care to share? Is it Gates and Buffett stepping into the breach? (See my next post.)
Where are the levers of beneficent power?
George,
George, just to be clear, I’ve been consistently saying we need not to prioritize. I’ve been saying exactly the same thing you just said — that we need to do a bunch of things simultaneously, with all possible vigor. The only reason I’ve been talking specifically about population here is to counter the efforts to discount its relative importance and, in so doing, make sure it’s kept in the mix of things we need absolutely to attend to without delay.
Since Monbiot wrote about them, I’ve had to speak specifically about economic growth and per capita consumption versus total consumption in order to critique his article. But I don’t mean to say those were the only items to address. They’re pretty darn fundamental among the things needing addressing, but there are absolutely other important issues such as renewable energy, plans to reduce carbon emissions through taxation or other possibilities, land preservation, relocalization, and others.
As you can see from a few recent quotes, phrases like “stop prioritizing” have been frequent for me lately:
Concerning population and per capita consumption:
Ya see? I’ve been saying the same thing!
Now, as for how to address population, I have nothing original to offer. I suggest only that, we:
(1) Sink a whole lot more funding into programs already working from angles with some sort of track record. Organizations like the Population Media Center, Population Action International, and others should be targeted for much needed funds. (I specifically included the former because it uses an approach unique among population organizations.
(2) Do something (create an entity or fund an existing organization or …?) to (a) enhance the development of new ideas for humanely addressing population, and (b) to assess the efficacy of all humane methods used to date. That may involve funding some studies of various methods which have been tried less often — e.g., tax credits for smaller families
(3) Continue working to raise awareness of the issue.
Related to what you wrote, I don’t claim we can do any of this well enough or quickly enough to avert some kind of collapse scenario. It’s impossible to know for sure. But, on the chance we can avert such a scenario, we certainly need to get moving.
In the event we cannot prevent such a scenario, it seems to me that any efforts to address population will still be of great value as they would potentially reduce the number of deaths by a large number, both in reducing the number of people competing for the same insufficient resources, and in preventing the births of people destined only to suffer and die tragically.
Again, though, I say we treat this like the global crisis it is and stop prioritizing and start grappling with a bunch urgent and fundamental problems. All I’ve been saying in the last several days is that it’s certainly a mistake to try to bump population off that list.
On a different note, I’m interested in your thought that we won’t effectively deal with this crisis through democracy in action. That could be true. What kinds of actions are you envisioning?
I think my previous comment is currently caught in the spam filter. But in it I should have included this quote of mine as well, from just above:
[editor: your comment has been freed from the spam filter. It's now #5, just above]
George Monbiot: “The real answer to climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”
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http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/12/11229/8694
The most important time-critical action needed to avert climate disasters concerns coal. Consider:
1 — one-quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emission remains in the air for more than 500 years,
2 — conventional oil and gas reserves are sufficient to take atmospheric CO2 at least to the vicinity of the “dangerous” level, and it is impractical to capture their CO2 emission as it is mostly from small sources (vehicles),
3 — coal reserves are far greater than oil and gas reserves, and most coal use is at power plants, where it is feasible to capture and permanently sequester the CO2 underground (CCS = carbon capture and sequestration).
Clear implication: the only practical way to keep CO2 below or close to the “dangerous level” is to phase out coal use during the next few decades, except where CO2 is captured and sequestered.
- —
It should all be so simple. But the ruling class of the current civilization spent the entire 20th century going permanently fossil-fuels insane, and the ordinary people in the street had no other option than to follow suit. Thus, what we’re having here is a fossil-fuels crazy world population. I mean: in order to understand the simple lesson that fossil-fuels are indeed the enemies of the human race, most people would have to be around thirteen years of age, or younger. Unfortunately, as it may seem, the youngest generation, which incidentally is going to be the generation that is going to have to deal with the mistakes that are being made today, do not have a say in any matter what-so-ever. If some of the smartest 12-year-old asses start asking their teachers some poisonous question about anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, they are, for all I know, most likely to be dismissed from the class room as a matter of punishment.
Now, just a word about CO2 capture and sequestration: as I see this hopes for a future in which CO2 can be captured and stored in underground deposits, I believe the thought itself works as evidence to the establishment of the fact that the civilization has gone absolutely fossil-fuels insane. As it turns out, the business leaders and the government officials are all dreaming of a future in which the necessary fossil-fuels consumption will no longer be considered to be either dangerous or polluting. They are building a castle in the sky. As it is: the idea that a polluting gas can be stored underground forever and ever is very dodgy indeed. But I guess this may even turn out to be an official lie that we are all going to just have to accept, as we continue our quest-like habit of thickening this planet’s atmosphere with more and more climate gases. Continued fossil-fuels consumption growth is in the offing here. It’s a decision made by energy the energy departments of all governments, and it will make way for continued economic growth, all the way from here to Nirvana. Don’t worry, be happy, yes don’t even think about it: the CO2 is soon to become a non-issue.
Just wait and see: the future is going to be all sequestered and cosy.
There is one aspect of population growth concern which is not mentioned by Monbiot, and which is not touched upon in the discussions so far, either here or at GIM. I’m thinking of the development dimension: the fact that the fast growing populations of the south are going to pursue a standard of living that is well known to Americans but seldom displayed in countries like Malawi, Chad, Albania, Bolivia, El Salvador, Laos, and Burma. Now, China is on the move in Africa, and pursues policies that are highly popular on that continent; namely an industrial growth approach which African people, and governments has craved for ever since the 1960s, as a much better solution to opening the poverty trap than the charitable funds made available to poor countries by means of development aid from countries of the western world.
New factories are being put in place, owned and run by the Chinese, but which benefits the population more directly, in the form of employment, salaries, and wages. Which means that other enterprises are growing, too, as a side effect of the first: big industry jobs for the people. The lifestyle side of the equation is certainly also going to be seen, as China will continue to expand and therefore also continue to be a most welcome guest and business partner.
This is the point when I say that “I’m afraid of Americans.” As the prevalent lifestyles of the United States of America — as spied on television screens all over the world — works as the target for all developing countries and cultures around the world.
I’m musing of a future in which most African households may be fixed up with refrigerators in the kitchen, airconditioning sets in the living room, and a cheap but practical gas-fuelled vehicle parked in the frontyard of the house. As a matter of fairness: whoever would go ahead and deny the majority of Africans the luxury of a refrigerator, airconditioning sets, and a car?
Even if that would mean that CO2 emissions would increase very quickly? As a growing third world population is about to take a quantum leap in a direction which all those who are aware of what poverty looks like, smells like, and feels like, would have to applaud?!
Think about it.
Hmm.
And that would be the simple reason why we must expect the Americans — along with the Western Europeans, the Japanese, the Koreans, and the Australians — to make the first move in the direction of sustainable living.
Magne – Good point. I responded to you on that on GIM.
____________
Just to clarify one point concerning the issue of prioritizing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but obviously there are some issues that are irrelevant. So there is some prioritizing in ignoring those. On the other hand, there are some issues which present a very concrete, physical, and global threat. So we have to make sure we don’t ignore those.
I fear I’ve had a hard time making my point clearly about population. I suppose in a sentence, it would be, “If we don’t start now (or very soon) to address it more seriously, we may well learn in the not too distant future that we waited too long to avert disaster.” If George or others are at least close to right that it’s already too late to avert some form of collapse, then certainly it must be true that if it’s not quite too late now, it will be soon. And clearly population is a major part of that.
I’m in midterms so can’t devote much time to answering Trin or John’s comments until after I’ve graded exams. But…
There are many things that need to be addressed, understood, and action plans developed. We’ve done a fair job of identifying what many of us think these things are. I suggest that instead of arguing about which is more important we recognize that many will be pursued in parallel. What we lack at present is an organizational framework for managing the diverse activities. What we need is some way to coordinate the efforts of the Johns, and the Trins who pursue their own passions and expertise. Most current NGO-type organizations tend to have single POV slants and tend to follow Maslow’s Law of the Instrument – every problem is treated like a nail. Wouldn’t it be better to consider some form of umbrella mechanism that operates to coordinate the efforts to find ways to reduce population while at the same time finding ways to convince people to reduce consumption, all the while planning for adaptation and mitigation efforts overall?
I, of course, would love to see a framework based on systems science to tie the threads together and have systems scientist working with policy wonks and engineers to organize the coordinated efforts. Such an organization would be similar to the IPCC operating under the Framework Convention, but on ‘Plans for Global Transition to a New Civilization’. (How do you like the name?)
I enjoy the conversations and the inputs, but we’re spending all our time talking and not much progress (except the unmeasurable possible progress in convincing the lurkers that they need to be thinking about these issues!)
Anyway, that is what I’m mostly thinking.
George
http://www.slate.com/id/2142366/
“Would $36,000 convince you to have another kid?”
- —
While many of us are concerned about the rapid growth of the world’s population, countries like Russia and Portugal face the economic crisis of population decline; the political classes of these countries are, as a consequence, making plans for adopting economic incentives in the pursuit of a growing number of babies, … or should I say “economic creatures”, essentially?
Magne: “As a matter of fairness: whoever would go ahead and deny the majority of INDIANS the so-called luxury of a refrigerator, airconditioning sets, and a car?”
- —
http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/article3164205.ece
“It is 3 metres long, seats four comfortably or five at a squeeze, does 65mph and aims to revolutionise travel for millions. The “People’s Car” is also the cheapest in the world at 100,000 rupees (£1,300) – the same price as the DVD player in a Lexus.”
I love that phrase “economic creatures”! Since there is no shortage of people willing to migrate from more crowded areas with less opportunity, I think policies to raise the birth rate are fundamentally bigoted.
January 11, 2008: TIMES ONLINE
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Tata Nano – world’s cheapest new car is unveiled in India
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It is 3 metres long, seats four comfortably or five at a squeeze, does 65mph and aims to revolutionise travel for millions. The “People’s Car” is also the cheapest in the world at 100,000 rupees (£1,300) – the same price as the DVD player in a Lexus.
The Nano, from Tata, the Indian conglomerate bidding for Jaguar and Land Rover, was unveiled at the Delhi Auto Expo yesterday to music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ratan Tata, the company chairman, harked back to the first flight by the Wright Brothers and the Moon landing as he revealed the cute, snub-nosed hatchback that will allow millions in India’s emerging middle classes to buy a car for the first time.
“I hope this changes the way people travel in rural India. We are a country of a billion and most are denied connectivity,” he said. “This is a car that is affordable and provides all-weather transport for the family.”
The aluminium shell contains a rear-mounted 33bhp two-cylinder petrol engine and weighs about half a tonne. The standard version comes with the vital features: brakes, a four-gear manual transmission, seatbelts, locking, wind-down windows and a steering wheel. A small boot could store a duffel bag. It lacks a passenger-side mirror and has one windscreen wiper. The deluxe version will have air-conditioning while extras such as a radio and an airbag could be added.
Tata has designs on famous British names
Tata could be a prime player in the British luxury car market, if it gets hold of Jaguar and Land Rover
The cheapest cars in the world
Corners cut on cost – and safety with the Tata Nano
Tata wants Ford man for Jaguar-Land Rover
Related Links
Ford doubles Indian production
Tata heads Jaguar and Land Rover race
Multimedia
Pictures: the Tata Nano
The car is the culmination of five years’ research and input from across the world, including Italy and Germany. But it was designed and made in India, defying expectations that a company best known for its elephantine lorries could manufacture a cutting-edge passenger product.
Hormazd Sorbajee, editor of Autocar India, said: “As a concept it’s brilliant. It’s spacious and promises to be fuel efficient.”
A team of 500 engineers worked on the car, to be produced at a plant in West Bengal. In an effort to allay fears that something so cheap could not be safe, Mr Tata said that it had passed a full-frontal crash test in India and was designed to sustain further impact testing under European standards.
Tata cut costs by minimising components, particularly steel, and taking advantage of India’s low production costs. Because of its size, it uses less sheet metal, has a smaller and lighter engine than other cars, smaller tube-less tyres and a no-frills interior. The company has applied for 34 patents to cover its innovations. “We shrunk it, made the engine smaller and used fewer materials but we haven’t taken any shortcuts in term of safety or emissions,” Mr Tata said.
The car will be sold first in India from the second half of this year, with an initial annual production run of 250,000, but it is expected to be made available in Latin America, SouthEast Asia and Africa. It could find its way to Europe in a few years but enhancements to meet higher standards would raise the price considerably.
The Nano, at its most basic, is roughly half the price of the cheapest car available today. China’s QQ3Y Chery and India’s Maruti 800 are both about £2,550. The idea of millions of Nanos on the road alarms environmentalists. Rajendra Pachauri, the chief UN climate scientist, said last month that he was “having nightmares” about it.
Green campaigners point to India’s terrible road system and rising pollution levels. “Even if they claim it will be fuel efficient, the sheer numbers will undermine this,” Vivek Chattopadhyaya, an air pollution specialist at the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, said. “India’s infrastructure doesn’t have the capacity.” The centre estimates that the five million vehicles on Delhi roads today meet only a fifth of the capital’s transport needs. Most people travel by bus but could be convinced to buy a car at such a low price. Delhi, where air pollution levels are more than twice the safe limit, is already registering 1,000 new vehicles a day. As more cars hit the road, the average speed at peak times has fallen to 7mph, which should at least ease concerns about safety in case of accidents.
Shekhar Mehta, 27, from Ahmeda-bad, said: “It looks like a good city drive. The body doesn’t look too safe but it’s better than an autorickshaw.”
As Greenpeace activists outside the show held banners demanding “Cut CO2 emissions”, Mr Tata dismissed environmental concerns. He said that his car, which does 50 miles to the gallon, would conform to all emission standards in India and Europe. “We need to think of our masses. Should they be denied the right to an individual form of transport?” he asked.
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Ashling O’Connor
Uh, sorry. For some unknown reason, it proved impossible to publish this article with a link to timesonline.co.uk — and as I pasted and glued in the article, this gibberish passage of commercials and links turned up on the screen:
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Tata has designs on famous British names
Tata could be a prime player in the British luxury car market, if it gets hold of Jaguar and Land Rover
The cheapest cars in the world
Corners cut on cost – and safety with the Tata Nano
Tata wants Ford man for Jaguar-Land Rover
Related Links
Ford doubles Indian production
Tata heads Jaguar and Land Rover race
Multimedia
Pictures: the Tata Nano
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But okay. That’s the real world to you. It’s actually all about commercials and related links, isn’t it?
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