[THS] George Monbiot: The Population Myth

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23624.htm

The Population Myth

People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting
the blame from the rich to the poor

By George Monbiot.

October 03, 2009 The Guardian" -- 29th September 2009 -- It’s no coincidence that
most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive
wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be
blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed
last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are
two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two
huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the
other is irrational.”(1) But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that
the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon
dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for
example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and
just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people,
but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth
happened in places with very low emissions(2).

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the
world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is
also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning
less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one
seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street
sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the
urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness
belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has
produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put
together(3). Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial
operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor
do far less harm(4).

The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment
and Development, points out that the old formula taught to all students of
development - that total impact equals population times affluence times technology
(I=PAT) - is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I=CAT: consumers times
affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t
figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth,
there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a
look at a few superyachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the
style to which they’re accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon
Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour(5)
I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an
eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 l/hr(6).
But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The
WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3400 l/hr
when travelling at 60 knots(7). That’s nearly one litre per second. Another way of
putting it is 31 litres per kilometre(8).

Of course to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings,
carry a few jet skis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private
plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the
beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner
of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most
Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of
the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to
bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights,
looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand
people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10
billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the
good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about
human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb
overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met
secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged
that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a
potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”(9) The ultra-rich, in
other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You
grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the
Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities
whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the
biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to
address the impacts of the very rich.

The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day
become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources
begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are
strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak
environmental reasons, except among wealthier populations.

The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through
demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost
everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to
peak this century(10), probably at around 10 billion(11). Most of the growth will take
place among those who consume almost nothing.

But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become
richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-
rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected
to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who
understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue
is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism,
blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.

So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living
systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s
Class War when you need it?

It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the
poor; it’s the rich.

www.monbiot.com