population

Gristmill’s most persistent troll earns props

The estimable George Monbiot channels Gristmill's most execrable troll, proving once again the old chestnut about stopped clocks being right twice a day.

History Channel explores a world without humans

What would the earth be like if we finally manage to bring about our own extinction? Find out Wednesday night.

Coral reefs suffer from proximity to humans, says study

The main factor contributing to declines in coral-reef health is proximity to human populations, says new research in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. A study of 322 reef sites in the Caribbean found that many suffered significant damage from overfishing and agricultural runoff. Author Camilo Mora estimates that reefs in […]

Is it only OK to talk about limiting population after it’s too late?

Sam Smith, inimitable editor of The Progressive Review, perhaps the world's first progressive blog (if you count its days as a print publication), reports that even he finds it difficult to bring up discussions of population.

I have experienced something like what Smith talks about, where even mentioning Bartlett (who has been campaigning against exponential population growth for decades) is enough to get you called nasty names by liberals and "anti-life" by church members.

Here's today's series of looks at the issue, with Smith's preface first:

Gore: Population one of the causes of climate change, but not one of the policy solutions

Sue Greenwald, mayor of Davis, Calif., asked a question that becomes inevitable when more than one environmentalist is in the room: does "population control" have any role in the climate movement? People laughed nervously. Gore immediately said, courteously but firmly, that if you go to developing countries using the term "population control," they’re going to […]

This blew a few of my circuits

You’ll learn a lot in these 20 minutes:

Competitive birthing is a new fad

Economists explained to us long ago why fertility rates around the world have fallen. Characteristically, these explanations (part of the demographic transition theory) occurred after the fact. Also characteristically, they'll likely fail to predict future fertility trends. From NPR:

The newest status symbol for the nation's most affluent families is fast becoming a big brood of kids.

Historically, the country-club set has had the smallest number of kids. But in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent.

Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.

They call it "competitive birthing."

I've mentioned this a few times in comments. The higher status (higher economic bracket) women I know tend to have three or four kids instead of the once-popular one or two. My personal observations did not form a database big enough to define a real trend, but apparently it is.

(Hat tip to KO)

Eyes wide shut toward global collapse?

Ecological Footprint, Energy Consumption, and the Looming Collapse:

This article explores dynamic relations governing population growth, resource depletion, and world economics by means of a few simple modeling and simulation exercises. To this end, we start out by exploring the concept of an ecological footprint, representing the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc. and place it in relation with the human development index, a measure of the quality of life of an individual. We then relate the ecological footprint to the per capita energy consumption. This discussion serves to provide a quantitative understanding of the limited resources that are at our disposal.

The article continues by exploring the dangers and seductions of exponential growth, and uses a system dynamics approach to illustrate why we are moving at a rapid pace toward global collapse with our eyes wide shut.

The article ends by discussing what we would need to do in order to avoid the looming collapse.

Population is not the short-term problem

Now and again some commentator will claim that we lack to resources to support our population sustainably -- either today or in the near future. But the fact is, even with current technology we have plenty of sustainable resources for our ~7 billion population and for the ~10 billion we expect in the future. What prevents this is not scarcity but folly and cruelty.

What are the constraints usually cited? There is soil and sustainable food production. But as I recently documented, we can feed ten billion sustainably if we choose to. There is freshwater, but as I documented, we have sustainable ways to deal with that as well.

What about energy? Right now we use about 14 terrawatts total primary energy world wide. The most conservative estimates of potential efficiency increases say we can double efficiency. And the most conservative estimates overlook stuff we are doing in some places at this very moment, including the potential for changes in material intensity and savings in thermal losses by producing electricity from mostly non-combustion sources.

But of course we are also going to have increased population and a lot of poor people who want to get richer. So it is not unreasonable to assume that a ten-billion-population world that consumes energy thriftily but lives a decent lifestyle with indoor plumbing, hot water, refrigerators, basic electronics, enough to eat, enough work, enough leisure, and plenty to do with that leisure will consume around 25 average terawatts worldwide.