Have you heard that we’re getting new neighbors? Demographers expect that the number of people living on earth—now about 6.8 billion—will grow to between 8 and 11 billion by 2050.
Whether population tops out at the high or the low end of those projections will have a huge impact on climate change. So population control is again claiming a place on the environmental agenda.
Nairobi slums
Oops! Did I say “population control”? I should have said “addressing population growth” or “assuring reproductive rights for women” or even “securing population justice” — because some people get very nervous when environmentalists start talking about population, and for good reason.
Yet the conversation is worth having, which is why I went to a discussion today at the Center for American Progress in Washington featuring Laurie Mazur, the editor of a new book called A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice & The Environmental Challenge (Island Press, $30).
Mazur argues that we are at a pivotal moment, not just environmentally, because of the lethal overheating of the planet, but demographically, because, as she writes,
the ultimate size of the human population will be decided in the next decade or so.
That’s because right now the largest generation of young people in human history is coming of age. Nearly half the world’s population—some 3 billion people—is under the age of twenty-five. Those young people will, quite literally, shape the future.
Like it or not, population is an environmental issue. Although many of our new neighbors will live in such poor countries as India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, they will have carbon footprints, too, albeit much smaller ones that those we make here in the U.S.
“Does population, per se, matter for the environment?” Mazur asked at the Center for American Progress. “Yes, it does.” It will matter even more as poor people improve their standard of living, gaining access to automobiles, electricity, computers and big-screen TVs. “Our planet can’t sustain 7 billion people consuming as we do, much less 9 or 11 billion,” she says.
What is to be done? It’s no mystery. “Over the last 50 years, we’ve learned a huge amount about how to slow population growth,” Mazur says. Quite simply, the goal should be to provide people with the means and the power to make their own decisions about when to have children. Women first need access to family planning and reproductive health services. Beyond that, they need to be able to determine their own fate. That means confronting gender inequality, providing girls with education, ending child marriage and reducing global poverty.
It’s a daunting agenda but the first step–providing reproductive health services for every woman on earth—is surprisingly inexpensive. The developed countries’ share of that cost is about $20 billion, according to Mazur, and she pegs the U.S.’s share at about $1 billion, less than the daily price tag of the war in Afghanistan.
The benefits are significant. Stabilizing world population at 8 billion, rather than 9 billion or more, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one gigaton or more by 2050, the equivalent of one or more of the “wedges” in the well-known analysis of climate mitigation by Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Sokolow, according to Brian C. O’Neill, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who contributed a chapter to A Pivotal Moment.
Nevertheless, environmentalists tiptoe around the population issue for a couple of reasons, says Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The first is that the apocalyptic warnings about overpopulation that were sounded in the late 1960s when the Sierra Club published Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb proved unfounded.
The other reason for trepidation is political sensitivity. Environmentalists don’t want to be seen as caring more about nature than people. The word “misanthropic” came up during the discussion, as did the names of Edward Abbey and David Brower. Whatever you think of Abbey, he was not a social animal.
Environmentalist are also aware of the ugly history of “population control.” While the international family planning movement brought contraceptives to the developing world and drove down fertility rates down between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s, family planning programs were controversial, as Mazur notes:
Some–notably in India and China–flagrantly abused human rights with coercive practices such as forced sterilization and abortion (which continue to this day in China). And many first-generation programs focused more on demographic “targets” than on individual needs.
In the U.S., the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, an organization seen by many as hostile to immigrants, was founded by members of the Sierra Club and John Tanton, then president of Zero Population Growth, which advocated birth control and tax incentives to limit population growth, according to A Pivotal Moment. In 2007, an Australian medical journal advocated a $5,000 carbon tax per child for families with more than two children. And, just a few weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh suggested, facetiously, that Andrew Refkin, the distinguished climate change reporter for The New York Times, kill himself after Revkin mused in print about the possibility of awarding carbon credits for avoided children, much like they are awarded for avoided deforestation. So, yes, talking about population is a tricky business.
Two final thoughts. First, while curbing population will help mitigate global warming, that is not the same thing as saying that population growth caused the climate crisis. Overconsumption is by far the bigger culprit, with Americans way out in the lead. The Washington, D.C., area, Mazur said, produces 25% more CO2 than all of Sweden, which has nearly twice as many people.
Second, the idea of “population justice,” which emphasizes individual freedoms to make decisions about sexuality, reproduction and family, should help avoid the future use of coercive tactics. As Light put it: “Any method you want to use for decreasing population has to pass some obvious moral tests.” Better yet, providing parents with access to family planning, educating girls and dealing with gender inequality are all steps worth taking for their own sake, regardless of their impact on population. You can read more at The Population Justice Project and at the Women’s Environment and Development Organization.
So is paying people not to have children moral? Comments, anyone?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks, Marc, for writing about this (carefully). It needs to be okay to write and talk about overpopulation. I would disagree that “overconsumption is the biggest culprit.” It cannot be any bigger than overpopulation, because it is people who overconsume. Two people overconsuming creates twice the problem of one person overconsuming. It’s simple math, and with scientists in general agreement that a sustainable lifestyle for 7 billion people would be drastically simpler than the current European or American lifestyle, it is simply unrealistic to expect that focusing on consumption alone will move us into a truly sustainble mode.
As for your morality question, today there are numerous financial incentives in many nations (including the U.S.) to have more children. If that is not immoral, then a financial disencentive cannot be immoral.
Dave Gardner
Producer/Director of the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
“Does population, per se, matter for the environment?”
Amazing to me that people so commonly get things so backwards.
Environment matters for the population, not the other way around.
Prove somehow that your concern about population growth isn’t related to the color of the population that’s growing. If it were all going to be people like you, this article wouldn’t exist.
I am half of a responsible, childless, U.S. couple. If we have children, we’ll have 2 at the most. It is environmentally and socially selfish and irresponsible to have families today that are 6,8,9,10, 18, 20 children, and equally wrong to deny the health services, tools and resources that people in developing countries need so they can choose to NOT have large families. I agree with Dave G’s comments and thanks Marc for writing so well about this important issue. Just like U.S. employers are starting to pay/incentivize employees to not smoke or be overweight, I would love to see an incentive for people who make responsible choices in terms of family size.
Nicholas Kristof writes so eloquently about the impact of educating girls in Half The sky, a fabulous book. In the Pacific Rim where countries invest in girls’ education, they have flocked to factory jobs and helps power an economic boom. We might see these as sweat shops producing cheap goods, but compared to being stuck in rural villages with no sanitation, power, or opportunities, they look good
These women contribute to the economy and send money back home, lifting up their families as well. Because they are working, they delay marriage and childbearing – a double benefit to developing countries.
educate women, provide health and info – and people opt for smaller families. The extreme of this is upper middle class Americans who now delay marriage into their late 20′s, often pushing children into their 30′s. Over time this slows population growth significantly.
Now we just need to get affluent people to consume less. Maybe incorporating the cost of climate change and clean water provision into pricing will help.
I’m not sure of the morality of the question… but there are serious moral or ethical considerations. Initially, I would think that poor people would overwhelmingly be courted (and court) any sort of “payment” for not having children. The financial incentive would be less of a draw to a wealthier individual, where the same incentive would make comparatively less of an impact on their income. But, then again, like your recent post on behavioral economics… humans are not the perfectly rational decision makers we are touted as, so the disparity I suggest may not be nearly as clear cut.
Logistically it would be problematic. Enough people don’t want children that identifying the couples that do want children, could be tricky (since I could see couples who don’t want children masquerading as those who do).
The biggest obstacle we face in changing attitudes toward overpopulation is economists. Since the field of economics was branded “the dismal science” after Malthus’ theory, economists have been adamant that they would never again consider the subject of overpopulation and continue to insist that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacle to further growth. Even worse, economists insist that population growth is vital to economic growth. This is why world leaders continue to ignore population growth in the face of mounting challenges like peak oil, global warming and a whole host of other environmental and resource issues.
But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.
If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”
My thanks for broaching a prickly topic, Marc. We are at a point where people have to start asking the annoying questions that no one really wants to deal with because the answers will may not come about in their children’s lifetime, let alone their own. The population is undoubtedly an environmental issue and the sooner we can address it, the better.
For me, the annoying, yet simple, question is “Can the world support an infinite number of humans?” I think most people would say no. After that it is merely a question of which generation would like to take the onus to figure out where a feasible level of stasis is.
Pete Murphy also makes a good point for countries like the U.S. that continue to operate with an understanding that free market capitalism requires continuous growth. In order for population to be addressed, economies like ours needs to find new ways of measuring success rather than an ever-increasing output.
T. Caine
Intercon
I thought the article was very interesting and I’m happy that we’re taking the time to talk a bit about morality. First of all, I would like to say that I believe population and consumption both play a role and therefore, both have to be taken into consideration when solving a problem as complex as this. I think it was extremely useful to mention in your article that fertility rates tend to drop when the status of women rises. In fact, many western European countries have an unsustainable low fertility rate. Since we all agree that advancing the status of women is moral, I believe that it would be the first most logical step to take.
Whether fining people when they have children is moral or not, is another question. I personally believe that the existing burden of having children is considerable enough that I question how effective an extra tax would play into the equation. Of course, people would think twice to have children if this extra tax were to be significant, but the result would then be that only rich people could have children. From this, I believe civil unrest would result because a question of economics turns easily into a question of race.
In conclusion, I believe the moral justification of having an extra tax on children is questionable, therefore, we should first advance the status of women and only resort to such drastic measures when all other options fail.