When it comes to saving the planet, lefties and greens love to talk about sustainability. But bring up sustainable population, says Eamonn Dwyer, and they rely on discredited arguments from their free-market nemeses.

China has been cast as the villain of Copenhagen. If one believes western reports, it worked to torpedo a binding deal with the Machiavellian sophistry of Fu Manchu. Whatever the truth, the world’s most populous nation has done more to cut global emissions than any other in history. In comments that went virtually unreported in the west, one of its negotiators pointed out that the one-child policy has resulted in 400 million fewer emitters. That’s 25 per cent less Chinese emissions, or nearly 5 per cent of the present day world total.

Yet on the left-green axis, there is hardly any serious discussion of population control. It is a taboo among progressives; Al Gore accepted population growth was a cause of rising emissions in his coffee-table tome, but omitted any reference to actually having population policies. Listen to phone-ins with supposedly progressive politicians, and they mock members of the public for raising the issue. Population control seems to operate in that strange ambit of radical, desperate solutions to impending crises, like nuclear power and geo-engineering, that garner few advocates left of the spectrum.

On Valentine’s Day I found myself lumbered with a facially plain development worker. To keep myself entertained, I brought up population growth, and was duly told in no uncertain terms that the solution was sustainable farming, not population control. Plain Jane didn’t seem to realise that sustainable farming produces far less food than current industrialised practices. Fossil fuel derived fertilisers and pesticides have in fact massively increased productivity. Organic food costs more because organic processes produce less. It also needs to be grown on good soil, which we’re destroying through overfarming. The trouble is, what will a population grown fat on fossil fuel agriculture do when the fossil fuels run out?

I’m all in favour of permaculture, and sustainable farming systems. That’s why I believe in a lower population than we currently have. You can’t have sustainable farming – which connotates sustainable supply - with growing demand. It’s an oxymoron, like ‘sustainable growth’. Yet this basic arithmetic is scarcely seen among greens.

Take Simon Butler. He is one of the leading eco-left critics of population control, and regularly pumps out talking points for people like Plain Jane who want to deny the laws of the physical world. In his nonsensical primer, Ten Reasons Why Population Control is Not The Answer, he claims: ‘Overpopulation is not the problem … Blaming too many people for driving climate change is like blaming too many trees for causing bushfires.’

Unfortunately for Butler and his argument, too many trees do cause forest fires. Naturally occurring forest fires play a role in reducing the ‘fuel load’ of the forest, scorching young trees but leaving elder trees intact. Human intervention - such as stopping natural fires - effectively turns the forest floor into huge reservoirs of kindle for fires we are unable to stop.

The issue is not that Butler doesn’t understand forests; it’s that he doesn’t understand ecology. Every human being and activity has an impact on the environment. Take global warming alone. Burning fossil fuels pumps greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Logging releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that would otherwise have been trapped in the ground. Livestock farming produces huge quantities of methane, which is 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. If you sensibly accept the principle of carbon rationing, then you must accept that ration is reduced every time a new child is born.

Butler contends population control is a ‘distraction’ from the real issues. This is an argument for not walking down the street and chewing bubblegum at the same time. Population control is not ‘the’ answer’, but neither is renewable energy, or sustainable farming, or ending forest destruction. Climate change and Peak Oil require action on all these issues. As Jared Diamond has pointed out, if we somehow manage to solve every other environmental problem except population growth, we will have solved nothing for all.

Moonbat Monbiot doesn’t think we should worry; he says we should blame the rich. After all, the developed world creates 80 per cent of polluting emissions. Yet he must know that every single person, be they born in Sidcup or Somalia, leaves a resource footprint on the planet. When most scientists agree we need to cut world emissions by 80 per cent, it is clear that population control must play a role in all corners of the world. This isn’t about ‘blame’, or saying that overpopulation is the cause of all our problems. It’s simply saying that if we want a sustainable future, we need a sustainable population as well.

In truth, most of those in the developing world will never enjoy the quality of life those in the developed world temporarily have. If Chinese citizens alone used the same amount of carbon dioxide as Americans, the world’s carbon footprint would almost double, and Peak Oil will reduce the developed world’s consumption anyway. In preaching the age-old evils of inequality, the development lobby is either advocating a massive increase in their resource footprint in the developing world to bring up their standard of life, or suggesting a massive voluntary reduction in the quality of life for those in the developed world. Both are delusional fantasies.

In the New Internationalist’s recent issue on overpopulation, Vanessa Baird’s bone-headed lead offers the usual glut of smears and weak arguments. She points to the ‘dark history’ of eugenics, enforced sterilisation and coercive abortions. Yet female education and access to subsidised contraceptives are among the most effective population control methods in the world; the examples of Iran and recently Rwanda, which is reducing birth rates year on year.

Baird says the Optimum Population Trust fundraising for family planning and contraception in the developing world sent the message that ‘if I can stop them having babies we won’t have to change our ways’. This is utter nonsense; the OPT has stated that ‘the top priority for Copenhagen is for the rich to reduce their huge and wasteful energy consumption’.

She goes on to assert that because fertility rates are declining, population growth will pause in 40 years anyway, which she claims ‘puts into perspective the alarmist claims of runaway population growth’. At a time when one billion people are starving, the well-fed Baird is stunningly complacent about the world population expanding by another 2.4 billion people. Baird has almost no fear of a food crisis; she blithely assumes our diet of overfishing, over-farming and over-foresting can be sustained if need be by being more efficient with food and becoming vegetarian (the diet ‘requires half the acreage of a meaty one’).

Ironically, in denying population control should be part of our social contract, the lefts and greens like Baird align themselves with the grandfather of climate change deniers, Julian Simon. His central thesis is that ‘resources don’t matter’, and like minded ‘eco-sceptics’ have drawn on a history of failed projections of modern collapse, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb. He claimed we have the ‘technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years’.

In Simon’s famous formulation, if we run out of copper, we can make it out of something else. Copper is an element.

These people are free-market mullahs juiced up on Golden Age pulp sci-fi. Like the mad monetarists of the 1980s, the deregulation mob, and the shock therapy jocks, they have a simplistic ‘turns out right in the end’ view of humans versus the universe. They believe every problem humanity creates can be solved by a techno-fix. In relying on such deranged laissez-faire arguments, greens betray the basis of environmentalism; stewardship for our world.

Anti-growth advocates have cried wolf in the past, and underestimated our ability to find ingenious solutions of supply to seemingly insoluble problems of demand. But ultimately what’s important is the principle of the prediction, not the timing. Growth can only be sustained within the limits of the physical world. For the human race, those limits include energy, freshwater, soil fertility, and the renewal rates of fisheries and forests. We like to think that when the population reaches its peak, we will be able to turn back from that dangerous precipice and reach a sustainable number.

Ecology suggests a different story. When a population ‘overshoots’ the carrying capacity of its environment, the result is a crash. It’s entirely possible for a huge population boom to be supported by raping the land and the ocean – one of those ‘ingenious’ solutions of supply - and for that population to collapse when one vital resource becomes scarce. If we find our debts being called when we have no more ecological capital to draw on, the result will be catastrophic.

In a credit crunch, consumers go bust.

In an eco-crunch, they starve.

eamon.dwyer83@gmail.com
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