The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a weekly “green tip” to our readers. This week’s tip was written by Éva Milan Engel.
In November, I read the book “The Population Bomb,” written in 1968 by Paul Ehrlich. Also in November, the global population reached eight billion people, according to projections by the United Nations.
Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions did not come to pass. There are now more than twice as many humans alive as there were when the book was published, but hunger, poverty and disease have generally lessened over the decades.
Still, for those who see every new birth as one more consumer and carbon-emitter on an already hot and crowded planet, the idea of eight billion people seems like an environmental catastrophe.
After all, the Earth has warmed almost 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the world hit the four billion mark in 1974. The explosive growth of population has come at the direct expense of other creatures that share our planet.
As the human population doubled in the last half century, wildlife populations declined by as much as 70%, not to mention the billions of farmed animals that make our meals. We’re currently using nearly twice as many resources as the Earth can replenish in a year.
But while more people are consuming energy and warming the planet, the key issue isn’t the number of people on the planet as much as how a small fraction of the population is producing a disproportionately large share of carbon pollution.
Here are some examples:
- Between 1990 and 2015, carbon emissions of the richest 1%, or about 63 million people, were more than twice that of the emissions of the poorest half of humanity, according to research by the Stockholm Environmental Institute and nonprofit Oxfam International.
- With only 4.5% of the planet’s people, the U.S. has emitted 21.5% of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
- Kenya, which is suffering from drought, has 55 million people, about 95 times more than the population of Wyoming. But Wyoming emits 3.7 times more carbon emissions.
- The average Canadian, Saudi and Australian is responsible for more than 10 times carbon dioxide as the average Pakistani, where one-third of the country was devastated by flooding triggered by climate change.
Contrary to Ehrlich’s assertions, what we have today is not a problem of overpopulation, it’s an issue of overconsumption and how rich nations consume. Worldwide population growth is now down to less than 1% per year, but carbon emissions are growing faster, at 1% more this year than in 2021.
If we want to avoid hardship for billions of people in poorer countries, we can, and must, do better.
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