Population x consumption = climate change

June 29, 2023 6:25 AM

CBC Ideas offers a rare balanced look at the impact of human population on climate change. Includes discussions of income disparity, fossil fuels, renewables, the racist history of population control, and many other critical issues that are seen too little in the media. Worth both a read and a listen.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon (36 comments total)

This is bullshit. Renewables could be solving pollution problems in high population developing countries except they aren't because it doesn't benefit the plutocracy. Blaming population growth for climate change is the same as blaming poor people for climate change. The essay even says this in the middle and then conveniently ignores it. Yuck.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:08 AM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

Population growth is one of the biggest reasons why carbon emissions continue to rise — and climate treaties keep missing their targets.

Citation needed. Globally, per capita carbon emissions have gone up 0.22 t per capita, or 5%, from 1990 to 2020. Looking into the data, the largest per capita carbon emissions growth is in middle income countries that have the farthest to grow, while per capita carbon emissions decreased from 1990 to 2020 in eg. the US and Canada. But the absolute amount of emissions or per capita emissions is also quite relevant here, and the article doesn’t make the case for this very strong statement with any actual data or calculations. (Maybe the radio program does, but Ideas doesn’t tend to get into quantitative reasoning much for any of their other topics.)
posted by eviemath at 7:09 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

In addition to needing to do the actual calculation to support this claim, as Literaryhero notes, there are lots of other confounding factors that make the claims of causation much less clear, even supposing the calculations support a correlation on the global level. That is: yes, in Canada total carbon emissions keep increasing despite per capita emissions going down, which might make you suspect population growth as the cause of the total emissions increase. But if you look into emissions sources in Canada, oil sands development is a large contributing factor, some of which then also contributes to Canadian emissions a second time through domestic use of the oil produced, but a fair amount is also exported. And in many countries, population growth is occurring alongside per capita carbon emissions increases. China now accounts for a significant proportion of global carbon emissions, which has co-occurred with population growth there; but also with rising per capita emissions, and also offshoring of industry from countries like the US and Canada, so some of China’s emissions should perhaps more accurately be counted as per capita US or Canadian emissions, since they wouldn’t exist without China’s very large export manufacturing market. In short, assigning causation is way more complicated than this article claims or implies.
posted by eviemath at 7:26 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm in agreement with the article that population growth does cause climate change. Winter economies use natural gas for heating. Canada, as an example, has been making a trade of citizens by growing its population through immigration. So India loses one citizen and Canada gains one citizen, but the citizen in India didn't require as much fossil fuels to heat their home as they did in Canada. Renewables can be great to power air conditioners, but there's not success stories of solar+wind successfully heating a home in winter.
posted by DetriusXii at 7:33 AM on June 29, 2023

Maximum Canada is happening (details the "grow population by immigration" argument, makes no mention of climate)
posted by chavenet at 7:40 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

There are plenty of solutions to the climate crisis with current available technology that support current rates of household energy use and population growth, however none of them are sufficiently profitable for the richest guys on the planet, so they don’t happen.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:43 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know of several Canadian homes that are heated by solar power throughout the year.
posted by eviemath at 7:45 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

The current wildfires in Canada are burning through monoculture pine forests that were planted as part of the carbon offset schemes of previous decades, and because they were planted as a monoculture to be profitably harvestable for wood, they burn like crazy and they’re releasing more carbon into the air then they offset to begin with.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:50 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

The biodiversity and habitat loss is an interesting angle. It does seem that the wealth and per Capita emissions of a country doesn't really matter for that dimension. Although I suppose wealthy countries build bigger McMansions (maybe) on their land. At the same time a lot of those countries export grain. But that often goes to feed meat production...


Ok the more I write the more it just supports us all becoming vegetarian.
posted by keep_evolving at 8:01 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

This article mentions a bunch of times that this is hard to talk about (or get people to talk about) because the right wing doesn't want to talk about non-market solutions and the left thinks that these conversations are often a stalking horse for racism and eugenics and these are...super not equivalent. I definitely didn't like the phrase "So that alliance between the left and right has basically made it very difficult to raise the population issue in a way that isn't simply a caricature" because there is not an alliance between people who believe exclusively in market-based solutions and those who have (extremely legitimate!) concerns about ecofascism! It seems to me that this article is presenting itself as speaking hard truths in the face of extremist opposition but I found it unconvincing and, as someone who is myself deeply concerned about ecofascism*, these kinds of articles pushing concerns about "overpopulation" while framing themselves as middle of the road pragmatists sit very poorly with me.

*I'm not talking more about what I mean when I say"ecofascism" and why it concerns me because I don't want to derail but I can if it would be helpful, also there are many great articles that explain more eloquently than I can (:
posted by an octopus IRL at 8:03 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m glad to see this, honestly. I say this as a leftist, but the left’s “more children in poor countries won’t affect climate change” assumes those people will stay at the same emissions level, and thus, barring major technological advancement, that they won’t want the same quality of life as people in high-income country. If you take away that assumption, the argument falls apart. The solution to overpopulation is to give people with uteruses education, contraception, and choices. Period. Luckily, that’s the ethical course of action whether or not population’s an issue.
posted by vim876 at 8:03 AM on June 29, 2023 [23 favorites]

One can also build passive solar houses in Canada that require negligible energy to heat or cool, though these are quite non-standard relative to the building industry overall, so are still significantly more expensive than a traditionally constructed home. On the cheaper end, just adding insulation, as with double-width walled but otherwise traditionally constructed buildings, or with certain natural building techniques such as straw bale, makes a huge difference in amount of energy required for both heating and cooling.

Additionally, I would have to look up the numbers, but I recall reading that the energy spent in cooling the average house in the southern US was significantly more than the energy spent on heating the average house in the northern US (which aligns with heating needs for most Canadian homes). So the claim that it takes much less energy to cool anyone in India than to heat a home in Canada seems quite suspect, or perhaps only true because of the large number of people in India who still live in slums without any sort of heating or cooling (and thus die during dangerous summer heat waves).

Back to the numbers, while immigration is the source of population growth in Canada, populations are still growing in most of the countries that new Canadians immigrate from, so the framing of “one new Canadian = one less Indian” is not relevant one way or the other. And of course it’s not the person living in a slum in India who is likely to end up immigrating to Canada, so wealth inequality and concurrent inequality in carbon footprint within India would also need to be considered in any such analysis. To determine the causes of increased carbon emissions, and thereby to design effective plans for reducing emissions, one needs to look in more depth at economic activity and global supply chains. Both population and immigration - and indeed restricting to a country-by-country analysis as if each country’s carbon emissions only come from that country’s residents’ economic activity, and each country’s residents’ per capita carbon footprint only comes from emissions produced in that country - are subsidiary factors only.
posted by eviemath at 8:04 AM on June 29, 2023

Blaming population growth for climate change is the same as blaming poor people for climate change. The essay even says this in the middle and then conveniently ignores it.

Population growth among the poor doesn't make them less poor, but causes more poverty among more people, which is easily explained. From there it snowballs into a lot of problems, even wars and famines, but especially increased disease and low education levels. Blaming victims doesn't help. But most people are quick to deny population issues for anything, because humans generally like to win the population game among the animals, and our cultures and religions are all about expansion (until the world ends).
posted by Brian B. at 8:17 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

There’s a big difference between “population is a major cause of x” and “y, in part via population pressures, causes x”. In the first case, the solution is to reduce population or at least population growth. Which has historically not gone well, to put it glibly. In the second case, we get stuff like empowerment of women and queer people, or environmental initiatives that partner with and take advantage of communal knowledge and lived experience of local historically marginalized/colonized groups.
posted by eviemath at 8:27 AM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or anti-colonial, socialist, democratic political movements, although those have also tended to be undermined (again, to put it glibly) but groups such as the US Central Intelligence Agency. But then a full understanding of the situation leads us to “hey, maybe the US shouldn’t be directly opposing local democratic movements around the world” as part of the solution to the climate crisis, which is very, very different from eco-fascism as a proposed solution; or even from restrictions imposed, IMF-style, on poorer/post-colonial-looting countries by richer, historically-colonizer countries.
posted by eviemath at 8:32 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Some spherical cow ass nonsense here.
posted by Artw at 9:11 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Managed to avoid speaking to an ecomodernist, or use the word "decouple".

There's clear victories in reducing human impact, our continual ability to harvest more food from the same land has allowed humans to reduce our farming footprint.

There's mention of energy density from trees to coal. The article mentions coal has 3x the energy density of wood.

Uranium has orders of magnitude greater energy density than coal.

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Yeah, you do end up talking about population control... when you can't see increasing efficiency in energy production and in agriculture.
posted by gordonmcdowell at 9:21 AM on June 29, 2023

Metafilter: some spherical cow ass nonsense here.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:21 AM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

It has long been the job of the CBC to find brown people to blame for white people's problems (and the job of the RCMP to take it out on them). Since it's not really acceptable any more for Canadian whites to dump on local indigenous groups, we're very happy to have ones elsewhere on the planet to point fingers at.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:53 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

reading that the energy spent in cooling the average house in the southern US was significantly more than the energy spent on heating the average house in the northern US (which aligns with heating needs for most Canadian homes).


That is true, but with a major caveat: the average house in the southern US (far more suburban) is much larger than the average house in the northern US (far more urban and dense), and when you compare northern suburban to southern suburban and comparable square footage, the energy costs of AC are less than heating costs. But the obvious answer is to build southern as urban (rather than suburban) and the total energy cost is less.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:04 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

we're very happy to have ones elsewhere on the planet to point fingers at.

Because everyone is afraid to point at a bunch of old childless men in cassocks who live in Rome.
posted by Brian B. at 10:05 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

But Homer-Dixon argues that "we cannot run modern industrial civilization on wind and solar power by themselves." He points out it would take an enormous amount of land or space in the oceans to make way for solar panels and wind farms to replace fossil fuels.

"So this is a fundamental constraint."

*citation needed*

there is, in actual fact, an enormous amount of land or space in the oceans
posted by allegedly at 10:50 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Of course there are too many of us. That's not opinion, it's just counting, and is readily apparent to anybody willing to put aside the bullshit notion that human beings are somehow not a terrestrial mammal. We and our livestock now out-consume every resource relied upon by every other mammal species on this planet by a large and increasing multiple. We are so far beyond this planet's capacity to sustain our requirements for living space, clean water, and nutritious food that if it weren't so grimly tragic it would be farcically comical.

And every time we invent some new kind of technology that lets us steal even more of what should belong to our descendants, we fall over ourselves in our rush to deploy it, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so much smarter than the average bear that humanity, and humanity alone, will be able provide permanently for the needs of humanity even as we push all our contemporaries toward extinction.

The collective hubris is breathtaking and the only thing worse than the collective hubris is the universal denial.

I first figured this out in my late teens, at which time there were still only four and a half billion of us, and I've seen nothing since to convince me that the analysis is wrong. Far from it. Everything is more crowded now and everything is more overloaded now and everything is busier and more precarious than it's ever been even though we continue to bury ourselves under a bigger mountain of "labour saving" technology than has ever existed. The conclusion that there are already far too many of us is unavoidable unless strenuous efforts are put into cultivating the magical thinking we employ to avoid seeing our place in the biosphere for what it is.

This is not a "problem" that we can "solve" and nor is it something that anybody is to "blame" for. It's the bedrock fact of our existence. There are too many of us for the biosphere to sustain, which means that at some point there will be fewer of us. That's just how being a species works. It's got nothing to do with how "smart" the individual members of that species are, or how magnificent the species' culture is, or what colour skin its individual members find themselves inside.

But being an individual member of that species is all that any of us have. So what are we to do with this dismal understanding?

I didn't choose to be here. None of us did. But I am here, and I have every bit as much right as anybody else to keep on being here for as long as I can. Nobody has the right to deny me my chance to do so. Nor do I have the right to deny that chance to anybody else.

I firmly believe that we each ought to minimize the resource consumption we choose to cause to the greatest extent we can, in order to limit our collective encroachments on the rest of the biosphere - encroachments of which climate change is but one - as much as possible. The consequence of not doing that is that we will eventually impoverish the interlocked systems that keep us growing to the point where they just can't do so any more even with all our tech to help us wring out their last drops, at which time our population will crash in ways that involve unfathomable suffering.

The single most consequential decision that any human being can make about how much resource consumption we are going to be responsible for is whether or not that resource consumption stops when we do. If I choose to create a tree of descendants of unknowable size, then I am responsible for the resource consumption of all of those people in addition to my own.

Which is why I got sterilized before I could reproduce.

I'm not out to persuade anybody else that doing likewise is the right choice for them. For a start, it's not my call; you've all got eyes, they're not painted on. That said, I do think it's a great shame that most people will go to their graves believing on some level that humanity is God's chosen species and that the rules therefore do not apply to us.

Obviously I would be happier if I could believe that humanity would bring its own population back to sustainable proportions via personal reproductive choices and natural attrition instead of literally eating ourselves out of house and home, but I'm 61 now and I just don't.

And I'm not expecting that the crash will come in my lifetime, or even in that of any of the kids I've helped raise (all of whom already existed before I started parenting them). But it will come. You can't bung on the most rapid mass extinction in the planet's geological history and somehow expect it not to.

C'est la vie.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 AM on June 29, 2023 [22 favorites]

the right wing doesn't want to talk about non-market solutions

They don't want to talk about market solutions, either! They balk at gas or emissions taxes, at disposal fees being built into the costs of items, at anything environmental being supported by taxation.

Negative externalities shall never be priced in, if the right wing has their way.

If we actually priced things at the cost to repair and replace, rather than the raw cost of extraction labor, things would look mighty different. Instead of scolding people for individual dietary choices, we could just tax animal goods to include the environmental harms.

They don't want even this.
posted by explosion at 12:34 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

1.2% of the Sahara Desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy.
posted by condour75 at 2:23 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Citation needed. Globally, per capita carbon emissions have gone up 0.22 t per capita, or 5%, from 1990 to 2020. Looking into the data, the largest per capita carbon emissions growth is in middle income countries...

World population increase over the same period: 5.3 billion in 1990 to 7.8 in 2020. That's a 46% increase, not a piddly 5%. Pretty clear to me what the dominant factor is.
posted by flabdablet at 3:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sorry, I found your comment unclear: Are you comparing a % total increase in one variable with a % per capita increase in a different variable, ignoring any information about what connects the two variables, and claiming that you can draw some “clear” conclusions about what has been impacting the total (not %, and not per capita) increase in the second variable?
posted by eviemath at 6:12 AM on June 30, 2023

Like, I understand that folks are, naively and without considering and details or context, reasoning as: per capita carbon production isn’t going down, ‘capita’ is going up, therefore, all other things being equal, that would make sense as something we could point to as a ‘biggest’ cause of increasing carbon emissions. But all other things are not equal - we live in a very, very unequal world. One of the ways in which our world is unequal is in where carbon-intensive production of things that support the lifestyles and economic growth of high income countries occurs. I mentioned above how a naive calculation of per capita carbon emissions from China leaves out how much of China’s industrial production is for an export market. As another example, consider Brazil. Per capita carbon emissions have gone up a fair amount in Brazil, but for a very large chunk of Brazilians, quality of life and their individual carbon footprint have not seen a commensurate change. Brazil’s carbon emissions, as in Canada, include a large contribution from one single industry: in Brazil’s case, beef cattle production. But where does that beef go? A lot of it goes to North America, and to other high income countries whose naively calculated per capita carbon emissions appear to be falling.

In short, there is a narrative that claims that although high income countries have historically produced way more than their fair share of carbon emissions and thus historically could be thought of as bearing the burden for reductions in emissions to save everyone on the planet, nowadays per capita emissions in middle income countries that are also experiencing higher population growth are the main problem. That is a continuation of previous poorly reasoned and colonialist/racist excuses for centering population growth as a cause of climate change instead of economic choices and inequality, because it ignores that high income countries have simply moved their carbon-emitting production to many of these middle income countries, so a proportion of the increased carbon emissions (that one would need more details and context to actually calculate, but it’s clear that it will be in the range to be relevant) of these middle income countries should actually be attributed to the high income countries. It also ignores the increasing wealth (and thus carbon footprint) inequality in both high income and middle income countries, and the role that colonialism and racism have played in that.
posted by eviemath at 6:31 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

The atmosphere gives no shits about which countries the carbon dioxide it's being loaded up with have come from or are coming from or will come from. The only emissions figure of consequence for climate change purposes is total (i.e. global) carbon emissions.

Total carbon emissions E can be directly calculated from global population P and per capita carbon emissions e: E = P × e.

If, over some time period, P has increased by 46% and e has increased by 5%, then E has increased by 1.46 × 1.05 - 1 = 53%.

The obvious conclusion is that P is the dominant factor in this increase. Any argument that suggests otherwise is going to need to make a strong case that if P had been held constant then e would have risen roughly ten times as fast as it actually has. I have never read one that does.

Arguments about the ways in which P or e or both are geographically distributed are red herrings.
posted by flabdablet at 6:53 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

The source of emissions doesn’t make an immediate difference to climate change, no. It does make a difference to humans and to determining what measures will be most effective at reducing climate change. Like, someone killed by a gun is just as dead no matter if the gun was an AR15, a rocket launcher or drone strike, or a muzzle-leader, and no matter whether it was fired by a far-right extremist, a cop, a Ukrainian soldier, an accidental shooting by a child, a suicide,l or a civil war reenact or or movie actor who didn’t practice proper safety procedures. But if our goal is to reduce gun deaths, and to do so in a humane and equitable manner, we’re going to want to focus on the largest sources first - in the US, if I recall correctly, that’s actually cops and suicides before far-right extremists? And yes, currently Ukrainian soldiers are causing an elevated number of deaths. Of course, so are Russian and Wagner soldiers. The naive, and most immediate, solution would be to have Ukraine surrender; but they didn’t cause the Ukraine war, Putin did, so a Ukrainian surrender, like focusing on population growth, is not an equitable solution nor will it actually fix anything long-term: it’s a solution to a symptom, not a man underlying cause.

Population growth is not an underlying cause of our climate crisis. If that’s what you focus on as your solution, then you will simply kick the problem down the road a little bit, and will create more inequities and racism along the way.
posted by eviemath at 7:19 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

And I know that you can do better than ignoring the majority of the content of my critiques and comments, flabdablet. You are mathing poorly in this thread, which is not like you in general.
posted by eviemath at 7:21 AM on June 30, 2023

Luckily, there's a policy goal that has been shown to have the side-effect of limiting population growth and reducing the emissions associated with industrialization and pissing off the voting block that most fights pricing in externalities: focus on educating and empowering women.
posted by straw at 8:20 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

How do you force other nations to educate and empower their women without declaring war against them? The first world democracies already have empowered and educated women; they already have the below-replacement birth rates to show that their policies are working towards domestic population reduction. Tell me how you get to that point with Afghanistan?
posted by DetriusXii at 8:45 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Luckily, there's a policy goal that has been shown to have the side-effect of limiting population growth and reducing the emissions associated with industrialization and pissing off the voting block that most fights pricing in externalities

It involves submarines.
posted by Artw at 9:19 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Population growth is not an underlying cause of our climate crisis.

A cause doesn't stop being causal merely because we dislike its implications and/or don't know what to do about it.

If that’s what you focus on as your solution, then you will simply kick the problem down the road a little bit, and will create more inequities and racism along the way.

Me, upthread:

This is not a "problem" that we can "solve" and nor is it something that anybody is to "blame" for. It's the bedrock fact of our existence. There are too many of us for the biosphere to sustain, which means that at some point there will be fewer of us. That's just how being a species works.

Yes, fixing climate change is urgent and necessary.

Yes, the only currently feasible approach is lowering per-capita emissions because we are evidently unwilling, as a species, to control our population size. Which is, to be fair, a characteristic we share with almost all other species. It's just disappointing that Homo is so not sapiens on a point of such fundamental importance.

Yes, the most urgent places to lower per-capita emissions are the places where it's currently growing the fastest.

Yes, the bulk of any funding required to achieve that goal ought to come from the countries that have de-sequestered the most fossil carbon.

Yes, halfway competent renewable energy policy will make emissions reduction profitable almost everywhere, meaning that the funding required to get it done will actually be relatively modest.

No, fixing climate change will not materially slow down the current mass extinction. The only way to achieve that is for humanity to pull its fucking elbows in far enough and fast enough to give the rest of the biosphere a chance to thrive again. And we're just not going to do that while we continue to think of ourselves as somehow conceptually separable from the web of life on this planet, a super common worldview and value system that strikes me as inextricably bound up in colonialism.

I know that you can do better than ignoring the majority of the content of my critiques and comments, flabdablet.

Tu quoque.

You are mathing poorly in this thread

I don't think it's a maths thing, I think it's an ecology thing.

which is not like you in general

The discomfort is mutual.
posted by flabdablet at 9:34 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

We cannot afford growth anywhere anymore, either population or consumption. In fast, the IPCC says 1.5°C demands rapid deep emissions cuts from All economic sectors across ALL global regions.

Already in 2015, developing countries were responsible for 63% of on-going carbon emissions, which only increased since. Also, China's emissions exceed all developed nations combined by 2021.

We cannot simply attribute emissions based upon some final point of consumption for several reasons. First, those emissions would continue even if the final point of consumption simply vanished, because once infrastructure exists then it'll be used, and the point of consumption is determined merely by who pays more. It simply doesn't whose consumption the manufacturing capacity originally exists. Second, there is enormous material economic growth around manufactures, hence why China now has more cars than the US, India increases their meat consumption, etc.

I do think resource exporters' emissions could be attributed to manufactures, so like rain forests destroyed in Brazil should be attributed to whoever buys the resulting cattle feed, even if their cattle then get sold elsewhere.

Anyways..

We cannot do much about population, so we should focus on reduced consumption and resilience, which includes ending most international trade. Among other benefits, this slows resource exploitation, manufacturing infrastructure expansion, etc.

As for population, we're definitely going above +4°C by which time the world carrying capacity drops below 1 billion people. It'll be ugly but our numbers shall come down.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:39 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]