“The Bomb” is Here, But It’s the Population Bomb

My childhood fears of nuclear war have come to pass, but not the way I expected. When I was a kid I had a great fear of nuclear war.  At school we drilled, hiding under our desks, in case Russian missiles with nuclear warheads should wreak terrible, radioactive firestorms on us.  One winter night around the age of 6 I woke up from a dream and looked out the window to see the sky glowing yellow – I was immediately convinced that either a nuclear attack was creating the incredible light in the sky, or that the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant had blown up, and in either case the radiation would soon get us.  As it turned out, it was just a full moon illuminating a light snowfall, but I will never forget the terror of those moments.  These days, with nuclear war seeming to be a much more remote possibility, I don’t even think about it.  The other night, however, I noticed the sky glowing orange most of the way around the horizon, and realized that, if I didn’t know it was street lights illuminating the falling snow, I would have thought a nuclear war had broken out.  The lights were like those of an explosion frozen in time.  Then I realized that this IS an explosion – a population explosion.  This extremely long, slow-motion explosion started over a century ago and the echoes won’t die out for decades, or maybe centuries, to come.  Unfortunately this explosion has consequences potentially more devastating than even a global nuclear war.  So what are we doing about it?  How can we mitigate the effects of this very-slow, long term explosion on ourselves and our descendants?

Harnessing the Power of the Masses to Achieve a Population “Glide Path”

The population explosion is testing our intelligence as a species. There are a great many of us on the planet now, and the power of the masses has become incredible. When there are 6 billion people, and 10% of them change their habits in a way that causes them to use a tenth of a gallon less water per day, the savings of 60 million gallons of water per day, or almost 22 billion gallons of water per year, is staggering to contemplate. This incredible power over our planet and our future can only be harnessed through the use of our media to educate all those people, and that will require breaking through a lot of political and economic barriers. Can we do this and get ahead of our problems before a large proportion of the world population dies from famine, disease, or some combination of natural and man-made disasters?

Global Warming and Our Responsibility to the Future – A Call to Action

Global warming and climate change are only pieces of the puzzle. The storm of media coverage and conflicting scientific data around global warming is overwhelming, but it is concealing very real problems we need to face if we are to ensure ourselves and our descendants can continue anything like the kind of lifestyles we have today. Climate change will happen, whether we cause it or not, and when it does, how prepared will we be? Energy supplies are a key factor, not only for our current relative comfort but as an enabler to our ability to deal with issues we will face in the short and long term. Where does this all lead, and what are our responsibilities as individuals? What can we do to ensure a better future?

Global Warming Article Leaves the Population/Energy Crisis as Our First Priority

Evidence mounts that carbon dioxide emissions are not our biggest problem. An article titled “Climate Change – The Real Causes” on the New Zealand Climate Science website by professor Geoffrey G. Duffy (link) strongly makes the point that carbon dioxide is not going to produce the kind of global climate change scenarios being trumpeted by many, including many celebrities and government climatologists. I was scared to death by the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, but I have seen and read many articles and studies throwing it into question or directly debunking it since then. As a result I have come to wonder why so many continue to raise alarms about global warming when the more obvious problems before us are our dependence on massive amounts of fossil fuels and their inevitable exhaustion, and the huge population growth we have achieved as a result of cheap energy. Why global warming persists as a news item I will leave to others, as it is a political issue that must be addressed in the short term, though it is nonetheless worrisome. Has the global warming flap helped us? What should we really be working on?

How Much Larger Can Our Cities Grow?

Many cities were begun in constrained environments, and the cost of continued expansion in their areas is rising. Many of the cities I have visited were started in places that naturally attracted humans – bays and estuaries, confluences of rivers, and other places where water and food sources were relatively more abundant and the climate was relatively favorable. I notice, however, that now that the human population has reached more than six billion these places are increasingly challenged for space, infrastructure, or resources of some important sort. At the same time, however, some are actually in a population decline, and some even have a declining “rate of sprawl.” The picture is complex, and differs significantly between developed and developing countries. So how are things likely to change from here, and how can we affect the situation positively?

Price of Rice Reflects Overpopulation Problem

The scale of problems from overpopulation will increase as the population grows. The Christian Science Monitor, long a bastion of sound journalism that has never followed the corporate main stream media (one of few), ran an article recently (link) explaining how a lack of agricultural development in the Philippines is combining with their rapidly growing population (and that of other less-developed nations) to create food shortages. The clearest evidence of the shortages is in the doubling of rice prices in the past year (2007-2008). While most people in North America, for instance, won’t think that is a very big deal, there are hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the planet who depend on rice as a staple – a major part of their diet – and for whom any price increase is seriously bad news. I remember reading in the news a month or two ago that the price rise has caused people who used to get two bowls of rice per day to cut back to one. (Try living on that diet, you in the developed countries, if you want a dose of reality.) The important realization is that, as energy shortages and population growth exacerbate food shortages, there will be more food riots and unrest in the fastest growing and least-developed countries. In response, the developed countries need to put more family planning, education, and economic aid, all proven to reduce birthrates, into the poorest areas of the globe for the good of all. Here’s a more detailed analysis.

Will Overpopulation Exceed the Capacity of Our Global Infrastructure?

Perhaps the question is, more appropriately, when will population exceed the capacity of our global infrastructure? I am amazed that enough food and other goods can be produced and delivered today to sustain cities like Karachi, Pakistan (12-18 million) and Mexico City (19-35 million), especially since the average family income in these cities is relatively low compared with that in the more developed countries. I wonder how long such cities can continue to grow, and why the infrastructure to sustain them doesn’t appear to be increasingly fragile and at risk from human and naturally-caused problems. What are the signs that tell us that we are pushing our infrastructure to the point where risk of problematic or disastrous collapses is significantly increased?

Lop-sided Focus on Climate Change Ignores Other Problems; Obscures the Root Problem: Overpopulation

Many feel the climate change risk is overstated and unsupported by evidence. Among websites that question whether global warming is supported by evidence, Anthony Watt’s Watt’s Up With That website is, in my opinion, probably the most credible, and its popularity continues to grow. His more than half million hits per month include enough commenters expressing significant weather knowledge and reasonable positions (among the Gore haters and anti-government types) to make it worth reading, in my opinion. It is clear that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and a lot of press, some of the highest profile releases coming from James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, has stirred a lot of concern worldwide. Personally, I am more concerned with the many problems, climate change possibly included, caused by the huge increase in the global human population over the last century.

1972 Rockefeller Commission Report on Population Was Surprisingly Insightful

President Nixon initiated a study of population that holds many insights of lasting value.  In the late 1960’s President Richard Nixon was very aware of a growing population and the problems it could cause (see my earlier entry “Who Would Have Thought Richard Nixon a Visionary“).  As a response, he set up the Rockefeller Commission under John D. Rockefeller III.  The Rockefeller Commission Report is a diverse, well-researched, and well-written report, a real eye opener, and it is clear now that it did not get the attention it deserved.   I will be writing more entries around some of the key revelations in this report, as there are just too many striking insights, still applicable today, to cover them in a single entry.  Here are a few highlights, however.

Extended Non-Families, An Alternative for the Aging Childless

People in a variety of situations, and in both developed and underdeveloped countries, are concerned about elder care.  Unfortunately, this is a key force behind the prevalence of large families and the resulting population explosion in underdeveloped countries.  I keep thinking about the news interview I heard recently with a parent in Pakistan (I think it was) who said that the reason they had a large family was so they could be assured that at least a couple of their children would be around to aid them in their old age.  Their assumption was that conditions in Pakistan were not going to get better, and that, between the economic and political problems, they would likely lose at least some of their children to disease or violence before they became old enough to need daily assistance.  Having someone to support you in old age isn’t just an issue in third world countries, however.  Childless individuals and couples in the developed countries have the same concern, and another option is becoming apparent.

A Positive and Cost Effective Path to Birthrate Reduction and Population Control

Why are third world families so large?  In poor agrarian societies there is a direct incentive to have more children, as it provides more hands to do the work and makes the family farm more productive and profitable.  It doesn’t appear to me, however, that there are many poor agrarian societies left, and a quick look at world population trends shows that in most of the less-developed countries the bulk of the population has moved or is moving to the big cities.  There must be other reasons for large families in these fast growing countries.

Achieving Sustainability Will Involve Birthrate Reduction, But How Can That Be Achieved?

Let’s face it: the earth has too many humans, using natural resources up too quickly, and the population will be forced to decline to a sustainable level sooner or later.  Achieving a sustainable situation will require that there be a lot less humans, especially when fossil fuels become scarce.  That means the human birthrate must decline.  For population to be reduced without a birthrate reduction would mean that average lifespans would have to decline to near the minimum childbearing age, which I think is highly unlikely.  Before sustainability is reached, however, there will be a long period of change, of probably 70 to 200 or more years.  How will population most likely be reduced during that period?

Everyone’s Help is Needed in the Pursuit of Sustainability

Moving towards sustainability requires everyone’s involvement. The biggest barrier to accomplishing the things we need to in order to move towards sustainability is in our own heads.  Too often, the people I talk with about sustainability and the global situation express either an indifferent attitude, downright rejection, or disbelief of what most of us consider to be facts.  I see a couple of common threads in their thinking.

Technological Development Isn’t the Only Thing Accelerating

Can improvements in technology keep up with increasing global demand? As I look around at various discussions of the current world situation I read lots of interesting thoughts and ideas around our rapidly advancing technology. Some see the rate of technological advancement as being on a continuous exponential upswing that will result in fabulous new classes of products, free or nearly free energy, and answers to practically all of our currently-anticipated global troubles within a decade or two. Others see a rocky road of regional energy and food shortages, promising technologies taking too long too implement, and much worse. I tend to be somewhere in the middle of it all, and working to raise consciousness so that the rocky road will be less so, and the technologies will have time to arrive. The problem is that, while technological development is accelerating, world problems are, too, and population seems to be the perennial behind-the-scenes story. The real race I see is between conservation (to buy time), scientific developments, the will to implement new technologies, and increasing human numbers and per capita demand. The unfortunate fact is that demand is accelerating faster than population as the world “globalizes” and modernizes.

Is Overpopulation at the Root of More “Popular” Problems?

This is a response to those who believe that problems such as “corrupt politicians” or “global warming” are the most important problems we face today.  I’m not contending that these aren’t problems, but that we have a bigger problem.  I believe the problem of overpopulation is far more important than the problems currently getting the most attention in the western media, such as immigration, pollution, and global climate change. In fact, I believe overpopulation can be seen as the root cause of many of the problems that do get the attention of the main stream media. It is unfortunate they are apparently unwilling to say anything that might lead people to make the connection.  The logic, however, seems simple.