“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?

Will Human Overpopulation Eventually Cause Lemming-like Mass Migrations?

Animal populations migrate to find food or better living conditions, often in huge numbers, when populations become too large for available resources. For the caribou, whales, birds, and other creatures an annual migration is part of their ritual of survival, but some other species, such as lemmings, only migrate when under pressure. Humans have managed to remain more sedentary as we invented shelter, clothing, and technology to keep us comfortable and well fed. How will this change when the cheap energy we use to sustain our food production and comfort becomes too expensive for most people? Will we see larger and larger “migrations” from the poorest and most overpopulated countries to the most developed?  Have the migrations already begun?

What Will Happen to Businesses When Energy Cost Eclipses Labor Cost?

Today the cost of labor is the biggest single cost element for many businesses, and drives most decisions. The rise of fossil fuel prices will not be smooth,  however, as we have seen in 2008, when oil prices doubled in a matter of months and then fell back to 30% of their peak in a few months more.  During these spikes, and in the longer term as fossil fuel sources become more difficult and costly to extract, energy costs will rise to a level that challenges or surpasses labor as the biggest component of cost for many or most businesses.  The law of supply and demand also kicks in as population continues to expand, and labor costs in many industries will fall as increasing numbers of people are seeking those jobs.  At the same time, rising energy costs will reduce or eliminate the advantage of manufacturing in “low cost countries” such as China.  How will businesses react?  Will the net effect be to cause people to generally live at a lower economic level and make less money for equivalent work compared with today?  Will manufacturing of progressively lower cost and higher margin goods return to the developed countries?

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?

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.

Back to the Future – Where Might We Be in Thirty Years?

Where will we be in, say, thirty years?  I know I get distracted by more current events, and stray from my purpose in this blog, which is to address issues around achieving a sustainable world situation, and how we might live and improve in the next two to ten decades.  This entry is an attempt to get back to my original intent, and  I hope to paint a relatively hopeful picture of where we may be in a few decades.  So how might we expect things to go, and where might we expect to be in the future?

Contrary to Certain Claims, Decreasing Population is Not the Big Problem

Claims that population reduction, and not population growth, is our biggest problem are misleading, and only true if one ignores other trends.  I have run across several articles recently making the point that population reduction, seen in the most developed countries, is the real problem that deserves our attention, and that even in the developing countries birthrates are dropping.  In at least one of the articles it was implied that a falling birthrate, and inevitably falling population, is a problem for business.  Is this really a problem we need to address?

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.

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.

Why Doesn’t Overpopulation Get Mentioned by the Press?

This week NPR did a story about food shortages in the developing world, but the word “population” was never said.  Other stories they have recently done about similar evidence of global environmental issues have similarly avoided mentioning overpopulation.  I have noted this phenomenon so many times that it is making me a bit crazy.  Why does the overpopulation problem, clearly behind our problems of pollution, ecological degradation, climate change, immigration, and various other economic woes, never get mentioned by the press or political candidates?  Is it THAT awful, that huge a problem? Does it have such terrifying implications that nobody can face the fact that, as a species, we humans are rapidly overpopulating the planet, and already suffering the inevitable fallout from doing so?

Preventing Population-Related Disasters in the Developing World

Recent studies of population growth indicate that population in the developed world is relatively stable, declining in some places and being bolstered by immigration in others.  The developing world, however, is seeing a continuing population explosion (link).  I was astonished to hear in a radio news report last year that the city of Karachi, Pakistan, had a population of 17 million, and that Mexico City was cited as the largest city in the world at 35 million.  Whether those figures are accurate or not, the thought of such huge and densely populated cities in such poor countries is staggering.  It is obvious that the developed countries need to help the developing world with this problem, if for no other reason than that it will fuel illegal immigration, already an issue in much of the developed world.  How can this be done most effectively?

Immigration

The immigration situation in the US is getting a lot of attention, with more heat than light applied.  While the US already has over 11 million illegal immigrants, a fact which makes ideas about deporting them all patently ridiculous, the number will continue to increase until economic and political situations improve enough in other parts of the world to decrease people’s desire to come t0 the US.  This will happen, inevitably and eventually, until globalization levels the economies of most countries.  In the meantime, much needs to be done to change the popular understanding of the problem and combat the flood of misinformation most US media continues to spew.  And I have a few more thoughts …