Consider the article and document linked below as yet another indication, albeit a minor one, that we’ve painted ourselves into a very tight, nasty corner. Our remaining options for dealing with climate change, peak oil, water issues, and every other facet of sustainability increasingly seem to be limited to escaping our mess by [1] busting a hole through the wall at our back or [2] learning how to fly. Geohacking belongs in the first category; given our current level of knowledge about the Earth System, it’s a brute-force “solution” that attempts to keep a disequilibrium in a witheringly complex set of interrelated subsystems from shifting to new, permanent (on human time scales), and highly undesirable (in human terms) state. If you don’t like the corner metaphor, think of humanity as a high school student who stayed out all night Saturday and is desperately trying to find some way to placate Mom Sunday morning before she gets Medieval on our sorry ass.
The “learning how to fly” category is reserved for humanity-wide behavior modifications. We need to find a way to make enough of us value long term considerations highly enough that we stop making our situation worse. Currently, we haven’t done that; at best, we’ve managed to slow the rate at which our situation was deteriorating. (Some would argue that we haven’t even accomplished that and all we’ve merely managed so far is to slow the acceleration of awfulness.) This is where things like putting a realistic price on CO2 emissions and water usage, among other un[der]priced activities, falls. Another component is population control, the Topic That We Dare Not Mention In Polite Company.
Which brings me to the article that prompted this post, We need birth control, not geoengineering:
I’ve written about my choice not to have children. What’s all too easy to forget is that many women still don’t have any reasonable choice about their fertility.
An estimated 200 million women around the world don’t have access to family-planning tools. If they did, 52 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted every year, according to the according to the Guttmacher Institute [PDF].
I’m not talking government mandates or coercion or heavy-handed tactics — those approaches aren’t just ethically dubious, they’re wholly unnecessary. We just need to give every woman everywhere contraceptive options so she can have basic control over how many children she has and how close together she has them — something that we in the developed world take completely for granted. If we did so, many women would choose on their own to have fewer children, or to space them further apart. Not only would there be fewer new bodies on our already crowded planet, but the lives of women and the children they do choose to have would be improved.
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Better still, providing contraception to women who lack it is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Each $7 spent on basic family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a metric ton, while achieving that same reduction with the leading low-carbon technologies would cost a minimum of $32, according to a recent study by the London School of Economics [PDF], commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust. And if you compare contraception to the potential costs of geoengineering, the potential savings are even more massive.
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When you look at those numbers, paying for condoms and IUDs looks to be not just a huge bargain, but startlingly sane. It may not be as sexy as space mirrors, but when’s the last time sexy solved a pressing global problem?
I am not a demographer or an expert in birth control or any of the issues related to this proposal. So for the sake of brevity I’ll assume that the basic conclusion is correct — empower women to take control of their reproductive decisions and we’ll have fewer births, with a resulting CO2 emissions savings at $7/ton. Similarly, I will also sidestep the moral swamp it presents.[1]
As I indicated above, this article jumped out at me because it’s the first time I’ve someone connect the dots between geohacking and birth control. But the other notable thing is that it does so in an either/or context, which I think is very revealing of a mindset I encounter endlessly online on various web sites and in private correspondence. It’s not the silver bullet myth — if we just do X the problem will magically go away (forever!) — it’s something nearly as dangerous: If we do (preferred thing) X then we won’t need to do (less preferred thing) Y. I see this all the time in people who think energy conservation can largely end the energy/climate change part of our mess, as just one example.
The underlying assumption, of course, is that our situation is not advanced enough that we no longer have the luxury of giving in to our preferences and imposing an either/or scenario on reality. That’s just as deluded, and ultimately damaging, as is the endless anti-science denial that sloshes around the Internet (and routinely appears in some traditional news publications) like so much fetid bilge water. All the evidence I’ve seen says that we’re in such bad shape on several fronts[2] that we need to employ a whole suite of emergency steps, at least some of which will be outside the comfort zone of any one person.
Do we need to have a sober, de-politicized discussion about birth control? Yes, just as surely as we should be talking about our continued use of fossil fuels, the merits of various forms of geohacking, and many other topics currently confined to circles of experts and obsessed amateurs. Our job, whether we like it or not, my fellow obsessed amateurs, is to figure out how to kick-start that process.
[1] Therefore, kindly save your “rich white people helping poor non-white people make fewer babies is racism” nonsense.
[2] Again, if you haven’t read it, or simply haven’t read it lately, get yourself a copy of the most recent edition of Limits to Growth and read the bloody thing. Another must-read is Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity, available here, along with supplementary material. Planetary Boundaries is the attempt which you probably remember from not too long ago that looked at nine boundaries, and attempted to define limits we should not exceed for each. For me, the most chilling factor is that while the authors say that climate change is beyond the threshold for creating unacceptable change in our environment, it’s not the worst situation they examine. They consider our disturbance of the nitrogen cycle to be worse, and the loss of biodiversity even more dire.
It’s no moral swamp. It’s giving poor women the same fertility choices rich women take for granted. Also, delaying childbirth in favor of education is the single best thing a woman in the third world can do to escape male domination. So to all the politically correct hacks around here: pick your poison, do you want to support high brown birthrates or the oppression of brown women? Pick your other poison: do you want to risk appearing mildly culturally/economically insensitive, or save the climate? I say flood the world with contraceptives, appearances be damned.
“Therefore, kindly save your “rich white people helping poor non-white people make fewer babies is racism” nonsense.”
If you going to kick-start a sober de-politicized discussion, throwing insults at those who have wholly reasonable reservations about the framing of population control is not a good beginning. And I do realise that you said you were going to side-step the “moral swamp” but following that up with the bald and completely unsupported statement that it is nonsense to think that there is a racist cast to this discussion rather negates your first claim, don’t you think?
I strongly support birth control, but not because it will alleviate carbon emissions. Its effects are going to be minimal for two reasons.
1) World population growth is a super-tanker; changing course will take more than a generation. Fertility transitions will take a long time to work their way through the entire system due to the demographic momentum of young populations. Even according to the UN’s Low projections, the population will peak at around 7.5bn in 2040 – i.e., the make or break period. (The Medium projection has it increasing to a peak of over 9bn by 2080). Either way, the global population will continue rising for at least one more generation so there is absolutely no hope of substantially limiting emissions by population control.
2) And here’s the clincher. Business-as-usual, it will actually be better for the climate if world population follows the High or Medium projection. What am I smoking? Let me explain. If population follows the Low projection, that would imply industrialization and higher rates of economic growth. The causality goes both ways. More wealth tends to bring about fertility transitions; lower fertility in developing nations alleviates Malthusian pressures and allows more resources to be devoted to industrial growth. Ironically, a world with poor, teeming Third World nations is more sustainable – or rather, less unsustainable – than one where the Indian subcontinent and Africa are seeing rapid fertility transitions and industrialization. The quoted CO2 savings are going to get swamped by greater affluence.
3) Of course, don’t get me wrong – I 100% support birth control. However, it’s necessary to couple it with sustainable development. That, however, is harder than it sounds.
Dan: No. I was fending off attacks on my motivations for writing about the topic, which I get in e-mail every time I so much as mention the words “population” or “birth control”. Blanket assumptions that “pro birth control = racism” (and the people who make such absurd assumptions) were the target of my comment.
Are there racists in the world? Hell yeah. And some of them want no birth control as a way to keep the poor non-white countries poor.
And I’m sure that some people “have wholly reasonable reservations about the framing of population control”, but that has nothing to do with baseless accusations of racism, so I was not addressing those people. Why would you assume I was, when I made it quite clear I wasn’t?
Lou: Sorry, but I’m not privy to the contents of either your inbox or the inside of your head so if you make statements which are loose and unclear (and what seems “quite clear” to you is not necessarily “quite clear” to others), then there’s obviously a fairly good chance that they’re going to be misunderstood; the way your comment read to me was that anyone who sees racism in the way population control is often introduced into discussions of climate change is talking nonsense. That means I’m talking nonsense. If that was not the meaning you intended to convey, then the failure is yours, not mine. I should add that your quoting – seemingly approvingly – the Optimum Population Trust rather added to this. Have you seen their website, and more specifically popoffsets (or whatever they’re called?) You can pay (indirectly) poor people not to have children as a salve to your conscience whilst you jet off for a weekend of fucking and sun-bathing in the Bahamas. Nice. Nothing morally questionable there, is there? By the way, I’m wholly in favour of making birth control universally available for all the regular reasons. I just object to (a) the way birth control is used in discussions of climate change as a way for obscenely resource-hungry westerners (that’s all of us) to squirm out of acknowledging their (our, really) guilt and responsibilities and (b) the way the discussion tends to perpetuate colonial tropes to do with the sexual license and irresponsibility of the non-white world. Because you brought up such a morally charged topic and seemed to dismiss these objections out of hand (objections which could easily come under the heading of racism), it’s only reasonable to expect some people to respond unfavourably to you.
Those who wish to “frame” the discussion of the earth’s over-population in terms and accusations of racism and/or the assignment of guilt may wish to skip this response. Casting this issue in such terms does nothing to yield useful analysis. Instead, it makes it very unlikely that solid analysis and science can ever be presented in a rational forum free of hate speech, insult, and emotional appeals to the same sentiments that are the foundation of both Western pro-life irrationality and “Eastern” refusal to even consider birth control.. End of sermon.
Lou, your reluctance to take on the population monster is understandable, since the opponents of aggressive population control include the vast majority of humans, and not just the ones living in cultures driven by non-rational religious belief systems. Most other pundits and publishers share your reluctance, with the result that little has been published showing clearly and compellingly the relationships between population growth and climate change.
You are correct to warn your readers that a simplistic either/or set of choices will not lead to effective action in the face of (from the most recent study results) an increasing rate of GW which threatens disastrous climate changes within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Those who, faced with the inevitable reality that we must radically and soon constrain population growth will even more loudly and desperately claim that engineering in some form or other will somehow make it possible for 12 or 15 billion persons to co-exist on this planet. Of course we should work hard to engineer ways to undo or counter-act the massive damage caused by our unthinking fossil fuel gluttony. But to assume that that will be enough to ensure our collective survival would be foolishly unrealistic.
So, we are forced to deal with population growth mitigation, easily the most incendiary issue of all the ones we face when it comes to slowing climate change.
I am not a demographer, either, Lou; my formal training was in mathematical economics. But the causal linkages between population and economic behavior, and the modeling of both, may give me some useful level of understanding of the subject. You and your readers can be the judge.
No sophisticated understanding of demographics is required, happily, to follow a compelling train of logic:
1 People are the principal cause of the current global warming event by burning fossil fuels.
2 The accumulation of CO2 and other GHGs is the direct result of the fact that the earth is now supporting nearly 7 billion persons, as opposed to the roughly one billion or so when we began to shift to an economy based on burning fossil fuels. Now, after less than two centuries, we have 7 billion people consuming goods and services that in turn require the production of energy, which in turn requires the burning of ever-larger quantities of fossil fuels.
3 These people are also increasing their per-capita levels of consumption, meaning that each is consuming much more energy per person than did their great-grandparents. The increase in “living standards” in the rapidly industrializing countries, especially China and India, accelerates this growth in per-capita energy consumption and aggravates the demand for more fossil fuel burning.
4 The energy mavens can supply the details, but from the viewpoint of economic and technology development, it is extremely unlikely that alternatives to fossil fuels can be developed and deployed fast enough to supply the great majority of this coming demand. “Peak oil” will help motivate us to try to accelerate energy alternatives, but it will more immediately result in the burning of more coal, very likely.
5 There is NO truly “official” forecast of global population levels as of, say, 2080 – - it would be political suicide for any government or the UN to publish one *that is based on realistic assumptions*. If you or your readers desire, I can explain in a supporting post why I concluded in the last year that the current semi-official projections are way underestimated. The point here is simply to ask “What *if* the commonly cited unofficial projections are significantly under likely reality?” Putting it more succinctly, if the present 7 billion people are producing sufficient GHGs to cause the presently demonstrable set of GW phenomena, how much more serious and threatening will our collective situation be if or when there are 12 to 15 billion energy consumers on the planet?
In the face of this very populous, very likely reality, it is misleading to simply accept the common notions that economic growth coupled with the education and “empowerment” of girls and females will be enough to slow the growth of human population *in time to slow the increasing pace of global warming and related climate changes*.
Not nearly enough research been done to help us predict what a world filled with ten- or twelve-plus billion consuming humans will be like. For example, the comforting and long-held assumption that the poor cultures will suddenly stop having so many children once they have “enough” family wealth has never been tested in a context as populous, as religiously dogmatic, and as culturally polarized as we are about to collectively face over the next 50 years.
Understand this: the commonly cited assumption that we will cease having more children is *untested* in this new context. Nor can we be certain just *when* people will change their reproductive behavior. Any substantial reduction in family size will surely require at least two elapsed generations, longer in many anti-birth control cultures. And any such reduction will take even longer in cultures which, as so many do today, simply refuse to educate girls and women according to so-called Western ideas, namely the ones based upon science and the principles of freedom of speech and belief.
Westerners almost always make the error of assuming that people conditioned in and by other cultures think the way we do. Yes, there is lots of evidence to show that rising standards of living in the so-called developed economies resulted in lower childbirth rates. But there is also a robust history of emancipation and education of females in these countries. This “Western” tradition of roughly the past 125 years had a profound effect when the Communist Chinese moved bloodily and wholesale to a non-traditional education system. But it took two full generations to begin to be felt in the society at large, and by then, China had passed the billion mark in population. This, even after a generation of the unevenly-enforced single child policy. Now, we see, or so many assume we see, the effects of rising per-family income in China in terms of the gradual slowing of population growth. How many have noted that, with the increase in personal wealth, the single child policy is being phased out in the prosperous regions? What will China’s population be once all these competing trends have worked their way through the Chinese demographic curve? Two billion? Two point five billion?
China is illustrative, folks. The political will and moral ruthlessness to simply demand lower population growth won’t be found in India, Indonesia, Brasil, Egypt, and a hundred smaller countries. Nor will they rapidly “free” their girls and child-bearing females from the yoke of past large family traditions. Nor will they accept even mild population control policies if they require the males and older females subvert the religious dictate to have ever more babies.
To assume that these cultures will suddenly adopt Western gender values is absurd. To assume that family size will decline in these economies *sufficiently to offset the rise in per-capita consumption of dirty energy in time* is moot, to say the least..
Modeling long-term climate variables and their collective behavior is possible, just hellishly difficult. Modeling *our* behavior changes when we are facing huge challenges to our survival will be at least as problematic. In a global forum where even the powerful are afraid to openly discuss rational population control, finding and saying the truth will make it even harder.