I was discussing the energy savings of minimizing north-facing windows with a friend whose best views are to the north. “Doesn’t being childless”, she asked, “count for anything?” A non sequitur? Hardly. My friend raised a point that is conspicuously absent in most discussions of global warming, energy conservation, and what individuals can do about it.
If each household in the U.S. replaced just one incandescent light bulb with a fluorescent, the EPA tells us, we could save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year. This is a small change for a home – how could it possibly have such a big impact?
The answer lies not in the amount of energy conserved by a single fluorescent bulb, but in the immense number of households. Yes, this kind of change is crucial.
We should scrap nearly all of our incandescent bulbs, demand and then buy cars with far better gas mileage, use mass transit, insulate, and take advantage of solar energy – but perhaps it is also time to look at sheer human numbers
The inconvenient truth is that global warming is happening, we are beginning to experience its consequences (which appear certain to worsen over time), and the IPPC experts conclude there is a 90% likelihood that people are causing it.
First the Kyoto Protocol, and recently the U.N. climate conference in Bali provide evidence that the world is becoming convinced that “business as usual” in energy use is no longer acceptable, and could be disastrous.
The even less convenient truth is that business as usual in childbearing – which crowds the planet with about 79 million more people each year – fuels our appetite for energy and converts what should be real progress into mere holding actions.
We are facing this truth with all the courage of the proverbial ostrich who buries its head in the sand as a hungry predator draws near. Unfortunately, ignoring painful reality does not make it go away, as any ostrich with this instinct would discover too late.
Population growth means that to make any dent in global energy use, we must first conserve enough to compensate for those 79 million new consumers.
But if we managed to conserve 79 million people’s worth of energy in 2008, might we be assured of some actual progress in 2009? Far from it. In 2009, we will need to compensate for nearly 79 million more, and again in 2010, and so on.
An insatiable force, population growth will almost immediately negate all the easy energy-conserving changes, and then rapidly erode the more difficult ones.
Like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” who must run constantly to avoid falling farther behind, expanding human numbers force us to conserve more and more merely to stay in the same place – which is not where we want to be.
Despite increasing conservation efforts, we are not even holding our ground. World oil consumption per day is predicted to grow by 1.4 million barrels during 2008.
The U.S. – with five times the world’s average per capita energy consumption – is producing a “baby boomlet”. And who could deny that the 5.4 billion inhabitants of less-developed countries have the right to a much-improved quality of life?
For example, China’s 1.3 billion people are striving, with some success, to raise their standard of living. As a result, energy consumption in China is surging and will overtake that of the U.S. this year. It will continue to increase as this massive economy grows.
The most inconvenient truth that humanity has ever faced must be addressed now. The increasing human population is an integral and unsustainable contributor to the global warming predicament.
If human numbers were sufficiently smaller and stable, natural ecosystems could absorb and recycle current – and even expanded – per capita greenhouse emissions.
We must recognize, acknowledge, and respond to this painful reality in a way that is both constructive and non-coercive. Access to family planning must become a global priority. Future parents must temper their very natural desire for children so that those they bear, and their grandchildren in turn, will inherit a decent place to live.
Teresa Audesirk lives in Steamboat Springs.
