During the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental activist Stephanie Mills made headlines when she announced she would not reproduce to avoid contributing to climate change and other environmental problems attributed to a growing human population. Forty-one years later, should reducing population again be considered as a way to contain global energy demand?
Japan's nuclear catastrophe and the explosion in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago force the question. Nuclear advocates universally justify the decision to fuel power plants with radioactive uranium as the best way to sate the world's increasing appetite for energy. Coal-fired utilities and oil companies use a "running to stay in place" argument as well. Despite gains in efficiency, they correctly point out, energy demand is on the rise. Part of the reason is because people in developing countries are justifiably using more kilowatts of electricity and barrels of oil to help bring their standard of living up to that of countries that have abundant energy access 24/7. But another reason is because every year, says the United Nations, our global numbers increase by some 80 million people, the equivalent of ten New York cities. At that rate, world population is projected to spike from the current 6.9 billion people to over 9 billion by 2044.
We don't have to wait thirty-three years to comprehend the impact increasing population growth will have on energy consumption and the resulting carbon dioxide that contributes to climate change. According to the International Energy Agency, from 2004-2008, world population increased 5%. During the same period, gross energy production increased 10% with a comparable 10% jump in annual CO2 emissions.
This does not bode well for our energy future.
Yes, we can wring another 4-12% out of every kilowatt we generate by insulating homes and buildings and improving appliance efficiency, reports the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, saving up to $35 billion in the U.S. alone over the next twenty years. Still, as long as population climbs, conservation won't be enough. "The idea that we can trim our energy consumption to come into balance with nature looks increasingly naïve," says population expert Robert Engelman of the environmentalist Worldwatch Institute.
Neither can we afford to meet growing demand by relying primarily on the same problematic energy sources that led to the tragedies in the Gulf or Japan. Radioactive fallout from Japan's crippled reactor has led to fears of it reaching the northwest coast of North America. Gulf coast communities from Louisiana to Florida are still recovering from the oil spill there as the projected clean up and recovery price tag looms at $10 billion or more. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to raise earth's temperature, wreaking havoc on the world's climate from the North Pole to the South. Meanwhile, only 4% of U.S. electricity comes from safe renewable sources like solar, wind and geothermal compared to 45% from coal and 20% from nuclear power plants, as well as 23% from natural gas and 7% from hydroelectric. The percentage of vehicles running on biofuels instead of fossil fuels is almost too small to be measured.
Accelerating the development of clean energy is critical, as is maximizing energy efficiency. But neither strategy will be enough if we don't set our sights on a world where population actually decreases over time.
That may not be as difficult as it seems. Every country that offers easy access to contraceptive and safe abortion services also has a fertility rate of two children per woman or fewer, consistent with a declining population, notes Worldwatch's Engelman. Further, he says, more than two out of five pregnancies worldwide are unintended, suggesting that a world in which women everywhere were fully in control of their childbearing would soon reverse population growth.
What will be difficult, however, is maintaining the federal funding that keeps many family planning programs operating here in the U.S. as well as abroad. The 2011 budget compromise requires Federal lawmakers to cut $38 billion in spending. Though President Obama staunchly supports family planning, Republicans in the House have already proposed more than $200 million in cuts for the international family planning programs the U.S. helps fund abroad. If they succeed, as many as 7 million women could lose access to contraception, reports the non-profit group Population Connection, formerly known as ZPG or Zero Population Growth. Republicans have also proposed eliminating all funding for Title X, the 40-year-old grant program that provides family planning and reproductive health services to American women and men at more than 4,500 health centers nationwide.
Energy demand and population growth go hand in hand. If the U.S. is serious about reducing its energy needs, supporting family planning must be part of the strategy.
Diane MacEachern is the author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World.
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Women must have the ability to manage their own bodies and cannot be considered to have less rights than the eggs they carry. We cannot allow forced breeding like cattle.
The energy issue is important and cannot be separated from health, economy, and national security in many aspects of the term. Actually records show that this year, renewable energy has provided as much energy as nuclear power at 12%. Many countries have more renewable energy and clean energy is an economic advantage in terms of ongoing fuel costs that can be avoided. The extra expense for solar is just in the payoff period, then for two thirds or more of it's guaranteed life, the costs drop to only maintenance, which due to no moving parts, is minimal. Wind power is already lower cost than coal.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/technology-and-impacts/impacts/increasing-renewables-cost.html
Why is that justifiable?
They want as big a share of the energy pie as what we've enjoyed for a century, and they want it all now, retroactively and with good reason: they deserve the opportunity to create the same kind of world we've created, even if it means becoming 'watt squanderers' themselves, just like us... What's good for the goose...
Or we could admit that the fact that we've been 'watt squanderers' ourselves is a heinous enough thing that we must try to convince emerging modernities to not squander as much as we've already done, and we must insist theydo their growing using less energy than we used...
... kind of like having an abortion when you were young and then being virulently anti-abortion for the rest of your life, denying others the opportunity of a second chance you availed yourself of when you had your abortion (that your god, no doubt, already forgave you for, especially since you've now chosen to proselytize for the other side).
Second, one can extrapolate the negative consequences of our unchecked energy usage and know with confidence that the entire world will never be able to enjoy the industrialized west already has. Furthermore, even getting our act together and improving efficiency is likely not enough. Yet the markets continue selling the dream worldwide in the hopes of creating ever more new consumers, all designed on the assumption of infinite resources. On earth unfortunately, this assumption is increasingly as false as it has ever been.
Conquering a world economy based on unlimited growth, unchecked demand, and voracious consumption , all ultimately based on an infinitely expanding human population, is quite another.
Take US for example. Why does anyone think neither party has really done anything about immigration, legal or otherwise? It's because the U.S. economy doesn't know what to do with a shrinking consumer population. We're no better than that old 3rd World stereotype of the woman who bears 20 or more children because she needs more hands to work the fields.
So, instead of changing our economic paradigms to ones far more sustainable than Rabid Rand-ism, we get what we got today. 300 million and rising, filling up every vacant lot, clogging our roads, pushing our already remnant patches of wilderness farther back, and setting the bar ever higher for turning the corner on pollution and cutting carbon emissions.
There is no morality in our nation because it attempts world-wide to advance its own version of western imperialism using maximum financial, and even military force; exactly what Gandhi struggled against.
The only hope for the survival of the USA as a republic is in the relegation of whites to minority status, that is how deep is their commitment to white supremacy and imperialism. In that sense I agree with this poster.
Not to worry, though, wars and famines and such will take their toll: the rich will not have to sully their precious hands, or even be aware of the universal disasters affecting the rest of us, and if that is not fast enough, they have all kinds of biologicals and chemical stocked, not to mention vast numbers of easily manipulated veterans, to used against us, should it prove necessary.
The bullies will survive, even if whites are relegated to minority status.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran
It can be done without recourse to abortion. I believe that is a separate discussion to be had.
To those who say "breakthroughs in cheap energy or increased food production will solve all our problems," what about the rest of life on this planet? Why would we want to create a planet crowded with humans and devoid of many of the other species living here? What exactly would be the point?
Yes, decreasing population creates a problem with some of our economic and social welfare structures, which have been designed for conditions of high population growth. Well, too bad. It was our mistake to be so short-sighted. Sustaining infinite exponential growth was never going to be possible forever - at some point, you have to stop! If that point is when the population is 10 billion, or 100 billion, or a trillion, you will still have to stop and reverse it, and then you will have to deal with the fact that social security no longer works, or that your whole economy is based on "growth." Why not face the issue now, rather than wait until the consequences will be so much worse?
And you also have to fight the religions/churches that encourage marriage and motherhood/parenthood.
Sadly, today, if a woman admits she doesn't want kids, too many people (family, friends) try to change her mind.
A childless woman, never mind one who never married, is often looked at like something is wrong with her.
It has gotten better, but prejudice against the childless by choice is still there.
Thanks so much for your post. For 99.99% of what passes for public discourse, the problem of population growth is never mentioned, yet it is the primary cause of environmental degradation and, at least, a significant factor in the wars which are plaguing the planet. Pretty much, it has been the Elephant in the Room no one wants to talk about, for various reasons. The issue needs to move from the far periphery to front and center. It is the only hope for quality of life, on a long term basis, for the human species.
Would abortion be considered “planning†or unplanned
.