Population panic lets rich people off the hook
for the climate crisis they are fuelling
George
Monbiot
Rising consumption by the affluent has a far greater
environmental impact than the birth rate in poorer nations
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 26 Aug
2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 26 Aug 2020 19.34 BST
When a
major study was published last month, showing that the global population is
likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I
naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the
world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it
appears to have got worse.
Next week
the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision
not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental
collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so
virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that
they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of
climate breakdown denial”.
It is true
that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of
particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale
agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water
and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people
claim.
The formula
for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely
misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT). The
global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year.
Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in
population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption. But
population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest
people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource
use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny
fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
Yet it is
widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown. Panic about
population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising
consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.
At this
year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who
is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats,
some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the
global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there
was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.” I doubt that any of
those who nodded and clapped were thinking, “yes, I urgently need to
disappear”.
In 2019,
Goodall appeared in an advertisement for British Airways, whose customers
produce more greenhouse gas emissions on one flight than many of the world’s
people generate in a year. If we had the global population of 500 years ago
(around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers,
our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion
alive today.
She
proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the
attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t
want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people
away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.
The
excessive emphasis on population growth has a grim history. Since the clergymen
Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century,
poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and
wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.
Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause
through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like
rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters,
wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”,
and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
Another of
the charity’s patrons, Paul Ehrlich, whose incorrect predictions about mass
famine helped to provoke the current population panic, once argued that the US
should “coerce” India into “sterilising all Indian males with three or more
children”, by making food aid conditional on this policy. This proposal was
similar to the brutal programme that Indira Gandhi later introduced, with
financial support from the UN and the World Bank. Foreign aid from the UK was
funding crude and dangerous sterilisation in India as recently as 2011, on the
grounds that this policy was helping to “fight climate change”. Some of the
victims of this programme allege that they were forced to participate. At the
same time, the UK government was pouring billions of pounds of aid into
developing coal, gas and oil plants, in India and other nations. It blamed the
poor for the crisis it was helping to cause.
Malthusianism
slides easily into racism. Most of the world’s population growth is happening
in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial
powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”,
“degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”. These claims have been
revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white
replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer
the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer
brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It
is inherently racist.
The far
right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and
the UK. This too has a grisly heritage: the pioneering conservationist Madison
Grant promoted, alongside his environmental work, the idea that the “Nordic
master race” was being “overtaken” in the US by “worthless race types”. As
president of the Immigration Restriction League, he helped to engineer the
vicious 1924 Immigration Act.
But, as
there are some genuine ecological impacts of population growth, how do we
distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and
racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is
female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is
extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
So a good
way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at
their record of campaigning against structural poverty. Have they contested the
impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against
corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer
countries, leaving almost nothing behind, or the financial sector in Britain’s
processing of money stolen abroad? Or have they simply sat and watched as
people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
Before
long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting
over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic
transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a
dearth of key workers. Until then, we should resist attempts by the rich to
demonise the poor.
• George
Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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