It’s time to ditch the generations-long argument between those who blame overpopulation and those who worry about consumption
- John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor
By a remarkable coincidence, just as governments, campaigners and business owners are meeting in Egypt to address climate breakdown today, the world is officially crashing past the symbolic 8 billion population milestone . This means global population is on its way to 10 billion or more by the turn of the century.
But there will be no attempt by countries at Cop27 to connect the inexorable growth of human numbers with the seemingly unstoppable rise in temperatures. Despite the fact that the several billion more people expected to be alive in 70 years’ time will put more pressure on resources and will produce far more emissions, the population explosion is yet again being ignored, sidestepped or denied by world leaders.
Part of this is down to sensitivity about talking about human numbers. History is littered with violent governments trying to force sterilisation on vulnerable people. Suggestions, too, that human numbers be cut have often been peddled by authoritarian regimes and far-right extremists, and genuine concern today in rich countries is often met with accusations of racism or eco-fascism.
Yet as the scientist James Lovelock was fond of saying, anyone who failed to see the connection between climate and population was “either ignorant or hiding from the truth”, adding: “These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
Until now, the orthodox western intellectual argument has been that the number of people does not matter as much as how people use resources. Consumption and inequality are the problem, not population size. True, the wealthiest 10% consume about 20 times more energy overall than the bottom 10%. So of course the rich must change their behaviour. But making climate breakdown all about consumption has become an excuse for countries to do nowhere near enough to reduce their populations.
The hard fact is that in an age of climate breakdown, human numbers matter. And the ecological impact of another 2-3 billion humans will be immense.
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