Curbing population growth will do little to solve the climate crisis
I am hugely disappointed to see John Vidal suggesting that slowing population growth can help solve the climate crisis, when he fully acknowledges that the rich generate orders of magnitude more emissions than the poor (It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate, 15 November). Population growth will cause many problems, not least increased resource consumption, but our ability to “solve” climate change in the here and now has nothing to do with future population growth because of the relative timescales involved. To argue otherwise is not controversial, it is merely wrong.
We have less than 10 years to bend the curve downwards on emissions, whereas doing the same with population is impossible. As the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling made clear, global heating is the fault of the overconsumption of the richest billion people on Earth and the next richest billion trying to adopt the same way of life. It has very little to do with the poorest billions, where future population growth is concentrated.
Solving global heating will only be possible through a rapid transition of the energy economy by the rich, and an adoption of those technologies by the poor in due course – something that fossil fuel countries and companies do not want us to do.
We absolutely need to improve the health, education and rights of women and children to help bend down the curve of population growth. But we must not be deluded into thinking that that helps us in the current transition of our energy economy, without which any population reduction in 50-100 years is simply too late.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “consensus” on population that Vidal refers to is weakened by the knowledge that the fossil fuel lobby is intense within the UN process, and attempting to refocus attention away from an energy transition and on to population is precisely what it wants in order to achieve further delay.
We must continue to focus on removing fossil fuels from our economies, because if we don’t, even if the population stood still, we would blast past 3C degrees of heating in the next 78 years regardless. In the time constraint we have, population growth is an irrelevance.Ian BrownLondon
• John Vidal compares the energy use of the wealthiest 10% to the poorest 10% (about 20 times). But it is not only energy that is overconsumed disproportionately by us – it is meat, cement, plastics, timber, lithium, clothes, etc. Most of the population growth is happening in underdeveloped countries, so its impact on energy use will be small compared with usage in richer countries. In the study that Vidal refers to, it is noted that the energy consumption of someone in the poorest 20% of the UK is still higher than all but the top 16% wealthiest in India. Those numbers provide a clearer idea of where the largest impact is coming from.
But the biggest problems are the trends: population growth is slowing and peaking, but our overconsumption of resources is constantly growing. One problem is diminishing (albeit slowly), the other is accelerating. It is clear that the planet can’t even sustain one billion of our environment-devouring western lifestyles.
Perhaps we should clean up our backyard before we go preaching with a holier-than-thou attitude to other countries. Some of them are literally sinking because of us.Daniel RodriguezAsh Vale, Surrey
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