Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Malthus, Ehrlich and The Club of Rome might have gotten everything wrong, but Waikato Professor Michael Cameron thinks we need to consider their work, and consider imposing curbs on population growth, if we want to prevent a future food crisis caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Curb population growth to tackle climate change: now that’s a tough ask
January 25, 2021 5.50am AEDT
Michael P. Cameron
Associate Professor in Economics, University of WaikatoPopulation growth plays a role in environmental damage and climate change.
…
The English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus laid out a compelling argument against overpopulation in his famous 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population
…
But his essay could not have been timed worse, coming near the beginning of the longest period of sustained global population growth in history. This was driven in part by vast improvements in agricultural productivity over time.
This idea of hard environmental limits to population growth was resurrected in the 20th century in publications such as The Population Bomb, a 1968 book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, and The Limits to Growth, a 1972 publication commissioned by the Club of Rome think-tank.
The implication of these treatises on the perils of population growth suggest population control is an important measure to limit carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and global climate change.
…
That leaves population control, but the issues here are no less challenging. Government-led population control presents serious moral questions for democratic countries.
That’s why the only country to have undertaken a (moderately) successful form of population control is China, through the One Child Policy that ran from 1979 to 2015. Over that period, the total fertility rate in China roughly halved.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/curb-population-growth-to-tackle-climate-change-now-thats-a-tough-ask-153382
To be fair the professor goes on to say that prosperity may be enough to limit population growth, though I find it personally repugnant to see China’s disastrous and cruel one child policy described as any kind of success.
Is there a hard limit to population growth? There must be a limit, it is impossible the Earth could support an infinite number of people. But 200 years of failed serial doomsaying suggests those who worry we are approaching a hard limit to global population are almost certainly wrong.
what do we need that for. The Neo Malthusian misanthropes have been wrong on their population estimates for over 50 years. They will miss their latest prediction as well. We will not hit 9 billion partcularly after COVID. World population will decline to about 6 billion by 2100
The last estimate I heard from the UN has 9 billion by 2050, declining after that.
When I was younger, the UN came out with a new population estimate every 10 years. One thing I noticed was that every single time they came out with a new estimate, the top number was smaller, and occurred sooner.
I have no doubt that the peak population will occur prior to 2040, perhaps as early as 2030, and it could be as low as 8 billion.
I read an article a few months back that claimed that there was going to be a drop in births in the US due to the COVID19 lockdowns. The article predicted up to 300,000 fewer births.
Birth spikes that occurred after blackouts and other types of disasters that locked people into their homes for a few days are different from the COVID lockdowns. The disasters were short term events and people knew that they would have jobs to go back to as soon as the lights came back.
With the COVID lockdowns, everybody is scared about the future. People who are scared about the future put off having kids.
David Attenborough too.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/01/17/population-bomb-davidism/
Population control has only ever been successfully managed by western countries, where people need to manage the trade-off of their self derived income with the costs of raising children. Any increase in population of western countries in from immigration from non-western countries.
If you examine countries such as China, the population growth was not limited by people’s own income, but instead was driven by the increase in government assistance provided by having a bigger family, which is a function of communism. We see the same situation on smaller scales with social housing and welfare dependent people in western countries, which creates the same reward structure to have more children to receive baby bonuses, more welfare payments and even a larger public house.
The only reason China needed to introduce population control measures was to combat the population driving forces that are inherent to socialism / communism.
Germany had ‘successful’ population control program, as did Stalin in the Ukraine, and come to think of it, Pol Pot did pretty well, oh yes, then there was a good program in Uganda.
…the “cynacial one”
Yes indeed!
The good perfessor is welcome to compete for A Darwin Award.
The limit to population growth is already well known and successful. It’s wealth, which comes from free market capitalism. Countries that have practiced this kind of wealth creation have long since reached the stage where they aren’t reproducing anywhere near replacement level. Replacement reproduction is 2.1 children per woman, but countries like Italy are only at 1.1 per woman which means genetic Italians will be extinct in just a few generations. The rest of the modern world isn’t far behind.
Unfortunately it is quite possible that the Statists do not want to”limit population growth” but to substantially reduce it. And you will love it, they will tell you.
Given current population declines in Greece, Japan, Hungry and Russia, perhaps a more accurate headline would have been “Even ignoring Uighur concentration camps, China uses totalitarian measures to control population”
Hello Japan? Anyone still there?
Don’t worry. After all the human provided food reserves are gone, It only takes 30 days for the world to starve to death. It will be quick, ugly and dirty,
Typical economist… 50 years behind the times..
https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-babies-per-woman-change-in-the-world/
https://www.gapminder.org/answers/the-rapid-growth-of-the-world-population-when-will-it-slow-down/
Ad hominem comments are not okay, but I look at the photo of Cameron, and I think to myself: Has this guy ever had a leg over he didn’t pay for?
Those with low self esteem just hate braggarts who can walk up straight, don’t they?
The basic idea is false as every country that has developed an industrial society and raised the general standard of living significantly and nor interfered too greatly with women’s business has greatly reduced the birth rate – without even trying.
Give the women an education.
Hmmm… population of Germany, Japan and S Korea is falling… birthrate in UK well below replacement rate.
Please not this is grounded in complete ignorance of what has been the case for years. There is a bubble caused by infant mortality reduction, and the cause of the bubble has shrunk the population birth rate that followed. When their children stop dying, women stop having them. The women can then contribute to economic life of their country and so things get better faster. Also increasing availability of cheap energy and machines means less manual labour is needed.
This was well described years ago by the late great Hans Rosling. This guy is an opinionated idiot, on the facts he has clearly not studied. Watch an intelligent and much greater man who viewed the world in the round, and on the facts, not what he believed. The World being influenced by self promoting ignoramuses who find a home in grant harvesting Univsities with no academic standards of note, primarily an education industry keeping the children of the middle classes off the streets, as they are unqualified for real work that adds value to their societies. Here is another one………strong on opinion, hard of research.. Hans is better:
SHORT VERSION: https://www.youtube.com/watch/2LyzBoHo5EI
FULL PRESENTATION OF “DON’T PANIC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
Most 1st world countries have negative population growth except for immigration. He is thus suggesting the cutting of immigration to these countries (although that is not what he says), and efforts to raise the wealth of 2nd & third world countries, which leads to decline in population growth.
Here’s a fairly easy experiment; Grow some hearty bugs. Perhaps cockroaches, or fruit-flies in a finite, closed environment, with a finite amount of food over time. There will come a time when the population simply stops expanding.
There are so many problems with your thought experiment that it’s hard to know where to begin and it’s impossible to believe that you are putting it forth with honest intentions.
I was curious to see what people were saying about this article in its comments. Big surprise, there is no conversation at “The Conversation”
That’s why the have like what, a billion 5?
Haven’t there been attempts to introduce or convince people to adopt population controls in the past, and haven’t most of them failed, especially in regions where populations are growing fastest. I may not have all my details right, but I’m thinking of countries like Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, and Mexico, to name a few. So how are governments going to get people to change their minds and embrace family planning?
Well, if it was even “moderately” successful, why did they abandon it?
Apparently the myopic professor seems to think infanticide and backstreet abortions of female foetuses is “OK” …. to save the planet.
I’m still trying to think of right word for what occurred in the Capitol.
It wasn’t an insurrection, nor a riot, it was simply a show of force.
It was a “Tea Party”. And the royals were not amused.
He could start by “curbing” his own appetite, I would suggest 500 less calories a day would get rid of that double chin in a few months. If a young man like him can’t manage his own consumption, why does he expect us to take him seriously?
Avoiding a food crisis, one burger at a time.
The Eugenics Movement was very fashionable in the US until Hilter rebranded it as the “Final Solution”.
After WWII the movement resurfaced as “Population Control”. When that fizzled, the movement morphed into “Global Warming”. When the warming failed, the fashionable elite hit upon “Climate Change’ as the ultimate solution to control populations.
Limiting population growth works from two directions.
The first is decreasing births.
The second is increasing deaths.
At the moment, the Sars-CoV-2 virus is helping the second way along.
If you think about it, the second way is the only way that will work. Productivity goes down dramatically as age increases.
Decreasing births leads to a demographic crisis where the young/society can no longer support the elderly.
The “second way” will eventually be chosen. Whether society will survive it is a moot point, as [this] society looks to be approaching its end-point anyway.