What is your Family Reproduction Policy (FRP)? If everyone adopted your policy for having children, what would it mean for energy consumption in the U.S. and the world?
A slight change in our thinking about how many children to have can have a major impact on life in the rest of the twenty-first century, and may mean the difference between whether we make it or not.
The United States uses approximately 21% of energy consumed in the world, but only has about four and a half percent of the population. We are therefore seriously "over budget." If we were to use energy at the same rate as the rest of the world, we’d have to cut back to about one fifth of what we currently use. To get an idea what this means, go around and remove four out of five of the light bulbs in your home. Pretend you don’t get to use them any more.
Get the picture? If we tried to balance energy use and give everyone on the planet their fair share of energy, those in the developed world would have to cut back pretty radically. In theory, we could just increase energy production enough that we wouldn’t have to do that, but that would imply increasing the total amount of energy produced by nearly 80%. A huge problem with that is that 85% of our energy comes from fossil fuels. (This figure comes from the Energy Information Administration forecasts.) We can’t radically increase energy production and solve the global warming problem at the same time.
In order to solve global warming and balance energy use across the globe, we have to reduce our energy use by 80% plus we either cut another 85% of our remaining energy use by conserving or we switch to renewable sources.
Take out another 8 out of 10 remaining light bulbs to represent conserving energy.
Now, you might say, "Rich, I’m an American and I’m entitled to use five times as much energy as someone in the third-world. And, I’m sure that technology will somehow solve the global warming problem. We just have to trust in industry."
Right. We’ll just go on, now.
Every problem with the environment is made considerable worse by the overpopulation problem. I know you’ve been told that there’s no problem. Here’s the scoop:
- Fish catches in two out of three of the world’s oceans are declining. That’s not because there are less boats out there fishing. The oceans with declining fish catches are the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Check a map. Which oceans are closest to the U.S.?
- In those oceans, the top two predation levels out of eleven have been effectively wiped out and replaced by humans. We eat what the top predators in the ocean used to. At this rate we will be eating plankton by the end of the century. Remember that the next time you have popcorn shrimp.
- Humans can no longer be fed with organic products produced without fertilizers and pesticides. Nitrogen-based fertilizers, in particular, are responsible for allowing us to grow on what would otherwise be non-arable land. Do you eat organic foods? Healthy and nutritious, but not available if everyone wanted them. There’s too many people for that.
I could go on. The short version is that too many humans are taking too much from the environment. Conservation will only get you so far. You can’t keep halving consumption indefinitely.
Overpopulation limits our options for dealing with our energy problems. Suppose we wanted to cut back the use of fossil fuels. Let’s say we wanted to do this with a mix of cutting back our energy consumption in the United States to half its current levels over the next 100 years, and make up the difference by converting to renewable resources (and possibly nuclear energy, if we can figure out how to make that work, a big if.) How easy is that going to be?
How easy depends on population policy. What we decide at a personal level says a lot about what we are willing to do to deal with environmental issues. A low FRP is an indication that we are serious about the problem. A high one says we don’t care.
To take an optimistic scenario, let’s say that we look to achieve zero population growth by 2050. Since there is momentum in the population numbers, this creates a top population of about 9.1 billion people in 2100. In this figure is the expectation that replacement level in 2100 will be around 2.05 children per woman. I chose this as my baseline for calculating impact, because we can see from that what additional impact it has to have an FRP above this level.
Starting from 2.05, let’s calculate the impact of changing FRP from 2.05 up to 2.15 children per woman. The impact isn’t just the number of children per person, it’s the number of children that his or her children have, and so on, over a period of time. In the 100 years between now and 2107, there would be five generations of children, and all of those children could be alive in 2107, given that life expectancies are pushing 100 years. If all those children were around, how much energy would they be using?
The number grows exponentially. Just adding a little each time creates a huge amount of change. For example, the change from 2.05 to just 2.11 children on average means an increase of one additional member of this family over a 100-year period. A FRP of 3 children per family in each generation means an impact of almost four times as many humans in that family. If zero population growth means a total of 9.1 billion humans in 2100, what would a family reproduction policy of 3 children mean over that period of time?
Let’s start with a much lower number. The current level of fertility is around 2.35. According to the United Nations long-range report on population (which I’ve used throughout for population figures), even this level is unsustainable:
Constant-fertility scenario: This scenario takes off in 2050 from the constant-fertility scenario of the 2002 Revision. In it fertility is maintained constant at the level it had in each country as of 1995-2000. This scenario is prepared merely for illustrative purposes since its results show that the population dynamics it embodies are unsustainable. . . .
The population of the more developed regions as a whole is projected to decreased by half in the constant-fertility scenario, passing from 1.2 billion in 2000 to 0.6 billion in 2300. In sharp contrast, extremely rapid population growth is projected for the less developed regions, whose population rises from 4.9 billion in 2000 to 134 trillion in 2300, 115 trillion of which are projected to live in Africa. Indeed, a country such a Niger, whose total fertility in 2000 was estimated at 8 children per woman, is projected to see its population increase by a factor of more than 2 million over the next 300 years under the constant-fertility scenario. The populations of countries such as Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Somalia, Uganda or Yemen are also multiplied by hundreds of thousands under that scenario. Clearly, such growth is not sustainable and will not occur over the long run.
An FRP of 3 would mean a four-fold increase in impact over 2.05. If 2.35 is unsustainable, what is 3.00? Even if it would work, it would mean four times as many people using energy, or an increase in demand of a little over 2 million BTU per family.
To return to the original question, how easy is it going to be to cut back 50% on energy use? If everyone in the country maintained a FRP of 2, then we would each have to use one half as much energy in 2100. That would not be pleasant, but it would be practical. If we maintained an FRP of 3, we would each have to use 10% as much energy. That just isn’t in the realm of possibility, even if that level of fertility were sustainable. Remember, energy is related to wealth. A 10% level equates to universal poverty in the United States.
Earlier, you took out nearly all the light bulbs in your home. Would you like to be able to put some of them back?