Yesterday afternoon, Drudge’s main headline, which can drive millions of clicks, claimed that “SCIENTISTS CALL FOR POPULATION CONTROL.” The link was to a story by Bloomberg’s Eric Roston, with the headline “Earth needs fewer people to beat the climate crisis, scientists say.”
Judging by the all-caps Drudge headline, one might suspect that this is another example of an obvious hoax, a la the whole let’s-eat-babies thing. But unfortunately it’s not: the source for this claim is an open letter signed by over 11,000 scientists published Tuesday in BioScience.
In the letter, the scientists provide two images of the climate’s vital signs, one of human changes like population growth, GDP, energy consumption, deforestation and other indicators of our consumption. The second figure is a suite of graphs showing how the planet has been responding, showing CO2 and other emission concentrations, temperatures, ice melt, sea level rise, etc.
Having laid out the problem, the scientists then present six very concise policy recommendations for avoiding climate catastrophe. For those who have been paying attention, there are no surprises: replacing fossil fuels with renewables, phasing out short-lived climate pollutants, protecting biodiversity, shifting to a mostly plant-based diet, ending economic overconsumption of natural resources, and finally, stabilizing and reducing population via policies that “make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women.”
Unfortunately, Roston’s relatively brief write-up, like most of the other coverage of the scientists’ letter, quoted the part about stabilizing populations, but not the part making it clear that they’re not talking about imposing draconian one-child policies. Bloomberg’s headline compounded that limited view.
Providing reproductive health services and making gender equity the norm are hardly, as Roston describes, entering “the politically fraught territory of population control.” Tell someone you want to kill people to save the planet and you’re a movie villain. Tell them you want to provide education, reproductive autonomy and gender equality for women, and you’re just the average international development wonk. It’s is good science, but admittedly, that idea doesn’t make for a Drudge-grabbing headline.
And even if that weren’t the case, the graphs provided in the short piece make it clear that it’s not population that’s the problem, but overconsumption by the rich. It’s not people in the developing world where birth rates are high who are causing climate change.
Looking at the graphs, you see that while population has increased, per capita CO2 emissions actually fell between 1980 and 2000, then rose until 2012 or so, and then began falling again.
And if per capita emissions eventually fall to zero, then population isn’t a factor. After all, if everyone is using renewables, it doesn’t matter how many people there are plugging in. And if no one’s eating meat like Americans do now, then feeding the global population doesn’t need to be a climate killer.
Yes, there are some fundamental constraints on resource use, but the fact that humans can invent and use technology to make more efficient use of natural resources means that population growth is not, in and of itself, a problem.
What is a problem, the paper itself points out, is what (white) people eat, how we keep our homes lit and cool (coal electricity and short-live-climate-polluting air-conditioning), and how we get from place to place (gas-guzzlers.)
The problem isn’t people. It’s rich people.