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from the ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
Jason Plautz writes at The Atlantic that the more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment. "And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," says Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau. Even as the population passes 7.2 billion and is projected by the United Nations to reach 10.9 billion by the end of the century, policymakers have been unable—or unwilling—to discuss population in tandem with climate change. Why? Because "talking about population control requires walking a tightrope." writes Plautz. "It can all too easily sound like a developed world leader telling people in the developing world that they should stop having children—especially because much of the population boom is coming from regions like sub-Saharan Africa." Just look at what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2009, when as secretary of State she acknowledged the overpopulation issue during a discussion with Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh. Clinton praised another panelist for noting "that it's rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning."
A 2010 study looked at the link between policies that help women plan pregnancies and family size and global emissions. The researchers predicted that lower population growth could provide benefits equivalent to between 16 and 29 percent of the emissions reduction needed to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius warming by 2050, the warning line set by international scientists. But the benefits also come through easing the reduced resources that could result from climate change. The U.N. IPCC report notes the potential for climate-related food shortages, with fish catches falling anywhere from 40 to 60 percent and wheat and maize taking a hit, as well as extreme droughts. With resources already stretched in some areas, the IPCC laid out the potential for famine, water shortages and pestilence. Still, the link remains a "very sensitive topic," says Karen Hardee, "At the global policy level you can't touch population … but what's been heartening is that over the last few years it's not just us, but people from the countries themselves talking about this."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Saturday November 01 2014, @09:00PM
This was covered by the BBC News on Mon 2 Feb 2009 [bbc.co.uk]. I've had a while to think about it since then and I believe that energy consumption is key to development [soylentnews.org]. In particular, advocating birth control prior to industrialization will fail [soylentnews.org]:-
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @09:24PM
Correlation is not caucasian.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @10:17PM
Energy use is, in general, higher in countries with more education.
Birth rates are, in general, lower in countries with more education.
Energy use and birth rates seem to be symptoms of the same thing: education. You don't need a public sector family-planning intervention to lower birth rates: just teach the women reading, writing, arithmetic, and science, and give them equal access to the job market, and the birth rate will plummet on its own.
Civilization bonks itself on the head with the Darwin-Fairy's Wand of Natural Selection. The more civilized it gets, the faster it gets outstripped by the barbarians' capacity to breed like rabbits.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 02 2014, @05:53AM
if you plot birth rate against energy consumption
Correlation doesn't imply causation. As I noted the last time you mentioned this "metabolic theory of ecology", labor force participation by women completely explains this phenomena without requiring a model with poor matching to reality.
Nor does the theory explain the natural world where higher energy consumption tends to correlate strongly with higher successful reproduction rates. For example, I work seasonally in Yellowstone National Park. The various ruminants of the park (bison, elk, deer, mountain goats, mountain sheep, etc) have various constraints on population growth and size, including predation by wolves and bears, disease, human kills (hunting and population control), and winter die-offs. The last is the dominant one, particularly for bison (who really are only controlled by die-offs in winter and human culling of the herds when the population gets larger than certain negotiated limits). Winter die-offs are primarily caused by difficulty of acquiring food. While bison are able to dig through snow for food, it requires energy to do so. And when they get less energy from the food they eat, than they burn clearing snow to get at it, then they will starve. This leads to substantial population growth during mild winters and severe die-offs during harsh winters. In addition, some of the human culls of bison are triggered in winter time by bison leaving park lands, looking for food by moving to private or public grazing lands.
The metabolic theory of ecology completely misses this correlation between winter food supply and successful reproduction. An even more glaring example is reproduction of small animals, such as microbes or mice. Reproduction will occur at near exponential rates until the food source is consumed.
people in energy poverty
People in energy poverty also happen to be people in genuine poverty with fewer economic alternatives available for women.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday November 02 2014, @09:31PM
The Metabolic theory of ecology [wikipedia.org] extends Kleiber's law [wikipedia.org] by including energy consumed externally to an organism.
It is widely observed that larger organisms live longer and consume energy more slowly per unit mass. The Metabolic theory of ecology extends this to virtual organisms. Above a certain threshold (which I should locate or calculate sometime), a virtual tribe has an average lifespan and lives at a pace at which the physical manifestation cannot sustainably breed.
Therefore, if you want to reduce population, push energy consumption above the threshold. The major problem here is that a fixed energy budget and a declining population leads a runaway effect which leads to extinction.
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 03 2014, @03:08PM
The Metabolic theory of ecology extends Kleiber's law by including energy consumed externally to an organism.
That is absurd from several angles. Humanity's metabolic rate and mass hasn't actually changed much. That point of view remains valid no matter what degree of energy prevalence or larger system is present. Why would we expect humanity's reproduction rate to change just because it is immersed in a larger system? Do the bacteria in your gut reproduce many orders of magnitude slower just because they are part of your body's ecosystem? No, they do not. In fact, if they did significantly slow down in reproduction rate, then our digestive systems would become much more vulnerable to invading disease organisms.
Further, this "virtual organism" almost completely consists of things like buildings and roads, not people who make up a miniscule amount by mass. So far that stuff has not had any trouble reproducing in your "virtual" sense and most of it by mass has an effective lifespan considerably shorter than a human life.
Third, this is a misuse of Kleiber's law since it's not intended to model "virtual" phenomena like social behavior or the construction of infrastructure. Do coral organisms reproduce slower on the Great Barrier Reef than they do on small reefs? Do trees in a forest grow slower, if the forest covers a continent instead of a small field?
Fourth, metabolic rate only has a loose correlation with longevity. There's no reason to expect that humanity has a fixed lifespan (especially given how much that lifespan has changed significantly up and down over history already). Prevalent energy use correlates with higher technology levels which correlates with longevity IMHO.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mojo chan on Sunday November 02 2014, @12:11PM
Bangladesh has managed to lower its fertility rate from a high of 7 to around 2.2 now: https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:BGD:IND:PAK&hl=en&dl=en [google.co.uk]
They did that through education. According to this [worldbank.org] Bangladeshi are only using around 260kWh/year/person, compared to around 13,250kWh/year/person in the US. Even relatively efficient countries are around the 5-8000kWh/year mark. So, energy consumption is not linked to the birth rate, education is.
Since the 60s there have been multiple programmes in Bangladesh educating people about contraception and the benefits of having a small family. Women have been empowered to refuse their husband's wishes to have more children, and having a small but well cared for and educated family has become the model. Bangladesh is still very poor, but the low fertility rate is helping to change that. India has realized the same thing and made major progress.
As for world population, we are nearly at the point where the number of children in the world is levelling off. The actual percentage of the population that is under 18 has been falling since the 60s, and the absolute number will level off around the 2 billion mark. By the end of the century world population will be stable around the 10 billion mark. Sounds like a lot, but most of the growth will be in Africa and that continent can cope if it is developed. We can't be complacent, we need to make sure development happens with sustainable farming and clean energy, but fortunately Africa is quite well suited to those two things. It's a challenge, but not the end of the world.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 02 2014, @01:22PM
Having said that, his conclusion that making having children less valuable will be correlated with a later reduction in population growth, and that industrialisation can be part of that, does have some merit. And that increased energy consuption is part of industrialisation. However, his graphs, in particularly his regressions, are at best meaningless.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves