Bill Ryerson: The Challenges Presented by Global Population Growth | Peak Prosperity
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We are adding about 225,000 people to the dinner table every night who were not there last night. So that is net growth of the world’s population on an annual basis of a new Egypt every year. In other words, 83 million additional people net growth annually. And that from a climate change perspective alone is a huge increment. Most of this growth is occurring in poor countries, so on a per capita level, the people being added to the population have much lower impact than, say, if Europe were growing at that rate. But nevertheless, just from a climate perspective, with most of that 83 million additional people in low per capita greenhouse-gas output countries – this is between now and 2050 – at this rate of growth, it is the climate equivalent of adding two United States to the planet.
Clearly resources like oil, coal, and gas are non-renewable and will eventually run out or become more and more expensive and therefore not reliable as a source of energy. But what is the renewable long-term sustainability or the carrying capacity of the environment in each geographic territory, and globally? What is the current and projected future human demand for those resources and do we have sufficient natural resources to meet our needs?
Doing this kind of accounting is not difficult. There are very good robust scientific designs for measuring resource capacity and human demand, and projecting out what do we need to do in some time in the next few decades in order to get from what is clearly population overshoot to achieving something that is in balance. Because as long as we are in overshoot – and the global footprint network’s calculation is we are now at 50% overshoot – that means we are digging into the savings account of our ecological systems, as you mentioned; the fisheries being one, forests being another.
We are eating into the capital to sustain the growing population.
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Chris Martenson: I find the arguments that more people equates to more growth, which therefore I think translates into more prosperity, is how that thought train goes has a logical break in it for me.
Because at some point, after a certain moment, growth itself actually steals from prosperity. They are both funded from the same source. And the real question is would you rather live in a nation of a hundred million people with just absolutely abundant resources for a very prosperous lifestyle, or in a nation of a billion people where everybody is sort of fighting over a relatively tiny share? To me that is a self-answering question. But you outlined that the process here would be to A) recognize that there is a limit that we have to live within, and then secondarily B) to create a strategy around that which involves a survey of some sort. What do we have? What kind of a lifestyle can we sustain given what we have here and within these boundaries we are talking about? And then the third thing is C) you would have to then manage to that.
And that analogy I have here is that we have recognized that there are limits to fisheries in the United States and we have been managing those fisheries for decades. And just a month ago they announced the closure, the complete closure, of the Grand Banks Fisheries because they had collapsed completely – just illustrating to me that even when you have the intention to manage carefully even a renewable resource, which fisheries potentially are, there is still obviously some learnings that are going to have to happen there. Which is kind of a long way of asking when is a good time to get started on this, do you think?
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Bill Ryerson: Nor did you hear much about the climate change. It is possible to make a subject taboo by having enough money thrown at PR around that issue being unacceptable to discuss. And indeed, that is what has happened.
There is a big money machine cranking out people going on talk shows saying population is not the problem, people who are concerned about population are either racist or in favor of free sex with contraception or whatever. And trying to make it controversial so that it gets off the table of the global community’s agenda. And instead allows these self-serving interests to continue to profit from population growth.
Most people in the world do not profit from population growth. But there are a few who do. And of course, when you stop and think about who profits from population growth, one is real estate developers. The builders of houses clearly think population growth is a great idea because it means more housing starts. And that is how they measure their welfare.
There are others, land owners, who think the more people there are, then the more demand there will be for my land, and that means the price of land is going to go up. Indeed, that is the case. And there are people in the energy business who say the more people there are, the more demand there will be for my product, so I will make more money. And that is the case.
So there are monied interests and there are also religious interests who are fighting the whole idea that population might have any relevance to the future of humanity and putting out a huge amount of literature on the subject on a daily basis.