As I’ve previously discussed, the most disconcerting turn in the population debate in recent times (at least in the U.S.) is the anti-immigrant factions that have co-opted it. But the approaching 7 billion mark has generated a new round of population chatter and news stories. At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media,…Continue Reading…
What does a scholar do when his work is cited by a mass murderer? Naturally, he writes an essay about it, which serves as a vehicle to discuss “the vast demographic transformation overtaking the human race.” The scholar’s thesis also stands in contrast to much of the conventional wisdom you read about population issues: We…Continue Reading…
One of these days, we’re going to have an adult, non-alarmist conversation about population. That would be a discussion that avoids Soylent Green imagery and talks, instead, about population in place-specific terms (which is how these guys do it). Most public debate on population, however, is conflated with a list of global concerns (peak oil,…Continue Reading…
Hmm, thanks to the modern diet, plastic take out containers, and our party hardy ways, maybe the planet’s population problem will take care of itself.
Well, not exactly. But this new paper in PNAS, which is bound to make make a splash, finds that slowing population growth could provide 16-29% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change. What surprises me most about the paper’s findings, as Grist reports, is that urbanization can…Continue Reading…
I’m not sure how much you can read into one particular comment thread. But there has been a discernible anti-immigration zealotry expressed by Grist readers over the last week, in response to this post. On the thread, Randy Cunningham pleaded with his fellow greens to be more compassionate. He finally gave up, despairing: Most of…Continue Reading…
[UPDATE: Heh, a day after I wrote my post, this appears in the Guardian] Perhaps unbeknownst to them, Roger Pielke Jr. and Joe Romm agree that population is not an important variable to the climate change equation. There’s a related issue that Roger doesn’t address in his post, when it comes to coupling population with…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, in response to a story in the NY Times, entitled “Sudan Court Fines Woman for Wearing Trousers,” Andy Revkin posted this meta thought at Dot Earth about the future of women in the developing world and how that ties into humanity’s prospects for sustainability: In a broader sense, then, there appears to be simmering…Continue Reading…
Even without climate change and its projected impacts, this would be a major problem.
“The Population Bomb” is number three on Daniel Drezner’s top ten worst books in international relations. First, he [Ehrlich] was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by…Continue Reading…