8 Billion People: What Population Growth Means for Climate
We need a different kind of change
Have you ever seen the famous “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures? Here’s a good rendition of it on Wikipedia. It shows steady temperatures for about 10,000 years, then a sudden spike in the last century.
Now, take a look at the global population graph on Statista.
Notice any similarities? Yes, it also shows a fairly steady picture until the last one hundred years or so when the population quadrupled from 2 billion people on Earth to 8 billion people on Earth as of yesterday.
Population Growth Restricts Our Options
This is not causal. Or at least, that’s not the point I want to make. Population growth certainly adds pressure to the climate change challenge as more and more people need the energy and the food that are fundamental drivers of carbon emissions and, therefore, climate change. But there is something far more important about population growth — whether or not it caused climate change, population growth has certainly restricted our options for solving it.
We Can’t Shrink Our Way Out of This
What population growth means is that we won’t be able to shrink our way out of climate change. For every step we take in the way of conservation, a countervailing force is present. Reduce overall consumption by 10%? Great idea, but in a few short years, the population will have grown by 10%, thereby reversing any progress that was made.
Many people argue that we need to reduce consumption to get climate change under control. Presumably, they mean we must reduce the consumption of the food and energy that drive climate-changing emissions. That energy includes not only direct use, such as driving cars, heating homes, and lighting lights, but also indirect use in the form of products we buy and use. Phones, personal care products, furniture, houses, clothing… all these and more represent consumption. They are the things we use to live modern life, and each one makes its contribution to emissions in the manufacturing, distribution, and use process. Taken together, all of these represent consumption.
People, organizations, and reports like to tell us to “use less” and change our lifestyle. An example of how this works is in a report from the Brookings Institution:
“An easy framework for thinking about lifestyle changes, developed by Felix Creutzig and others, is Avoid-Shift-Improve. Avoidance is best understood as reducing the overall level of consumption. For example, a key “ask” of consumers is to avoid long-haul and medium-haul flights, as these have considerable carbon emissions associated with them. Smaller houses, reductions in food waste, and living car-free (thanks to the availability of car sharing through businesses like Uber) can be added to this list. On shifting, use of public transport, shifting diets to reduce beef and lamb consumption, and buying local produce are part of the answer. On improving energy efficiency, transitioning to electric cars and purchasing sustainably produced products are the main drivers.”
If you think about it, however, both avoiding and shifting — or what I call “shrinking” — will be reversed by population growth. Don’t get me wrong — avoiding and shifting are good things to do, but as a strategy for reversing climate change, they will never do.
You see, avoiding and shifting are essentially quantitative solutions. The problem is that quantitative solutions can be reversed by quantitative forces, and population growth is certainly one of those. While it may be theoretically possible to control population growth through draconian political and social policies, world and national governments seem unlikely to impose such policies. A better strategy would be to accept what is unlikely to change, and figure out solutions that work given those assumed conditions.
Qualitative Change Is Essential
The Brookings Institution report I just quoted points the way. Not avoid or shift, but rather the third method — improve. In other words, forget the quantitative solutions and make qualitative changes instead. Replace gasoline cars with electric vehicles. Replace gas appliances with electric ones. Replace coal-fired power plants with solar and wind generators. These would all be improvements in Brookings’ language, but what they amount to is a truly qualitative change. No longer are we counting on people to do less of what they do, but rather, to live their lives in different, better ways.
Any solution that relies on quantitative change will eventually be reversed by population growth. Reduce consumption by 10%, and as soon as the population is back up 10%, you have in effect no change. I suspect it was this reality that prompted one commenter on a Medium story of mine who said that the target for reducing consumption is 70% less than current levels. Such a reduction in consumption would render population growth less important for several decades as a driver of climate change, but achieving that is unlikely at best. You can’t turn your thermostat down by 70%. You can’t eat 70% less food. People still need to live their lives.
Qualitative changes, on the other hand, neutralize quantitative factors like population growth. When the electricity used to produce an EV, including all the supply chain materials and production, comes from emissions-free sources like solar, and when the use of the vehicle is itself emissions-free, it hardly matters how many people “consume” that product — at least from the standpoint of emissions. The same is true for electric appliances like heat pumps, electric stoves, and electric baseboard heating. If the qualitative change is that the energy comes from emission-free sources, the number of these appliances doesn’t matter. And finally, once all of our electricity comes from renewable sources, how many people are using that electricity and how much they use is not relevant. The climate emissions are the same no matter what — emissions are zero.
In the short run, the aggregation of personal choice can make a difference. Those aggregations can reduce our quantitative use of resources and buy time. But because the benefits of quantitative change will inevitably be reversed by population growth, we need to make sure that the qualitative changes are actually happening. Our success in meeting the climate change crisis will not depend on how much of something we do, but rather on how we do it. Nothing is more important than shifting energy sources to renewables. That shift is the biggest qualitative change we can make. It is the only way to meet the challenge while handling the growing population of the Earth.
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