Sustainability: Carrying Capacity & Consumption
November 09, 2008
Carrying Capacity & Ecological Footprints
Peak Population.
Liberals are less-than-fond of Big Oil's profit margins, so we point out the need for alternative energy. Then we frame it as an environmental problem. But it is also an economic, a social, and a foreign policy problem. Our energy crisis is being talked about by both presidential candidates. Which is a lot more time than they're giving to the population crisis.
Global population could increase to 12 billion by 2050. Most growth is in developing countries. The closest thing to population reform coming from the right is, "If the world's brown people would stop having so many babies, there'd be no crisis." On the left, if we ease poverty and increase education in developing countries, the global population will even itself out.
The growing number of people inhabiting the Earth is everybody's problem. Based on solid evidence, there is a direct relationship between lower standards of living and larger family size. Yet there is no guarantee that addressing quality-of-living issues will solve the population problem.
We are faced with a crisis because we are using up more resources than the planet can produce. The most basic resources are growing scarce, food, potable water, wood. A population that keeps growing will eventually overwhelm the planet. As impoverished nations achieve prosperity, their consumption grows. A two-pronged solution is needed: reduced consumption and staved population growth.
Once again, the birth-to-death ratio in this country has reached replacement level. A child born in a first-world country uses more resources and emits more carbon than a child born in a developing country.
One of the obstacles to enacting international policies to curtail the population explosion is that, until recently, there is no consensus that the present global population is a problem. Many countries encourage family growth through tax incentives and other policies. Population control is met with vehement opposition. They are the human desire to live the way we wish, consequences be damned. The only way to counteract this desire is to make it less profitable to have children.
If food, healthcare, and education are provided, subsidizing procreation won't be necessary. This will increase the quality of life for families without punishing parents or promoting family growth.
We need to make birth control more widely available worldwide.
The association between the tyrannical and the humanitarian motivations of limiting population bolsters the need for transparent and public worldwide policies. We may still be allowed a weaning period. Energy costs will rise. The poor will bear the burden, But innovation will balloon, and the dividends of increased innovation will grow.
A lack of forethought in energy policy almost destroyed the planet, and still might. How much more difficult will it be, to make the argument that the choice to have a child is no longer a decision that can be made freely?
Karen Gaia says: the author does not seem to understand the value of voluntary family planning. U.S. women voluntarily limited their family size to replacement level, from 4 to 2 children in 20 years. With reproductive health care, women's education and self esteem, and available contraception, it can easily be done.
August 12, 2008
Utne Reader
Did You Know?.
*The 8 warmest years have occurred in the last decade.
*For seven of the last eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it produced. One fifth of the U.S. grain is being turned into fuel ethanol.
*One third of reptile, amphibian, and fish species are threatened with extinction.
*Grain yields increased half as fast in the 1990s as in the 1960s.
*Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa today is lower than in the late 1980s.
*Today's reserves of lead, tin, and copper could be depleted within the next 25 years if their extraction expands at current rates.
*Nearly half of the global military budget of $1.2 trillion is spent by the US.
*South Korea recycles 77% of its paper products.
*Conservation agriculture is practiced on more than 100 million hectares around the world
*Four years after London introduced a fee on motor vehicles entering the city center, car traffic had fallen by 36% while bicycle trips increased by 49%.
*The world produces 110 million bicycles a year, but an annual production of 49 million cars.
*Fish farming is the fastest growing source of animal protein worldwide, increasing 7% each year since 1995.
*World soybean production has quadrupled since 1977.
*Coal use in Germany has dropped 37% since 1990; in the UK it has fallen by 43%.
*Solar cell production is doubling every two years.
*Electricity used for lighting can be cut by 65% through switching to compact fluorescents.
Follow the link to more fascinating data and charts on global trends.
June 14, 2008
Earth Policy Institute, Plan B 3.0
US Wisconsin: A Shift to a New Ethics?.
Wisconsin legislators embraced an ethics built on preserving and sustaining the earth's system of living things.
We thought we had the right to use all the resources of the earth to serve our human growth. We possessed the right to equality, free speech, to work for pay and so on. We believed we had the right to expand our material possessions, our property and the number of children we brought into the world.
Our ethics held that the earth's resources were infinite and our ability to grow and increase was also infinite. But now we see a shift. Environmental ethics moves us away from the human-centered ethics of limitlessness and realizes that, in fact, our planet is finite. This scarcity of the earth's resources limits the rights and privileges of its human inhabitants. Protecting the environment must come before the limitless rights and needs of the human population. When humans act to protect and renew the resources of the Earth, they act in the most morally and ethically responsible way possible. When they act for their own growth and expansion, they tend to deplete and destroy the environment. The victims of planetary degradation will be our species - or at least the major civilizations, which will collapse from the loss of clean water, air and fertile land.
The environment has veto power over a human-centered ethics of expansion, growth and consumption. Making the environmental principle the centerpiece of our cultural ethics will face resistance from the human rights-and-freedom ethics we have embraced for so long. We cannot expand and grow forever. And a scarce Earth will place limits on our freedom, rights and needs.
Our civic leaders must assess the benefits and costs to humans and to the environment when they consider expanding freeways, public transportation systems, building coal-burning power plants, putting wind turbines on farm land. The environmental principle must be considered first.
June 08, 2008
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sustainability of the World’s Outputs of Food, Wood and Freshwater for Human Consumption.
This article discusses in great detail the sustainabilities of the world's outputs of food, wood and freshwater. It also considers that sustainability is mainly culture-dependent. The article divides the world into 3 sections, the developing world, the older portions of the developed world, and the newer portions of the developed world. These three regions view sustainability issues in far different ways and for far different reasons. It also ddiscusses in great detail the developments that are responsible for the rapid increase in global food production over the past 4-5 decades. It reviews the need for and the actual reductions in population growth and some of the modern contraceptive methods.
Anyone interested in any of these subjects should click on the headline link and read the full article.
May 08, 2008
Bruce Sundquist's webpage
Return of the Population Timebomb.
Only since 1800 has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.
Our environmental impact is the product of population size and the average person's consumption.
Today's climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce our numbers and per person consumption.
An common assertion: If everyone on Earth consumed less, we wouldn't have exceeded carrying capacity. It's a simple notion: reduce per person consumption and end our environmental problems. And it sidesteps population size and growth, a subject of much concern in the 1960s and 1970s but taboo today.
Why taboo? Pressure from social justice activists who insist in recent decades that any focus on numbers violates the right of women to manage their fertility.
Humane, successful population programmes in countries as varied as Thailand, Iran, and Mexico contradict that assumption.
Nevertheless, the criticism has cowed environmentalists and NGOs which once championed the population cause, influencing policy, pushing the subject off the agenda, or shifting the emphasis solely to "reproductive health" without the numbers.
Most environmentalists now suggest a reduction in individual consumption is all we need to solve our ecological problems.
Measuring consumption as the use of biologically productive land and sea, data shows a global maximum sustainable footprint, at today's population, of just under 1.8 global hectares per person. Currently, we're a bit over 2.2gha, overshooting Earth's limits by about 25%.
What if we converged on Mexico's level of per capita consumption? Resource use would plummet in developed countries while rising in many of the poorest. But it wouldn't get us to 1.8gha. At 2.6gha, Mexico's footprint is 32% too high. A drop to the level of Botswana or Uzbekistan would put us in the right range.
But that's not low enough. We'd next have to compensate for UN projections of 40% more humans by the middle of the century. That would mean shrinking the global footprint to under 1.3gha, roughly the level of Guatemala or Nigeria.
The GFN authors point out their data is conservative, underestimating problems such as aquifer depletion and our impacts on other species. In response, the Redefining Progress group publishes an alternative footprint measure which has humanity not at 25%, but at 39% overshoot. But that too, the authors concede, is an underestimate.
While in overshoot, moreover, we erode carrying capacity. There are limits to how much we can reduce per-person use of land, water, and other resources. A purposeful drop on the part of industrialised countries to consumption levels comparable to those of the poorest areas in the world is not only wholly unrealistic but, at today's population size, would not end our environmental woes. Our sheer numbers prevent it.
We have no alternative but to return our attention to population, the other factor in the equation. We must aim for population stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers worldwide.
We have to provide easy access to family planning options while educating parents in the benefits of smaller families and family planning. We should educate and empower girls and women to give them options and help free them to make decisions concerning family size. And we should end government incentives for larger families. We must do these things internationally and vigorously, with a keen eye toward numbers, monitoring results and making adjustments accordingly.
The stakes are too high to waste time evading the issue. Doing so is intellectually dishonest and a setup for global tragedy. It's time environmentalists ended the silence on population.
Ralph says: At last someone has the courage to say what should be on every politician's blotter tomorrow morning.
May 05, 2008
Guardian - comment by John Feeney
US California: More Mouths to Feed Means Less Land to Feed Them On.
Agricultural experts have warned that California's farmland is threatened by population growth. Farmers and ranchers have expressed the concern for decades.
Unfortunately, warnings have not slowed the pace at which croplands and soils are being eaten up by development. The state's farmlands are shrinking because the millions added to our population are competing with farmers for water and for the land that is best at producing food. California has long been America's leading agricultural state, generating over $30 billion a year in revenues. California cultivates more than 350 crops. The cash value of crops grown in the great Central Valley is probably unrivalled by any other comparably-sized area on earth. Unfortunately, the urbanization is accelerating. In California, productive farmlands are succumbing and are being split up into unproductive rural ranchettes or hobby farms.
Between 1990 and 2004, rapid population growth has been driving this trend.
More than 60% of the 538,000 acres developed in California was agricultural land. In the most important agricultural areas like the Central Valley, a higher portion, nearly three-quarters of the area, developed was farmland. By 2050, if the state's population projections come to pass, and if current trends continue, an additional 2.1 million acres would be urbanized. These are the lands that with the proper stewardship could produce food virtually in perpetuity. Like the non-renewable energy resources we have squandered in recent decades, this loss will come back to haunt us in a future.
Food prices are mounting globally with the addition of 70-80 million more mouths to feed every year, diversion of food crops into biofuels production, increasing consumption of meat (which uses far more land to grow the crops fed to livestock), and rising energy prices.
If California is to be part of the solution, unsustainable population growth must be checked. Since virtually all present and projected growth is from immigration and higher average immigrant fertility, these must be reduced.
If we don't, then one day California will struggle just to feed its own citizens, no less the nation and the world.
April 2008
Leon Kolankiewicz - CAPS
Could Resources Become a Limit to Global Growth?.
Surging food and energy prices are new reasons to re-think the relationship between resources and growth. There is a real wolf nearby, in the form of resource degradation and rapidly growing population.
When oil prices rose in the 1970s, this created incentives to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles, for most of the 1980s and 1990s, energy and food became more abundant. Technological progress stayed ahead of population growth and resource depletion. However, economic incentives cannot keep the wolf at bay indefinitely.
Resource prices have surpassed record levels and per-capita food availability has started to decline. Despite demographic transition to low fertility in East Asia, Europe, and North America, current population growth rates would still triple world population to over 20 billion in about 90 years. The question is whether population growth will fall due to declines in fertility or whether epidemics, malnutrition, and violent conflict will carry out the adjustment, aided by global warming.
Residents of China and India are unlikely to buy many SUVs, and economic incentives will push them in more environmentally friendly directions. If China were the model, I would be optimistic about the future. Fertility there has declined to about replacement level. China is poised to move where people demand better environmental quality as incomes rise.
The dismal picture is in Africa. Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa fell between 1980 and 2005, despite improvements in technology made available in that period. Population growth remains very high and infectious disease, malnutrition, and violent conflict have become more entrenched and could spill over into other regions. Water provides an important example of resource scarcity. If the people of Los Angeles faced higher water prices, we would see households switch away from green grass.
A second set of issues concerns population growth in poor nations. Population growth helps to create new markets. Unfortunately, population growth in the developing world is unlikely to trigger such an innovation.
Market-based prices cannot do everything, largely because of non-priced third party effects. An electric utility using coal to produce electricity contributes to global warming and other pollution problems. This effect is not priced.
Decisions to have large numbers of children may also impose negative externalities on others. Some would like to limit growth in order to mitigate the production of greenhouse gases. But they are vague about the details. Which people should not be born? Whose income should decline in order to achieve their noble goal?
California is likely to implement a cap and trade program which will effectively create a new market in the "right to pollute." Effective regulation has helped to offset the quantity of economic activity. But in general, I wonder whether government is up to the task of limiting the costs of growth on a global scale.
Major resources such as forests and agricultural land are under threat, as are the air and water. Possibly the biggest threat is a catastrophic rise in sea level caused by global warming.
Fertility reduction is the biggest challenge. Chinese-style state-imposed fertility control will not be acceptable elsewhere, but female education and female control over reproductive decisions are very positive forces.
If natural resources grow scarce, we will adjust and in the long run, new substitutes will be introduced.
Karen Gaia says: Instead of a population of 20 billion in 90 years, the U.N. predicts a leveling-off of 9-11 billion in 50 years. As for sufficient, timely substitutes for natural resources, that takes a lot of faith. Take water or soil for example.
March 24, 2008
Wall Street Journal
Australia: The S Word is Sustainability.
Rapid population growth means, the future of our society, our economy and our environment; the structure of our cities, their energy and water sources the imminent peaking of world oil supplies; our use of finite resources like gas and coal; and the way we dispose of those resources.
Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield by an estimated 25%. We are setting the stage for decline and collapse.
With some exceptions, policy makers have been guilty of allowing sustainability to be cast as a peculiarly environmental issue. Sustainability is the ultimate whole of government - indeed, whole of society - issue.
Sustainability must be the foundation upon which we build economic strength and natural resilience.
It must be central to our planning, thinking and acting as we seek to live in harmony with the planet.
Global warming is a symptom of the problem of living unsustainably. Consuming fossil fuels without considering the waste is a sustainability issue.
The rate of increase in greenhouse concentrations is unprecedented in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Human induced global catastrophe as it should be known, might be the clarion call that heralds another threat caused by our careless consumption of fossil fuels.
A growing group of voices predict that between 2006 and 2020 the world will pass a point after which we will never have as much oil at our disposal as we did the day before.
November 2006 is the possible peak of production, with the world's daily average in that month of 85.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of oil and condensates not having been exceeded in the 14 months since.
Crude has been consistently trading between US$100 and US$102 a barrel and we now stand on the threshold of an upswing in global oil prices that will have a significant impact on the economy of the world and for which we are seriously unprepared.
What both peak oil and climate change will impose upon us is a requirement to use less energy. We will need to live closer to work, schools and shops and public transport.
We have the capacity with existing technology and intellect to adopt more sustainable policies and practices to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control through greater use of renewable energy sources and to reduce our reliance on oil.
The challenge is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed.
In an energy-constrained world dedicated to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's time we spoke of population.
The rampaging monster is over-population. In its presence, sustainability is a fragile theoretical thing.
People are ready to grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet. Population maldistribution increases the stress on available resources and heightens the need for more stringent sustainable living practices, such as water restrictions.
Developed countries have the double whammy of increasing populations and rampant consumerism.
It's one thing to provide the necessities of life… quite another to provide the trimmings demanded by affluence.
In the 21st century, the human race must confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there are limits to growth.
No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical limits of the world's resources.
What we need above all is smart growth. .. Growth that is low carbon. .. Growth that is low pollution. .. Growth that is resource neutral.
We need growth that adds to the natural capital, instead of destroying it.
March 12, 2008
Sunshine Coast Daily
Global Inaction: We’d better get motivated now to confront climate change; our leaders are not going to do it for us.
The global response to global warming has been inaction. And while a poll shows that 71% of Americans think warming is a problem, most of us continue with our lives as usual.
Why are we so passive in the face of such profound changes for the worse in our environment?
By the year 2100, those changes will include a sea level rise of 5 to 10 feet; a 30% drop in crop yields; hundreds of millions of climate refugees; erratic and more severe weather; frequent forest fires; potable water shortages; a roughly 30% rate of global species extinction, and a hostile world.
With a better understanding of our reluctance to act, we'll be motivated to undertake the changes required for sustainability.
Global warming's harm is in the future, and we tend to ignore future harm. Warming is in evidence today, but so far only amounts to one degree C. Now we must insure ourselves against the very high likelihood that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions will be massively disruptive.
We have to stop polluting. Dilution is not the solution, because it fails when the volume or toxicity of pollutants increase.
The huge volume of carbon dioxide is a pollutant, but it's ignored because it's invisible and odorless. Now, it is our single most serious problem.
Rising carbon dioxide correlates with rising temperature, and rising temperatures will cause a multitude of problems. The science has some uncertainty, but so does all science.
By the time we have precise knowledge of the rate and consequences of warming, it will be too late. If we wait, significant warming will be inevitable and irreversible.
So far, if drought reduces some food we want, we simply pay more to bring some in from elsewhere. But more than 1 billion people in the world live on $2 a day or less, and have no cushion against the ill effects of warming. Soon, even our wealth will prove inadequate. A 2003 Pentagon study predicted widespread chaos based on just one of the global warming consequences.
Our wealth temporarily insulates us from an urgent and chaotic reality.
We have to save ourselves — we have no effective leaders.
We have no assurance that alternative, non-polluting energy sources can replace our current energy use, or even large parts of it. It seems unlikely that we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as needed.
No one knows how much non-emitting energy we can develop, because that depends mostly on new or improved technologies. But the reduction will change our lives, because we are highly dependent on cheap and plentiful fossil fuel energy.
At some point quite a while ago, growth became unsustainable. But our cultural worship of growth irrationally persisted.
March 09, 2008
The Register-Guard
Humanity is Consuming Over 20 Per Cent More Natural Resources Each Year Than the Earth Can Produce.
The report in the WWF's (World Wide Fund for Nature) periodic update on the state of the world's ecosystems said humanity is now consuming over 20% more natural resources each year than the earth can produce. This leads to the destruction of ecological assets, on which the world's economy depends. The report shows that humanity's Ecological Footprint grew by 150% between 1961 and 2000.
During the same period, the report shows a 40% decline in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species population. Ten years after the UN Rio conference in 1992, the Footprint in the 27 wealthiest countries increased by 8% per person, while in the middle and low income countries, it shrank by 8% per person.
Consumption of fossil fuels increased by almost 700% between 1961 and 2001. But the planet is unable to absorb the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions that degrade the earth's ozone layer.
We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate.
The biggest culprit is the US. Although it has only 4.5% of the world's population, it consumes more than 29% of the world's annual output of renewable resources. The US has been urging developing countries to adopt sustainable development, but there is no sign of the US adopting such policies.
With more than 120 million vehicles on its roads the US is also the biggest culprit when it comes to generating carbon-dioxide emissions.
The global community has set targets for sustainability and biodiversity conservation. At the 2004 meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, governments agreed to set targets for creating networks of protected areas.
All 191 member states of the UN have signed up to support the MDGs, which not only address the root causes of environmental degradation but include a specific goal on environmental sustainability.
Some might argue that governments are wasting their time talking. The fact is that governments today are no further to achieving the MDGs than they were seven years ago.
Populations of terrestrial, freshwater and marine species fell on an average by 40% between 1970 and 2000. Destruction of natural habitats, pollution, overfishing and the introduction of non-native animals, often drive out indigenous species.
Trawlers and dredgers wreak destruction across the seabed, crushing entire ecosystems of corals, algae and crustaceans as they go. But will governments take heed? Or will they continue to look the other way? The forest species declined by about 15%, the marine species 35%, while the freshwater species dropped 55% over the 30-year period.
The earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space, after all unproductive areas are discounted. Divided between the current estimated global population of 6.4 billion, this total equates to 1.78 hectares per person.
When the world's population was slightly less than 6 billion, the Ecological Footprint of the world's average consumer was 2.3 hectares, or 20% above the earth's capacity of 1.90 hectares per person versus 1.78 hectares per person today. In other words, humanity now exceeds the planet's capacity to sustain its consumption of renewable resources.
March 08, 2008
The News
U.K.: The Elephant in the Room.
We must change our basic way of living; it will either be made on our own initiative in a planned way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the laws of nature.
First, we must accept the idea that sustainable means for a long time.
The Government of the UK defines it as: ‘Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.'
This means that the resources have to be renewable through natural processes and entirely recycled if they are not renewable. If the population exceeds the carrying capacity, the death rate will increase until the population numbers are stable. Using these criteria it is obvious that the current human population is not sustainable.
In the discussions taking place, population is a word we dare not speak. Population is the elephant in the room.
It is obvious that something has increased the world's carrying capacity in the last 150 years. That something is oil.
Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource and not sustainable. If oil is not sustainable, then the added carrying capacity the oil has provided is unsustainable. Carrying capacity has been added to the world in direct proportion to the use of oil, and if our oil supply declines, the carrying capacity of the world will automatically fall with it.
Our population today is at least five times what it was before oil came on the scene. Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. We are in fantasy land if we think that we can continue to support the number of people that we do now without the full input of oil and its related products.
We have become so dependent on those fuels, that there is no way we can sustain ourselves at this population density and level of technology without them. Population redistribution provides no long-term solution to environmental sustainability, total population numbers need to decrease worldwide.
Extremes of temperature and climate, combined with weather-related disruptions, would severely reduce the size of the country's population carrying capacity.
With population continuing to grow, urbanisation eating up farmland, and more of our remaining agricultural land likely to be used for energy crops, food production will be squeezed.
The systems that produce the world's food supply are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. In addition, fossil fuels are essential in the construction and the repair of equipment and infrastructure needed to facilitate this industry. Almost every human endeavour from transportation, to manufacturing, to electricity to plastics, and especially food production is intertwined with oil and natural gas supplies. As each individual recycles more of his or her own waste, success is undermined by the constantly increasing numbers of people who create waste.
But how much land would be needed to provide all our electricity. It depends how much wind power can be constructed offshore. For wind power to supply all-electric homes at today's rates of consumption, for today's 60 million people, several counties would need to be covered with wind turbines.
The total amount of water used in UK is modest because agriculture can be carried on mostly without irrigation.
The UK Government attaches importance to lowering water use because of increasing water constraints: rivers reduced to a trickle for several months, reservoir levels dropping, water tables continuing to drop. The large increases in the UK population experienced during the last five years makes it even more important to try to push per person consumption downwards.
Half a million new homes are planned in the South East alone.
The UK is one of the most densely populated and built up countries in the EU and some English regions are already close to reaching the limits of their capacity to take further development without serious damage to the environment or quality of life.
Along with every measure for reducing per person use of water, we should address the problem of population.
All these problems are symptoms of the growth in the human population, currently surging through 6.6 billion people worldwide. The consequences are already clear without policies to reduce world population, efforts to save our environment cannot succeed.
The uncomfortable truth is that the impact on Earth's biosphere of a projected 9 billion people living at a desired higher standard of living in 2050 would be fatal for the planet in terms of greenhouse gas emissions alone.
Given the fact that our world's carrying capacity is supported by oil, and that the oil is about to start going away, it seems that a population decline is inevitable. Populations in serious overshoot always decline, though actually, it's a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot.
We are getting obvious signals from our environment that all is not well. Because we are now a global species with a global civilization, continuing growth of our numbers depends on the continuing growth of our civilization. There must be a sufficient level of food, shelter, energy and medical care available. All these factors will be put at risk globally within the next two decades due to the loss of oil. Food production and distribution will be hampered or impossible, and local agriculture will prove very difficult in some places. Other countries like those at the bottom of the list of developing nations will simply be too poor to compete against the developed world for the resources needed for survival. Populations will fall as a result.
The facts remain: there aren't enough resources to bring the whole world up to the industrial level of the developed world and the developed world is unlikely to consent to their own voluntary impoverishment in favour of industrializing the less developed world, and attempting such an approach would increase rather than reduce global ecological devastation.
The human race has only one or perhaps two generations to rescue itself. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution can divert our attention. If the present growth in world population continues, the limits to growth will be reached within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
As for man, there is little reason to think that he can, in the long run, escape the fate of other creatures.
March 06, 2008
CounterCurrents.org
UK Unable to Sustain Population, Says Study.
The UK is over-populated and could support only 17 million people if it had to provide for the current 60 million from its own resources. If global population growth continues the world could be at war over resources in less than 50 years and calls on governments to advocate smaller families and increased use of contraception.
Government targets to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 will have little impact on the UK's sustainability because of the rate of population growth.
The number of people living in the UK is expected to hit 65 million within 10 years, and top 70 million by 2031.
Even if Britain was carbon neutral, it could only sustainably support 40 million people. To live sustainably, British people would have to lead simpler lives, similar to people in China, Paraguay, Algeria and Botswana.
The world was living within its ecological means until the 1980s when populations began to grow rapidly.
By 2050, it will be using up the equivalent of nearly two Earths each year and the UK's overpopulation threatens the environment and people's quality of life.
We need a national population policy.
February 18, 2008
Telegraph
U.S.: Envisioning a Sustainable Chesapeake.
It's been most inspiring to see discussions begin to address the future of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay.
They prompt us to ask: "What does a sustainable Chesapeake really mean?"
My vision is built upon a balanced, vibrant ecosystem teeming with fish, shellfish, underwater grasses and clear, healthy waters. But to be truly sustainable, the Chesapeake ecosystem needs to exist while also supporting the region's human population.
Creating a sustainable Chesapeake will not be easy. But as we look around the state, we're seeing more and more positive steps being taken.
Recently, the Maryland Commission on Climate Change made recommendations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving energy throughout the state. These actions will require that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by more than 25% within the next 12 years.
An initiative was introduced that will seek to instill a sense of environmental stewardship among the 28,000 students graduating each year. It will also foster research and prepare the new "green" workforce.
By changing our own actions, each of us has the ability to reduce our impact on the bay and the planet.
As long as the region's population continues to grow, and we develop lands faster than needed to accommodate that growth, we make it more difficult to maintain the sustainability equation.
We have struggled more than 20 years to reduce the amount of pollution flowing into the bay and we are still far from where we need to be. Another 10, 20 or 30 years of pollution-fighting efforts will still not be enough. Bay restoration efforts will be needed in perpetuity.
We need to manage for sustainability by remaining aware of what will cross our path in the future.
Karen Gaia says: The way things are going, we will be forced to reduce our greenhouse gases because we have passed peak oil, meaning our consumption of oil will be reduced.
February 17, 2008
Annapolis Capital
The Hidden Holocaust -- Our Civilizational Crisis, Part 3.
This global system is driven purely by profit, efficiency, growth, and monopoly. It is destructive of all life, nature, and even itself.
It is now generating multiple crises across the world that threaten to converge unless we take drastic action now.
These crises have four key themes: Climate catastrophe, peak oil, food scarcity, and economic instability.
The C02 emissions from the industries are the main engine of global warming. Scientists have found no evidence that solar energy is correlated with rising temperatures. According to the IPCC's first report, by 2100 the average global temperature could rise by 6.4C, leading to ecological alterations that would make life throughout most of the Earth impossible.
Another crisis emerging is the energy crisis, primarily oil. The basic rules for the discovery, estimation and production of petroleum reserves were laid down by Dr. M. King Hubbert who pointed out that as petroleum is a finite resource, its production must inevitably pass through three key stages. Production reaches a peak which cannot be surpassed which occurs at the point when 50% of total reserves are depleted.
Production declines at an increasing rate, until the resource is completely depleted.
Rising oil prices and reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has occurred, or will do, within the start of the 21st century. The convergence of climate change and peak oil threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.
A study predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people over the precipice.
We are already pushing the limits on world food production. The Earth is running out of fertile land, and food production will soon be unable to keep up with population growth.
Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.
Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.
Economic meltdown, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989.
Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, about 1.3 billion have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people suffer from anaemia, 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. The CEPR conducted a study of economic growth for 1980 to 2005. The results are shocking. The majority of the world's economies have been retarded. These 25 years have exhibited a decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.
The global economic system is inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises. It is vulnerable to collapse.
In mid-2006, Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, warned that the world "has done little to prepare itself for what could well be the next crisis." A key trigger could be the housing market, the use of home loans to squeeze cash out of equity, permitting consumers to spend beyond their means.
This spending spree has to come to an end. If it comes to an end suddenly, then we have our recession. The US economy is close to the edge. We need a civilizational paradigm shift. A whole new vision of life itself to replace the dead, broken materialistic vision associated with the concurrent global imperial system. The good news is that the civilizational paradigm shift is not only happening its seeds have already been planted.
This system is now generating multiple crises across the world that over the next 20 years threaten to converge in an unprecedented and unimaginable way, unless we take drastic action now.
These crises can be categorized broadly into four key themes:
1. Climate Catastrophe
Industrial civilization derives all its energy from the burning of fossil fuels, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The C02 emissions from the industries that drive our economies, our societies, that sustain our infrastructures, are the main engine of global warming in the last few decades. This doesn't mean that all climate change ever is due to human-induced C02. Scientists know that there are many other factors involved in climate change, such as solar activity, as well as periodic changes in the Earth's orbit. But they have overwhelmingly confirmed that these are not the primary factors currently driving global warming. The primary factor is C02 emissions induced by human activities.
The origins of climate change are no longer a matter of serious scientific debate. Early in 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported the findings of a three-year study projecting the rise in temperatures due to global warming, by 600 scientists from 40 countries, peer-reviewed by 600 more meteorologists. The report confirmed that human-induced global warming is "unequivocally" happening, and that the probability that climate change was due to human C02 emissions is over 90%.
The London Times reported on a study from Nature as follows:
"Scientists have examined various proxies of solar energy output over the past 1,000 years and have found no evidence that they are correlated with today's rising temperatures. Satellite observations over the past 30 years have also turned up nothing. ‘The solar contribution to warming . . . is negligible,' the researchers wrote in the journal Nature."
At 6c : "Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive."
Growing evidence suggests that the IPCC projections are extremely conservative, and that the climate crisis is rapidly growing out of control. According to Dr David Wasdell, a climate expert and an accredited reviewer of the IPCC report, the final report was watered down by Western government officials before release to make its findings appear less catastrophic. Dr Wasdell told the New Scientist (8 March 2007) that early drafts of the report prepared by scientists in April 2006 contained "many references to the potential for climate to change faster than expected because of ‘positive feedbacks' in the climate system. Most of these references were absent from the final version."
The following IPCC report, however, distilling the research of 2,500 climate scientists, released in November 2007 only confirms that the original projection was too optimistic. To avoid heating the globe by the minimum possible, an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the world's spiraling growth in greenhouse gas emissions must end no later than 2015, and must start to drop quickly after that peak. By 2050, carbon dioxide and other atmospheric polluting gases must be reduced by 50 to 85%, according to the estimates. But even this is already too late. "We may have already overshot that target," said David Karoly, one member of the core team that wrote the report. Current emissions already are nearing the limit required in 2015 to limit the warming to 2 degrees Celsius, he added in a media interview from Valencia.
But Western governments have known about this danger for years. At the June 2005 UK government conference on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" at the Met Office in Exeter, scientists reported an emerging consensus that global warming must remain "below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided," which means ensuring that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stays below 400 parts per million. Beyond this level, dangerous and runaway climate change is likely to be irreversible.
About two weeks after the government conference warned of this minimum threshold, the Independent commissioned an investigation by Keith Shine, head of the meteorology department at the University of Reading. Using the latest available figures (for 2004), Professor Shine calculated that "the C02 equivalent concentration, largely unnoticed by the scientific and political communities, has now risen beyond this threshold." Accounting for the effects of methane and nitrous oxide, he found that the equivalent concentration of C02 is now 425ppm and fast rising, guaranteeing that the global mean temperature will rise by 2 degrees. Consequently, some of the worst predicted effects of global warming, such as the destruction of ecosystems and increased hunger and water shortages for billions of people in the South, may well be unavoidable.
When asked about the implications, Tom Burke, a former government environment adviser, told the Independent: "The passing of this threshold is of the most enormous significance. It means we have actually entered a new era -- the era of dangerous climate change. We have passed the point where we can be confident of staying below the 2 degree rise set as the threshold for danger. What this tells us is that we have already reached the point where our children can no longer count on a safe climate."
According to the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) the percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, from about 10-15% to 30%, largely due to rising temperatures. Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. Global warming is not only melting the Arctic, it is melting the glaciers that feed Asia's largest rivers -- the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow. Because glaciers are a natural storage system, releasing water during hot arid periods, the shrinking ice sheets could aggravate water imbalances, causing flooding as the melting accelerates, followed by a reduction in river flows. This problem is only decades, possibly even years away, resulting in hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who have water, being short of it, most likely in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages, and by 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people. Some climate models show sub-saharan Africa drying out by 2050.
2. Peak oil
There is yet another crisis emerging, which is also linked to our addiction to burning fossil fuels. That is the energy crisis. Today, the most prominent energy source is, of course, conventional oil. Here in the UK, from where I'm now writing, 90% of our energy comes from conventional oil, gas and coal, but primarily oil. Without these energy supplies, civilized life in the UK would simply collapse. Transportation, agriculture, modern medicine, national defence, water distribution, and the production of even basic technologies would be impossible. This formula applies across the board, throughout western industrial civilization.
One of the most authoritative studies so far on peak oil and its timing was conducted by Dr. Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, leading oil industry experts concluded in a report for the government that "the mid-point of ultimate conventional oil production would be reached by year 2000 and that decline would soon begin." They also projected that "production post-peak would halve about every 25 years, an exponential decline of 2.5 to 2.9% per annum."
This conclusion is based as it is on performance data from thousands of oil fields in 65 countries, including data on "virtually all discoveries, on production history by country, field, and company as well as key details of geology and geophysical surveys." A review of the research by senior industry geologists in Petroleum Review indicated, apart from minor disagreement over the scope of remaining reserves, "general acceptance of the substance of their arguments; that the bulk of remaining discovery will be in ever smaller fields within established provinces."
Rapidly rising oil prices and growing reports of declining oil production corroborate the conclusion that the peak has already occurred, or will do, well within the dawn of the 21st century. London's Petroleum Review published a study toward the end of 2004 concluding that in Indonesia, Gabon, and fifteen other oil-rich nations supplying about 30% of the world's daily crude, oil production is declining by 5% a year -- double the rate of decline a year prior to the report. Chris Skrebowski reported in early 2005 that production in conventional oil reserves are already declining at about 4-6% a year worldwide, including 18 large oil-producing countries, and 32 smaller ones. Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India are due to peak in the next few years.
According to an official report published by British Petroleum late last year, we have about 30 years before we peak. This is supposed to be an ‘optimistic' assessment. Apart from the fact that this is hardly good news, it is a clearly politicized claim from an oil industry fighting to sustain its credibility as the Oil Age nears its demise. Colin Campbell, himself a former senior BP geologist, argues that the data shows we have less than 4 years; and in the meantime, former US government energy adviser Matt Simmons argues that we have most likely peaked years ago, but won't know for sure until we start feeling the crunch within a few years.
3. Food scarcity
The convergence of these two global crises, climate change and peak oil, threaten to undermine global food security over the next few years. The effects of this are already being felt.
At the British Association's Festival of Science in Dublin in September 2005, US and UK scientists working at the Hadley Centre described how shifts in rain patterns and temperatures due to global warming could lead to a further 50 million people going hungry by conservative estimates. "If we accept that broadly 500 million people are at risk today, we expect that to increase by about 10 percent by the middle part of this century."
Then toward the end of 2006, a study by Met Office's Hadley Centre funded by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, predicted that if global warming continues, drought that already threatens the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth before 2100, and extreme drought making agriculture impossible will affect a third of the planet. The world-scale drought would undermine the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, and the availability of water, pushing millions of people already struggling in conditions of dire deprivation over the precipice.
The grim truth is that we are already pushing the limits on world food production within the existing structure of modern corporate agriculture. According to new maps released in December 2005 by scientists at the Centre for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Navin Ramankutty, "Except for Latin America and Africa, all the places in the world where we could grow crops are already being cultivated. The remaining places are either too cold or too dry to grow crops." The maps thus show that the Earth is "rapidly running out of fertile land" and that "food production will soon be unable to keep up with global population growth."
World food prediction probably peaked shortly before the new millennium. Lester Brown, a former international agricultural policy advisor for the US government who went on to found the World Watch Institute and Earth Policy Institute, reports that since world grain consumption has exceeded production since 2000, such that 2003 saw a deficit of 105 million tones. On that basis, Brown predicts a global grain deficit within the next few years. In 2003 he noted that "World grain harvests have fallen for four consecutive years and world grain stocks are at the lowest level in 30 years." This is partly why world grain prices are steadily rising.
This is not centrally about population, but about modern intensive agricultural methods as practiced by the globalized corporate food industry, which are simply unsustainable. US structural geologist Dave Allen Pfeiffer points out that while it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil, in soil made susceptible by modern agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year. Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from US agricultural soils every year. Every year in the US, more than 2 million acres of cropland are lost to erosion, salinization and water logging.
Already, populations in the South are suffering from the grim reality of these crises. Near the end of last year, The Guardian reported:
"Empty shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products. Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN. Next week the FAO is expected to say that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years and that prices will remain high for years."
Peak food will be exacerbated beyond all proportion in the context of peak oil. Modern intensive agriculture that produces most of our food, is industrialized, mechanized. It needs oil. Without oil, modern agriculture dies, and so then will our ability to mass-produce food.
4. Economic meltdown
According to the United Nations Development Programme, the gap between rich and poor nations doubled between 1960 and 1989. The rewards of globalization are increasingly "spread unequally and inequitably -- concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations and corporations, marginalizing the others."
Successive UN Human Development reports give us the broad contours of the manner in which this system inflicts protracted death-by-deprivation on the majority of the world's population. Of the 4 billion people who live in developing countries, almost a third -- about 1.3 billion people -- have no access to clean drinking water. A fifth of all children in the world receive an insufficient intake of calories and proteins. Around 2 billion people -- a third of the human race -- suffer from anaemia. 2.4 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Thirty million people die of hunger every year, half of whom, UNICEF estimates, are children. Over 840 million suffer from chronic malnutrition, almost a sixth of the population. Three billion people -- that is half the world population -- are forced to survive on less than two dollars a day. Of the 6 billion people in the world, only 500 million live in comfort -- that is approximately one-twelfth of the world population. This leaves a massive 5.5 billion people living in need -- over five-sixth of the population.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, DC found, in a comprehensive study of economic growth and other indicators for the period between 1980 and 2005, that the vast majority of the world's economies have been systematically retarded, exhibiting an empirically incontrovertible decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades [1960-1980] in growth, life expectancy, infant mortality and education.
But the global economic system is not merely inherently unjust and unequal but also inherently unstable, and tends toward the generation of periodic crises, and as events of the last few months have shown, it is increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Financial institutions, corporate investors and even mainstream economists have been aware of the dangers for several years before the recent crisis that erupted from the depths of fault lines in the housing market. In March 2006, an unprecedented IMF report Safeguarding Financial Stability criticized the twin strategies of deregulation and liberalization, the staple policies of the global economy, as "the potential for fragility, instability, systemic risk, and adverse economic consequences." Deregulation has caused "national financial systems [to] become increasingly vulnerable to increased systemic risk and to a growing number of financial crises."
In mid-2006, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, warned that the world "has done little to prepare itself for what could well be the next crisis." UC Berkeley economist professor Brad DeLong in March 2007 argued that a global economic recession was in motion, principally due to three factors:
"1) A Federal Reserve that finds itself with less inflation-fighting credibility than it thought it had; 2) upward pressure on inflation from rising energy and, perhaps, import prices; and 3) millions of middle-class homeowners who for too long have treated their houses as gigantic ATMs, using home equity loans and refinancing to generate extra spending money."
A key trigger could be the housing market -- the unprecedented use of home loans to squeeze cash out of equity, permitting middle-class consumers to spend well beyond their means. "Someday this spending spree has to come to an end. If it comes to an end suddenly, at a time when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates a little too much, then we have our recession . . . Make no mistake about it: The US economy is close to the edge . . . What can be done to head off the danger? Unfortunately, very little. The bag of macroeconomic tricks is empty." [
In July 2006 Dr. David Martin, in a speech at the Arlington Institute, warned his listeners that a collapse of the global banking system could be imminent as of January 2008, and that it would start with the housing crisis.
The war forward . . . ?
What we need now is a civilizational paradigm shift. Not just a new economics, or new politics, or new social vision. We need a whole new vision of life itself to replace the dead, broken materialistic vision associated with the concurrent global imperial system. The good news is that the civilizational paradigm shift is not only happening now as I write -- its seeds have already been planted.
January 06, 2008
Online Journal
Niger: Population Explosion Threatens Development Gains.
If Nigeriens remain uninformed about family planning and keep reproducing at the current rate the population will more than quadruple by 2050, imposing unmanageable demands on the economy, social services and the environment. The current rate of population growth is 3.3% every year. If that growth continues, there will be 56 million people in Niger by 2050, compared to 13.5 million today. In 1960, it was just 1.7 million.
The average number of children per mother is 7.1. Women said they would like nine and men said 12, but some families said 40 or 50 children. It a society that encourages procreation.
Just 5% of Nigeriens use family planning and contraception. People aren't informed about the negative consequences of having so many children.
The 85% of Nigeriens who rely on rain-fed, subsistence agriculture to feed themselves are going to be hardest hit as millions more people compete for the same amount of farmland to grow food.
The Sahel has recently been identified as one of the regions most likely to be adversely affected by climate change.
The increase in the population will continue to accentuate the cereal production and wood-for-fuel deficits which started in the 1980s. Niger's population will quickly overtake the government's ability to provide health, education, jobs and even water points, tasks that it is already failing at today.
94% of Nigeriens live on 35% of the land. The most populated areas are along the southern border with Burkina Faso and Mali.
The Maradi region holds 20% of the population, 2,235,748 people, living on 3.3% of the country's land.
Niger's desert and mountain north accounts for 53% of Niger's territory but only 3 percent of the population, 321,639 people.
Niger plans this year to curb population growth which the INS says would reduce the population in 2050 to 33.3 million, still almost three times its current level.
The government wants the number practising family planning to increase from to 15% or 20% by 2015. The INS says 20% of women claim to want it.
The plan calls for information campaigns to educate religious leaders and women about the availability and importance of family planning.
Currently, every second girl is married and likely to be procreating before the age of 15. Raising the marriage age to 18 would take up to four years off a woman's reproductive life.
By 2015 population growth should have slowed to 2.5% and the average number of children per woman should be five.
Diadi Boureima, deputy representative of the UN Fund for Population Affairs (UNFPA) in Niger, said the task was a critical one.
If the demographics continue, Niger cannot develop. All the resources the country has will be going into social services and nothing will be left for investing in the economy. The government is acting accordingly.
December 11, 2007
UN Integrated Regional Information Network
Sustainable Development is Need of the Time.
The idea of sustainable development grew from environmental movements in earlier decades and was defined in 1987 as: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
When you think of the world as a system, you understand that air pollution from North America affects air quality in Asia, and that pesticides sprayed in Argentina could harm fish stocks off the coast of Australia.
You start to realise that the decisions our grandparents made about how to farm the land continue to affect agricultural practice today.
We understand that quality of life is a system, too. What if you are poor and don't have access to education? It's good to have a secure income, but what if the air in your part of the world is unclean? And it's good to have freedom of religious expression, but what if you can't feed your family?
The concept of sustainable development helps us understand ourselves and our world. The problems we face are complex and serious, and we can't address them in the same way we created them.
Sustainable development highlights sustainability as the idea of environmental, economic and social progress and equity, all within the limits of the world's natural resources.
Sustainable development calls for improving the quality of life for all of the world's people without increasing the use of our natural resources beyond the Earth's carrying capacity. The efforts to build a truly sustainable way of life require the integration of action in three key areas:
Interlinked, global economic systems demand an integrated approach to foster responsible long-term growth while ensuring that no nation or community is left behind.
To conserve our environment and natural resources for future generations, economically viable solutions must be developed to reduce resource consumption, stop pollution and conserve natural habitats.
Throughout the world, people require jobs, food, education, energy, health care, water, and sanitation. The world community must ensure that the cultural and social diversity, and the rights of workers, are respected, and that all members of society are empowered to play a role in determining their futures.
The record on sustainability so far appears to have been quite poor. Sustainable development is an urgent issue, though political will has been slow-paced. There are 1.3 billion without access to clean water. About half of humanity lack access to adequate sanitation and living on less than 2 dollars a day.
In practicing sustainable development over the long-term one will:
-- Not diminish the quality of the present environment.
-- Not reduce the availability of renewable resources.
-- Take into consideration the value of non-renewable resources to future generations.
-- Not compromise the ability of other species or future generations to meet their needs.
December 08, 2007
The Daily Star
World Atlas of Sustainable Development- Feed Your Head.
So far, we have only one usable planet. The "science dudes" are trying to discover if there are any planets out there that are suitable for humans to live on. This has not produced results. In our solar system everything appears to be too hot, too cold, or have no atmosphere. This leaves us to face the fact that the 6.5 billion humans on this rocky sphere are dependent on the natural resources that exist on our planet. Unfortunately, we are using those resources in an unsustainable way right now. Within 100 years, we will have to feed, clothe, and provide electricity and transportation and water to, around 10 billion humans.
* The worldwide catch of fish is now 6 times what it was 50 years ago. Catches are beginning to decline as fish populations sink.
* 850 million humans go hungry; 220 million are children.
* 1 in 5 humans have no access to clean drinking water.
* By 2050, 85% of all humans will live in developing countries.
* One third of the world's visible land is affected by desertification, the degradation of productive but fragile lands which have insufficient rainfall and has been damaged by unsustainable development.
* During the next 100 years that global temperature averages will rise from 2 to 6 degrees C, resulting in coastal flooding and an increase in droughts. We are using resources 30% faster than the ability of those resources to renew themselves. Many people whose knowledge of the environmental challenges seems to date from 1960.
December 06, 2007
Gather.com
Is the Planet Full Yet?.
Of the top 50 things to save the planet, to have fewer people is only Number 18. The current population of 6.6 billion people is predicted to rocket to 9.7 billion in the next 40 years. Yet there is a conspicuous silence about the topic of sustainable family planning.
Population growth is one of the factors which determines our impact on the Earth's ecosystem and therefore we should talk frankly about it. Population growth could wipe out any gains we make reducing the amount we consume. It has to be a part of the discussion and not ignored as some form of sacred taboo.
Friends of the Earth do not campaign on the matter of population, claiming the big issue is resource use. But Green Party Caroline Lucas MEP disagrees. "There's a direct relation between the emissions we produce and how many of us there are."
The idea of controlling the population may be distasteful but on a planet with finite resources and an exponentially growing number of people something, has to give. At present we are not able to feed the world's population adequately, yet we produce enough food to do so. That is a failure of our current structures. With the world's population set to rise significantly over the next century, if we can't cope now, how are we going to cope then?
By encouraging high levels of immigration we are fuelling the problem because when people come here they are, going to start living our unsustainable lifestyle, too."
The South East Plan proposes a further 11,000 homes should be built in Brighton and Hove by 2026, the result is likely to be severe pressure on our natural resources, such as water. Can a city hemmed in by the sea and South Downs accommodate any more without compromising quality of life and the future of the South Downs National Park?
According to the UN, there are 78 million people added to the world every year, yet there are 200 million women who want to control their fertility but have no safe and effective access to contraceptive services.
We need a major investment in family planning so women can choose their family size.
In the Sixties and Seventies, population was a key issue for all the major campaign groups. Oxfam published a paper entitled World Population: The Biggest Problem Of All. But in 2007, to call for such frank discussion runs too great a risk of upsetting the other values environmentalists identify with: human rights, gender equality, race, immigration and, above all, individual choice.
We've got to stop being paralysed by the sensitivities the population question naturally taps into and recognise there are actually valid ways to address it which could bring great benefits.
The decisions we make relating to family issues, must be left up to individuals, but devoting resources to reproductive health and family planning services brings genuine win-wins in terms of community development and women's rights, as well as smaller populations.
Scratch the surface of any environmental problem and it reveals population growth, and the way we live our lives, as the root cause. The need for a population policy has never been more urgent. While governments see big populations as an indicator of economic strength, the population problem will lead to environmental catastrophe.
November 26, 2007
The Argus website
Wake Up About Overpopulation.
Any individual will encounter terms such as carrying capacity, limiting factors and exponential growth. Yet few implement the concept of sustainability.
Until people question the existence, of the global environmental crisis, the population stabilization and reduction initiative will remain little more than a lobby largely ignored by politicians.
The US has been unable to serve as an example. Any way of life that is unlike our own, is a threat and must promptly be democratized, modernized and westernized.
The symptoms of a society that is straining under its own weight are all there, yet we've successfully managed to evade the issue by misdiagnosing, and offering temporary solutions to the problem. While the United States birth rate has decreased, our lenient immigration policies continue to increase our population. Experts predict that the United States population, if left unchecked, is expected to double in 70 years to a total of 540 million people.
We must begin our public discourse when consensus is met; sacrifices will have to be made, for democracy can only deal with the ever-changing present while relegating responsibility for the future to the few who care to take it upon themselves.
An average U.S. citizen consumes 50 times more goods and services than a Chinese citizen and approximately twice as many as a Western European.
Only recently, during spikes in gas prices, has the engineers' task turned to designing automobiles and engines which reduce consumption and emissions.
Our challenge is to stir the minds and hearts of our fellow Americans so that they may awaken to this reality, directing this change for the better before it is snatched from us.
November 13, 2007
College of New Jersey Signal
City Planning Will Determine Pace of Global Warming: UN-Habitat Chief.
The way in which the world's growing cities were planned and managed would largely determine the pace of global warming. The urbanization of poverty was now the biggest development challenge. With half the world's population residing in cities, and one billion slum dwellers living in life-threatening conditions, 2007 marked a turning point in history. Cities were responsible for 75% of energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The opportunity to reduce the vulnerability of cities to the effects of climate change should be a priority alongside improving the living conditions of the most vulnerable populations. Policymakers, planners, must place cities and urban issues at the forefront of sustainable development.
Several speakers indicated that climate change had devastated the lives of millions and natural disasters had set back development efforts. There was need for the international community to support developing countries by providing them with the tools to cope with global warming effects and also to bolster their economies to build a sustainable future.
The Kyoto Protocol must be carried out to the needs of developing countries. Just as important was disaster preparedness and response. The 2004 Asian tsunami had proved that early warning systems were vital and in order to boost those efforts, Thailand had contributed $10 million to the Fund for Tsunami Early Warning Arrangements in the Indian Ocean and South-east Asia.
Thailand had taken steps towards sustainability, and the philosophy of a “sufficiency economy” had been integrated into its policies. That had already promoted sustainable agricultural practices to ensure food security for farmers, persuade locals to conserve forests, and promote sustainable energy development.
Ethiopia's delegate said a more concerted effort was needed in Africa to push developing countries towards sustainable development and to avert climate-change crises. Too many obstacles stood in the way of sustainability, including conflict, insufficient investment, limited market access opportunities, supply- side constraints and unsustainable debt burdens. Ecuador's representative pointed to the Hyogo Framework for Action and the work of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction as tools that could translate words into action.
Japan's representative stressed the importance of concerted action in support of vulnerable countries, particularly small island developing States and least developed countries.
Karen Gaia says: Thailand has a good chance at sustainability because it did something about it's population growth many years ago. Africa has a long way to go before catching up with Thailand.
October 31, 2007
Media Newswire
U.S.;: Honey, We Shrunk the Planet.
The physical Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it.
Environmental disasters are almost always human disasters. Satellite pictures of Burma over the past three years have recorded the extermination of over 3,000 villages displacing half a million people. The main culprit is the hunger for oil and gas, backed by the murderous local military junta.
The bottom line, is we're living beyond our means. Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature are in decline worldwide. We can't count on the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations.
Change is not linear, and sudden shifts sometimes remake the world in the blink of an eye. We know we're approaching mysterious thresholds that mark the tipping points of ecological regime change, and we may have already crossed some. The closer we get to each threshold, the less it takes to push the system over the edge. Resilience does not mean just bouncing back to business-as-usual. It means assuring the very ability to get back.
Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Think decentralized power grids, more localized food systems, and the Internet.
The heart of resilience is diversity. Damaged ecosystems rebound to health when they have sufficient diversity.
Resilience resides in enduring relationships and networks that hold cultural memory the same way seeds regenerate a forest after a fire. Empower local communities to solve their own problems.
The Dutch mobilized around total environmental quality recovery in 25 years. But the process kicked in only after business took the lead. They had a surprising proposal: Have government set the standards, and let business figure out how to achieve them. Together they developed a twenty-five-year plan, as well as annual plans that report on progress and challenges. If business fails to meet the specific voluntary goals, government will intervene with mandatory controls. To guarantee transparency and accountability, the government funded environmental NGOs as watchdogs to transmit their findings to the media and the public.
We have a golden opportunity to regenerate our waning economy and correct environmental degradation and rampant social injustices. Our declining public health and educational systems rank among the lowest in developed countries. The reinvention of a green economy can begin to solve our economic and social ills simultaneously. We can create abundant jobs, prosperity, equity and hope. Our new declaration of independence is from fossil fuels and imperial entanglements. In the absence of federal leadership, large numbers of cities and states are banding together to lead these kinds of changes. Political boundaries are also morphing. A historic convergence of the environmental and social justice movements is crystallizing in the shared recognition that taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Meanwhile, there are mounting numbers of conservatives, stepping up under the banner of conserving the Earth for their grandchildren.
We need to reclaim our government from the corporate shadow government. It will keep trying to hijack systemic changes that threaten its short-term profits, vested interests and power. We need the separation of corporations and the state.
A successful U.S. Green Plan depends on our doing all this--together, with respect, justice and dignity for all people and the circle of life.
October 19, 2007
Huffington Post
The Nature of the New World.
We are entering a new world where the collisions between our demands and the earth's capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, the seemingly isolated events will determine our future.
Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines are not politically negotiable.
Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic.
Our situation today is more challenging because we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, shrinking oil supplies. Although these destructive trends have been evident for some time, not one has been reversed at the global level.
The world is in what ecologists call an "overshoot-and-collapse" mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20%. The gap, growing by 1% or so a year, is now much wider. We are setting the stage for decline and collapse.
When agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1% of the total. Today, this group accounts for 98% of the earth's total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2% for the wild portion, including all the deer, wild beasts, elephants, birds, and so forth.
For example, as the environmental resources of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today's population of fewer than 4,000.
Even as the global population is climbing and the economy's environmental support systems are deteriorating, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce high-yielding biofuel crops. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.
Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.
If recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.
October 02, 2007
Earth Policy Institute
Green Family Values: Sex and the Environment-World Population Day.
World Population Day was established by the UN in 1989 when the Earth's population reached five billion. Almost 20 years later, we have reached over 6.6 billion with approximately 77 million people added each year. When will we not be able to support our population or have we reached this point?
As the century begins, natural resources are under increasing pressure, water shortages, soil exhaustion, loss of forests, air and water pollution, and degradation of coastlines afflict many areas. Developed economies consume resources faster than they can regenerate. Developing countries with rapid population growth face the need to improve living standards. As we exploit nature to meet present needs, are we destroying resources for the future?
There are so many issues involving global population growth. We may not feel the effects in the US yet, but if we look to developing countries and the natural resources available, it is easy to become alarmed. If we want a livable future, we must increase our sustainabilty, as well as stabilize the human population. We must slow this growth to enable us to address sustainability and preserve a high standard of living for all people. Voluntary family planning should be supported, including eliminating the Global Gag Rule. Even though the US population grows mostly due to immigration, there are families in this country with eight or nine children. However, 99% of population growth does occurs in developing countries. Family planning education that targets both men and women, as well as aid should be a priority as we look to stabilize population growth.
Karen Gaia says: with the human population at 6.6 billion, it will be impossible to attain a high standard of living for all people. Let us settle for a standard of living more like that of Cuba, which is the most sustainable counry in the world. Cuba has free health care, free education, adequately feeds its people, and even sends doctors and nurses to help people in developing countries.
July 11, 2007
Green Options blog
New Sustainability Measure Shows Utahns Have a Big Eco-footprint.
The Utah Population and Environment Coalition calculated that it takes about 9.9 global hectares to support each Utahn, while Utah lands provide 8.9 global hectares.
"It's important to start this discussion about choices for our future," said one of the researchers.
"We hope this will be a community discussion and that Utah will take a leadership role. The average Utahn's share of that consumption has grown along with the state's population. In 1990, the population was 1.7 million and the state's overall footprint was 15.2 million global hectares, compared with 23.8 in 2003, when the population had reached 2.4 million.
The population growth put such a great demand on resources that now we consume more than the land can supply on a sustainable basis. The state now has a deficit of about 2.4 million hectares.
Americans are resource hogs compared to the rest of the world. It would take five earths to sustain everyone if people worldwide had the same eco-footprint as Utahns.
June 28, 2007
The Salt Lake Tribune
When is Hawaii's 'Carrying Capacity' Maxed Out?.
It would seem logical to determine what is the carrying capacity of our Hawaiian islands. There are water conservation advisories on a regular basis. Our sewer system is in need of constant repair. Flooding is common. Road rage is rampant. All boats have a finite carrying capacity. I submit so do islands and what is the carrying capacity of Hawaii?
The criterion for determining whether a region is overpopulated is not land area, but carrying capacity.
That refers to the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations.
The carrying capacity is not fixed. It can be altered by improved technology, but mostly it is changed for the worse by population increase.
As the environment is degraded, carrying capacity shrinks, leaving the environment unable to support even the number of people who could formerly have lived in the area.
The average "ecological footprint" on the mainland is about 12 acres, an area far greater than that taken up by one's residence and place of school or work and the Hawaiian footprint is larger.
June 25, 2007
Hawaii Reporter
Natural Resource Depletion Costs Ghana $520 Million Annually.
Research reveals that the degradation of agricultural soils, forests and Savannah woodlands, coastal fisheries, wildlife resources, and Lake Volta's environment are estimated to cost Ghana at least $520 million annually.
The majority of the estimated costs of environmental degradation comes from forests, to represent 5% of GDP.
Ghana's natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate. More than 50% of the original forest has been converted to agricultural land by slash- and-burn. Despite cocoa land expansion, productivity has declined because of soil erosion.
Fish, timber, and non- timber forest product stocks are decreasing. As a result, coastal towns have begun to experience severe water shortages. Hydropower is dropping, and bilharzia has spread around the Volta Lake region.
Wildlife populations and biodiversity are in serous decline and many species face extinction. These depletions might lower Ghana's GDP growth in the near future.
Poor forest management and soil degradation result in huge economic losses. The degradation of Lake Volta increases the costs and reduces the quality of both water and power.
The prospects for economic development and poverty reduction in Ghana are dependent on natural resources.
Rural households rely on natural resources for their livelihoods, fisheries, and wildlife provide protein in Ghanaian diets. Urban economic activities depend on reliable hydroelectric power.
About half of Ghana's GDP derived from agriculture and livestock, forestry and wood processing and were related to the natural resources.
Ghana's natural resources are over exploited and continue to decline. Inappropriate crop production, mining and the wood industry are adversely affecting forests and savannah. Ongoing soil erosion and a decline in fertility undermine food and agricultural production.
A stronger policy dialogue must etablish a framework to provide sustainable management practices for Ghana's natural resources.
The government must improve local community involvement in natural resource and environmental management.
Also stimulate investments in wildlife, farming, ecotourism, tree plantations, and sustainable land management.
Karen Gaia says: Another article that misses the link to overpopulation. Again, here is the unwritten assumption that women want to have a lot of children and risk dying in childbirth. Ralph says: Why not reduce the population? Oh!! Sorry, must not talk about that.
June 20, 2007
Statesman
US Arizona;: Technology Can Help Sustain Desert Living.
The decade long drought in Arizona may turn into a 1930s-style Dust Bowl. Night-time temperatures may keep on rising. Freeway construction may never relieve the traffic.
More frequent hurricanes traumatize the Gulf Coast. Climbing gas prices threaten our nation's mobility. Conversion of corn into ethanol causes the cost of foodstuffs to skyrocket. New diseases like bird flu spread across the globe.
The sustainability of our lifestyle suddenly seems at risk. Societies are confronted by limits that they did not worry about before.
In the spirit of optimism, Arizona organizations are working together to understand the challenges of sustainability and possible remedies.
The Global Institute of Sustainability, or GIOS, researches rapid urbanization, which uses Greater Phoenix as its main laboratory.
ASU receives millions of federal, state and industry dollars to study how cities grow. Among the major questions being addressed are:
How does the expansion of metro Phoenix affect the Sonoran Desert ecosystem?
How do commercial and government managers make decisions about water allocation?
How can changes in construction materials reduce the urban heat island effect?
How might information-sharing technology allow the police departments to more quickly identify criminals?
How can "green" energy technologies reduce a city's reliance on vulnerable, distant fuel sources?
Where does the Valley's air pollution come from?
These questions may seem diverse, but can be solved only through an interdisciplinary approach. Their solutions offer new business opportunities by creating "sustainable technologies."
June 09, 2007
Arizona Republic
Toward a Green Economy.
The 2005 Millennium Assessment (MA) found that 83% of the planet's natural systems are in serious decline. Adding to this are the pressures of population growth and increasing consumption.
Global population is expected to soar 9 billion by 2050. Even though we crossed the point of sustainable use of natural resources in the mid-1980s, many of the 2.4 billion people living in China and India are striving to approach the materialistic lifestyle of the average North American.
Humanity needs a new approach to managing the assets upon which we all depend. Farming and forestry is about maximizing production, but has to start maximizing the ecological goods and service those ecosystems offer. Funds to pay for such services should come from taxes on polluters, including a carbon tax, cap and trade. In Ecuador, a Water Conservation Fund (FONAG) collects user fees from those who benefit from the water in the Condor Bioreserves and uses these funds to support watershed management projects. In Brazil, states allocate some revenues help support protected areas for forests and other resources. With deforestation threatening the Panama Canal, insurance and shipping companies are helping finance a major reforestation effort.
There is a vital need to create new institutions to protect natural capital at the local level.
On a larger scale Biomes are ecosystems with similar climate, soils, plants, and animals. The MA identifies 15 biomes and a stewardship council for each would maximize ecosystem protection and human welfare within a biome.
There is also a need to create a Commission that would communicate the fact that healthy ecosystem services are fundamental to reducing poverty and achieving economic development. A new forum has been recommended by the U.N. that would include heads of state from countries at different levels of economic development and cultures and deal with environmental and social as well as economic issues.
There are likely one to two million grassroots organizations around the world working toward ecological sustainability. It's unknown if people will rise to this enormous challenge. Voting and choosing environmentally-friendly products is not nearly enough. Only collective action will produce the substantial changes that are needed.
May 31, 2007
IPS News
Plan B Budget for Restoring the Earth - Part Three.
To save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring natural support systems, eradicating poverty, and stabilizing population. We have the resources to do this and the US has the resources to lead this effort. Rich countries are so rich - and the poor so poor - that a few tenths of 1% of GNP from the rich ones over the coming decades could ensure that the basic needs of health and education are met for all impoverished children. It is not possible to put a price tag on the changes needed to move our civilization onto a path that will sustain economic progress. We need to restructure the energy economy to renewable sources of energy. The funding to achieve universal primary education in the developing countries is estimated at $12 billion per year. Funding an adult literacy program based on volunteers will take $4 billion annually. Providing for basic health care in developing countries is estimated at $33 billion. The funding to provide reproductive health care and family planning services to all women in developing countries is less than $7 billion a year.
Providing the 9.5 billion condoms needed to control the spread of HIV in the developing world and Eastern Europe requires $2 billion for condoms and $1.7 billion for AIDS prevention education and condom distribution. School lunch programs to the 44 poorest countries is $6 billion. $4 billion per year would cover the cost of assistance to preschool children and pregnant women. The cost of reaching basic goals comes to $68 billion a year.
A poverty eradication effort that is not accompanied by an earth restoration effort is doomed to fail. Reforesting the earth will cost $6 billion annually. Protecting and restoring rangeland will require $9 billion, restoring fisheries will cost $13 billion, and stabilizing water tables will require $10 billion annually. Protecting biological diversity and conserving soil on cropland, account for over half of the earth restoration annual outlay, $93 billion of additional expenditures per year.
We can decide to stay with business as usual and watch our modern economy collapse, or we can move onto a path, that will sustain economic progress.
It is hard to find the words to convey the gravity of our situation and the momentous nature of the decision we are about to make. No one can argue that we do not have the resources to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and protect the earth's natural resource base. Shifting one sixth of the world military budget to the budget would be more than adequate to move the world onto a path that would sustain progress.
This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market to be ecologically honest. The benchmark of political leadership will be whether or not leaders succeed in restructuring the tax system. This is the key to stabilize climate and to make the transition to the post-petroleum world.
The challenge is to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable.
Karen Gaia says: I respect the Earth Policy institute, but do not share their confidence that there will be enough food to go around after all the restoration and stabilization of water tables. What is to prevent the continuous draw upon the world's resources from again depleting them? And how can this restoration be accomplished while we still rely on fossil fuels which are depleting?
April 17, 2007
Earth Policy Institute
The Next Added 100 Million Americans, Part 28.
In the days of sailing ships, sailors used to leave goats on islands to ensure fresh meat on return trips. But the animals bred faster than the sailors could eat them, and goats ate the vegetation and starved. They also screwed up the environment so that native species couldn't survive. A report blames humans for increased temperatures, melting glaciers and rising seas, they burn fossil fuels at 82 million barrels daily which does no include millions of tons of coal, natural gas and wood being burned every day by 6.6 billion humans.
We've had virtually free energy in the form of fossil fuels. Climate change is a sign that we are exceeding the number of people Earth can sustain. Some, however, point to increased agricultural production and medical advances that fend off disease.
Earth's carrying capacity is thought to be four to five billion people. We have 6.6 billion today and grow by 240,000 every 24 hours. Half of the world's population has little access to medicine, electricity, safe water and reliable food supplies.
You might have 50 billion, but the quality of life might not be pleasing. The US possesses resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. Americans who make up 5% of the world's population, use 25% of its resources and cast a large footprint.
If all 6 billion people were to share the world's resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80% for each of us. Carrying capacity and footprint are tied to the global economy, which has quadrupled since the world's population doubled.
That leads to a fear that slowing population growth might not ultimately curb greenhouse gas production if more people achieve Western lifestyles. China is opening an average of one coal-fired power plant a week to meet electricity demand. Everyone in China wants their own apartment and their own car. People ask how many people the Earth can sustain. That depends on whether you want to live like an Indian or an American.
Farmers worldwide grow about two billion tons of grain a year. Each American consumes 1,760 pounds annually, mainly because of the grains used to feed farm animals. If everyone on the planet consumed that much grain, earth would support about 2.5 billion people. But in India, people consume about 440 pounds each. If everyone else in the world did likewise, the world's grain would support about 10 billion people.
Growing one ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water which is short in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As water flows from agriculture to support growing urban populations, more grain must be imported.
Soybeans are increasingly in demand for biodiesel. And ethanol production now vies with food for corn. By 2008, half of the U.S. corn crop will go to ethanol.
70% of all corn comes from the U.S. If we grow fuel plants that would require setting aside lots of land to produce ethanol. We don't have enough land worldwide to meet those demands. Humans are drawing on capital rather than interest, and once that is exhausted, they will find Mother Nature reluctant to make a loan.
We must take action and prevent a horrible overpopulation future for our children by taking action today. We can bring about population stabilization gracefully or nature will do it brutally.
April 06, 2007
NewsByUs.com
Capitalism and the Consequences of Biofuels.
Biofuel refers to fuels derived from recently living organisms, today mostly in the form of ethanol from plants such as sugar cane, soybeans, and oil palm. Biofuels often use more energy to produce than they contribute. Scientists hope that biofuels can replace much gasoline used today. Because the carbon in biofuels comes from CO2 that is taken out of the atmosphere by the living plants, some scientists argue that biofuels could contribute less to global warming than fossil fuels. And, biofuels could be grown year after year.
Others are saying that they require the use of fertilizers, which increase CO2, replace other plant life, deplete the soil, and are water intensive.
The use of biofuels has led to horrific consequences for the people of the world and the environment.
89% of the world's resources are absorbed by the advanced countries. Imperialism has produced a wasteful and destructive pattern of economic activity and industrial development.
This will continue to mean that the growing of crops for fuel, mostly for export to Europe, Japan and the US, is being done on large-scale plantations in the third world. Ancient forests are being cut down, threatening extinction for many species. Reduction of greenhouse gases is lost when carbon-capturing forests are cut down. In Malaysia, the production of palm oil for biodiesel is a major industry. The development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87% of deforestation. In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.
Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers.
Hundreds of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers are being displaced by soybeans expansion. Many more stand to lose their land under the biofuels stampede. The expanding cropland planted to yellow corn for ethanol has reduced the supply of white corn for tortillas in Mexico, sending prices up 400%.
For investors in alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy the spoils that will make the gains from creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny.
In the development of biofuels this means that they do not pay attention to long-term effects. The economy is broken up into competing units of capitalist control and ownership over the means of production. And each unit is fundamentally concerned with itself and its expansion and its profit. The economy, the constructed and natural environment, and society cannot be dealt with as a social whole under capitalism.
Ralph says: From practical experience in several countries including the old Soviet Union, I can assure our readers that socialism does not work either. Perhaps a benevolent universal dictatorsip is the only solution. In WW2 when food became scarce, rationing was willingly accepted. But will the citizens of the more advanced countries accept ethanol rationing so that more food can be sent to the poorer countries with continuing population growth??
March 30, 2007
Revolution Newspaper - East Bay
Massive Diversion of U.S. Grain to Fuel Cars.
Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising. The use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol is creating consequences throughout the global food chain.
In Mexico, the price of tortillas is up by 60% percent. Angry Mexicans have forced the government to institute price controls on tortillas.
Food prices are also rising in China, India, and the US, 40% of the world's people. Vast quantities of corn are consumed indirectly in meat, milk, and eggs in both China and the US.
In China, pork prices were up 20% above a year earlier, eggs were up 16%. In India, the food price index in 2007 was 10% higher than a year earlier. The price of wheat has jumped 11%.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the wholesale price of chicken in 2007 will be 10% higher than in 2006, the price of eggs will be up 21%, and milk 14%, and this is only the beginning.
As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value. In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. Some 16 of the 2006 U.S. harvest was used to produce ethanol. With 80 or so ethanol distilleries under construction, nearly a third of the 2008 grain harvest will be going to ethanol.
Since the United States is the leading exporter of grain, what happens to the U.S. grain crop affects the entire world. The world's breadbasket is fast becoming the U.S. fuel tank.
The UN lists 34 countries as needing emergency food assistance. Food aid programs have fixed budgets.
Protests in response to rising food prices could lead to political instability that would add to the list of failed and failing states. President Bush set a production goal for 2017 of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels. Given the difficulties in producing cellulosic ethanol at a competitive cost and the mounting public opposition to liquefied coal, most of the fuel to meet this goal might have to come from grain. This could leave little grain to meet U.S. needs, much less those of the countries that import grain.
The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level.
In 2007, 18,000 children are dying every day from hunger and malnutrition. There are alternatives. A rise in fuel efficiency standards of 20% over the next decade would save as much oil as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol.
One option is plug-in hybrids. Adding a second storage battery to a gas-electric hybrid car along with a plug-in capacity allows most short-distance driving to be done with electricity. If this was accompanied by thousands of wind farms that could feed cheap electricity into the grid, then cars could run largely on electricity for the equivalent cost of $1 per gallon gasoline.
Toyota, Nissan, and GM, have announced plans to bring plug-in hybrid cars to market. It is time to decide whether to continue with subsidizing more grain-based distilleries or to encourage a shift to more fuel-efficient cars. The choice is between a future of rising world food prices, spreading hunger, and growing political instability, or one of stable food prices, sharply reduced dependence on oil, and much lower carbon emissions.
Karen Gaia says: No mention of there being too many people and too many people with large appetites for energy. Time to conserve energy. Move closer to your work and shopping. Move where you can walk or bicycle to whereever you need to go. Go from a multi-car family to a one car family and save money on gas, car insurance, and the car itself. And let's get away from globalization and back to bioregionlism. Take the farms away from the corporations and let the local people go back to farming. And give women access to ways to keep their family size small.
March 21, 2007
Earth Policy News
Are Politicians Avoiding the Real Reasons for Climate Change?.
According to the World Land Trust, politicians and environmentalists are not confronting the real reasons for climate change. "It is only when we confront the real issue that is driving the whole energy issue that we can hope to prevent the total chaos that is likely to result over the next few decades. And that is far too many people exist on this planet."
The population, with its ever increasing demands on the world's resources, is totally unsustainable. The developed world is only able to sustain its own use of resources by exploiting the less developed parts of the world, such as China, India and other parts of Asia. As they catch up, more and more resources will be consumed, particularly energy and water. Intensification of farming in the developed world has temporarily alleviated food shortages, but devastated wildlife, with millions of acres now barren of wild animals and plants, even migrant birds suffer.
Since the World Land Trust was created in 1989, more organizations are seeing the importance of preserving what little is left. It's not a huge amount, but by targeting key areas, perhaps something will survive for future generation when human populations are brought under control."
Meanwhile politicians try to convince us that a bit of recycling, and a more energy efficient light bulb will save the planet. They ignore the fact that every extra million human beings means huge amounts of oil, food and other resources are needed. Every Briton consumes more than a peasant farmer in Central Africa. In addition to wrecking the British countryside, Britons are also responsible for depleting the resources of many other parts of the world. In the past the problem has been resolved by war, famine and disease. All three loom close, and we are, still re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, with the iceberg in full view.
March 14, 2007
World Land Trust
Too Many People, Not Enough Earth; Scientists Debate How Much Population the World Can Sustain .
In the days of sailing ships, sailors left goats on islands to ensure fresh meat on return trips. It worked. The animals bred fast and ate all the vegetation and began to starve. The goats also screwed up the environment so that native species couldn't survive. The lesson of the goats applies to humans and this is how how our "island" has suffered.
There is air and water pollution, falling water tables, climate change and rampant extinction of wild plants and animals. Climate change is a sign that we are exceeding the number of people Earth can sustain.
Every year, 91 million humans are born in excess of those who die. That's 1 billion people every 11 years.
Right now, Earth's carrying capacity is in the range of 4 to 5 billion people. There are 6.5 billion of us.
Half of the world's population has little access to medicine, electricity, safe water and reliable food supplies.
If the 1.3 million residents of Franklin County had to live on the resources the county could provide, only about 100,000 would live here.
We're oblivious to that because we import the vast majority of our needs.
The US has the resources to sustain less than half of its current population of 300 million. Americans, who make up 5% of the world's population and use 25% of its resources. If all 6 billion people were to share the world's resources equally, Americans would have to reduce consumption by 80%.
There is a fear that slowing population growth might not curb greenhouse gas production if more people achieve Western lifestyles. China is opening one coal-fired power plant a week to meet electricity demand. Everyone in China wants their own apartment and their own car. People ask how many people the Earth can sustain. It depends on whether you want to live like an Indian or an American.
Each American consumes an average of 1,760 pounds annually, mainly because of the grains used to feed farm animals. If everyone on the planet consumed that much grain, Earth would support about 2.5 billion people.
In India, people consume about 440 pounds each. If everyone else in the world did likewise, the world's grain would support about 10 billion people.
Growing 1 ton of grain requires 1,000 tons of water.
There already are water shortages and, as water is diverted from agriculture to support growing urban populations, more grain must be imported.
Soybeans are increasingly in demand for biodiesel and ethanol now vies with food for corn.
