Climate change and population control

I had my first ever article published in The Conversation this morning, on population control and climate change. I encourage you to read it.

The process of writing and getting the article published has been an interesting experience. It started as a request from the University's communications team to write something 'for the University website'. Once I had written a draft though, it became clear that I was being subjected to what I am sure was a pretty unsophisticated bait-and-switch, when the comms people recommended I pitch the article to The Conversation. The article appears to be doing what they intended though, and my email has been pinging constantly all day as the article attracts comments (129 comments so far, and counting - for context, that is more comments than all other articles by University of Waikato staff have attracted in the last month).

Anyway, there isn't much space to write in depth about the issues in the 800 words that The Conversation allows, and the original 1200 words I drafted got pared back substantially. The main issue I wanted to highlight is that, when some people argue that we should curb population growth to reduce carbon emissions (or climate damage more generally), there are a number of key issues that need to be considered. First, there is an ethical or moral issue, as Ross Douthat discussed in this article back in November. As I noted in my article:

If our concern about climate change arises because we want to ensure a liveable future world for our grandchildren, is it ethical to ensure that pathway is achieved by preventing some grandchildren from ever seeing that world because they are never born?

Second, it's not clear that government-enforced population control is even necessary, because:

All high-income countries currently already have below-replacement fertility, with fewer children being born than are necessary to maintain a constant population.

What does that mean? I took my starting point as the Kaya Identity, which breaks carbon emissions exactly into four components:

1. Population
2. GDP (or production) per capita;
3. Energy use per unit of GDP (or production); and
4. Carbon emissions per unit of energy use

To reduce emissions, we would need to reduce one or more of those components. Taking into account that the first two components are growing, if we can't easily reduce population and we are unwilling to reduce economic growth, then we need to reduce the energy intensity of the economy or the carbon intensity of energy production. And if we can't do either of those things (and, to be honest, we haven't done a good enough job so far), then we would have to undertake some challenging conversations about the first two.

Anyway, against my better judgement I have been following along the discussion in the comments, and a couple of very valid points have been raised. So, I thought I would make some comments about them here.

First, the moral or ethical issue that I raised has been challenged. Some people have missed the point that it is a philosophical question and so, while the answer might seem obvious on the surface, the reasoning is less so. However, aside from the philosophical question, the moral issue I raised does take a human-centred view of the world, whereas if you take a planet-centred view there is no such issue. That is, would we save the planet for our grandchildren at all, or would we save it for the planet itself? That is an excellent point.

Second, I raised China as being the only country to have undertaken a successful policy of population control. Some commenters raised family planning programmes, but I would argue that family planning doesn't have at its heart a goal of population control - it is about empowering parents (particularly women) in their choices about family size. It's still a good point though, and there is a huge unmet need for family planning (particularly in developing countries and in underserved communities in developed countries) that, if resources were applied, could reduce future population. Increasing female education also has the effect of lowering fertility rates but again, it's not a policy a government implements explicitly for its population control effects.