It's the Population, Stupid!1
CO2 as a function of time over the last half-century2 . Despite technological improvements that should have slowed or reversed CO2 increase, the rate of increase continues to escalate. I will endeavor to argue this is a result of growing population, and that population control must supplement scientific advances for continued viability of the biosphere.
Throughout recent centuries, science and innovation have always bailed us out. Whether it has been preventing or curing illness, inventing machines to make our lives better or easier, or creating better weapons to kill the bad guys faster, science has been there. When we noticed our air getting dirty, science provided nuclear power to run appliances without polluting the air. When petroleum became expensive, innovation improved vehicle energy efficiency to do more with less.
Every gain has a price, though: nuclear power generates a small amount of highly concentrated and dangerous waste, battery production for hybrid cars has environmental issues, and hydroelectric dams interfere with local ecosystems. When looking at the larger picture, the trade-offs and limitations of technological approaches makes it evident that they are more stop-gaps than solutions.
And all through all of that, the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere has been rising ever faster. We didn't notice it for a long time, because nobody thought to check. Even after we started collecting CO2 concentration data, years passed before enough data was collected to provide the meaningful analysis. Now that we're beginning to understand it, though, it's just the latest environmental symptom of human endeavors.
Some put faith in science as our savior. Unfortunately, as fast as science tries to bail us out, humans reproduce and exacerbate the problem. And now, time is of the essence: years ago, we exceeded the CO2 threshold3 that, left unchecked, will cause irreversible climate change on Planet Earth.
The good news is that science is ready to bail us out again. There are things we can do to reverse the damage before it is too late. Unfortunately, science can not do it alone. We need to examine our personal behaviors and make choices to minimize our impact. We need to put our money where our mouth is: buy efficient rather than just talking about it, stop buying trivial junk we do not need, and stop throwing everything in the trash because "recycling is hard".
Most importantly, we need to stop offsetting gains with increased population.
We can fix this, and the sooner we get started the better chance we have of success. A one-dimensional solution is not going to cut it: we need science, public policy, population control, and individual choice to come together to address this problem. And we need to take a holistic approach in examining and addressing the problems, rather than "solving" one problem by trading it for a different one.
Contents
1. The Problem
To be blunt, we’re tearing up the planet at an astounding rate. We knew this ages ago: Love Canal, smog, the hole in the ozone. In all these cases, there was something that directly affected humankind that acted as incentive to change our behavior: we stopped PCB use and cleaned up spills that were causing cancers; added catalytic converters to our cars to reduce nitrogen compound (NO and NO2) emissions and smog; and we stopped using CFCs, the major contributing catalyst to the destruction of the ozone layer.
Now growing CO2 concentrations and global warming are the latest symptoms of human activity, with population as the problem. Once again, we’re throwing technology at the surface problem: hybrid vehicles, energy-efficient light bulbs, improved furnaces.
The actions already taken are a good start, but do they really address the underlying issue? I believe they do not, and that these these solutions alone will not work this time. Why? To understand, we must consider each of the ways that technological solutions have succeeded in the past– and examine why they can not continue to do so.
2. Why Science Can Not Fix It Alone
Our faith in technology is based on a record of successes, in which differing technological approaches have solved problems over the years. The gestalt of solutions reinforces our faith: we believe that if one approach fails, another will succeed.To overcome this illusion, we must examine each approach individually so that its limitations and trade-offs are evident. After the unrealistic expectations have been dispelled individually, we can then return to the larger picture and see it more realistically.
2.1. Avoiding the Problem: Deception & Self-Deception
There are plenty of merchants that have a hand in selling us their products, and often time, we want to buy their products because they make our lives easier. If we believe that we are having an impact on the planet, then we must change our ways– and therefore, it is in our interest to either outright deny the existence of the problem or to accept over-simplistic answers.
Denial that there is a developing problem:
Despite mounting scientific evidence and undeniable data showing CO2 concentration increasing in the atmosphere, there is nobody dying of brain cancer like in Love Canal, no smog creating respiratory diseases or acid rain destroying lakes in the Adirondacks like with nitrogen emissions, and no increase in skin cancer risk like with the ozone hole.For most people, until there is a tangible effect we would rather deny that anything is going wrong. “This might just be natural” is preferable, especially when the alternate possibility is that it is our fault, and the solution is to cut back on the things that make life easy. Even when we acknowledge the problem, “Nothing bad has happened yet– we just need to fix it before the problems begin to show up.”
Overly simplistic answers:
When we listen to advertising for “green” products, we often allow ourselves to be easily convinced that that it is good for the planet, and we can therefore use it recklessly– just as we used to do.
However, even for products that actually do provide
improvement,4 an
improvement is not the same as a solution. A caustic oven cleaner
made from “natural” sources is still a caustic cleanser in the end,
and while it might be better than the prior all-synthetic chemical
solution, it still has impact. There’s a big difference between
repairing, eliminating, and reducing
damage, and we need to delineate the difference in our mind. Going
“green” does not mean we can stop reusing, reducing, recycling and
other behaviors that minimize impact. Unfortunately, we often
desire "green” labeling as permission to go back to using products
with wanton abandon.
Belief in a future solution:
When we’re ready to accept that it is our fault, then we’d like to believe that technological innovation will address the problem yet allow us to continue our lifestyle with minimal alteration. Let’s examine the fallacies of this idea.2.2. Environmental Impact Trade-offs
One of the biggest “green” pushes lately has been hybrid vehicles. The kinetic energy of a braking vehicle is stored and reused for propulsion for later acceleration. Who could argue with using energy that would be otherwise wasted?The problem is that the batteries used to store the energy between collection and re-use have environmental issues of their own. Nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries and strong electric motors require nickel and copper respectively, requiring extra mining, refining, shipping, and production, all to finally add additional weight to the overall vehicle and attain an efficiency gain typically not over 20%. It’s moved some of the impact from use to production, and while I’ll avoid the the debate of whether the overall impact is an improvement or a detriment, I will observe that it is at best an improvement– not a solution.
We can find a similar problem with ethanol as a fuel source. By converting corn or other plants into fuel, allegedly we produce a “green” fuel. But production requires additional fuel for equipment to plant, fertilize, harvest, ship, and produce the crop to be "ethanized". As ethanol eats into our food supplies, we must clear more regions to expand crop production. In many regions, ages-old aquifers are being drained to water the crops– they are not an indefinite resource. Even if ethanol is overall reducing our gasoline utilization (and there are those who debate it), it is in exchange for impacts elsewhere. Just as with hybrid vehicles, I evade the determination of improvement or detriment– but offer a reminder that ethanol does not fix the problem, it at best offers an improvement.
Other examples? Energy efficient compact fluorescent (CF) light bulbs contain mercury– less than the amount saved by burning coal to power a traditional incandescent rather than the CF bulb, but again, an improvement– not a fix.
Some argue for a switch to electric vehicles. But where does that energy come from? Coal plants (benefit from scale of production, but that does not solve the problem), nuclear plants (which trade a large amount of “chronic” waste into a small amount of “acute” waste), windmills (which can help, but can't supply enough power to solve the problem entirely), hydroelectric (which impact the waterways on which dams are built), or solar-voltaic (which have toxins associated with production). Additionally, electric vehicles need even more batteries than hybrids– which, as mentioned earlier, have their own environmental impact. Electric vehicles will not be a silver bullet.
2.3. Why Science Can Not Continue Providing Good Trade-offs
There is always research into new things, so sooner or later we’ll find something new and unexpected to save our collective asses, right? A possibility, true, but a diminishing one for a few reasons. Most notably, science rarely gave us many trade-off free solutions in the first place– we just didn't recognize that we were making trade-offs.Asbestos was a wonderful new building product that was fire retardant until we learned about its carcinogenic effects. The drug thalidomide was going to prevent spontaneous abortions– we did not expect flipper babies. The pesticide DDT was going to safely rid our crops of insects because we failed to understand it was going to affect bird egg shell formation and thus their ability to reproduce for decades to come. The effects of DDT are not confined to those birds living on land, but also the sea birds of the Pacific Gyre5 where DDT attaches to and concentrates on waste plastic floating in the ocean until it is eaten by fish or other marine life and makes its way back up the food chain.
Incidents like this mean we’re being more careful to understand the impact of our actions before we try something and create a new problem. Our growing understanding of the world around us helps us make predictions about side-effects, and our greater cautiousness (learned from the mistakes of our earlier recklessness) means we’re likely to notice problems earlier when we do try something new.
Not only do the problems we’re coming up with have side effects, but the problems themselves are in part due to side effects: for example, in response to growing particulate matter in the atmosphere and the respiratory diseases and other problems that they cause, we have been working for several decades on reducing particulate pollution. The result? The trend of global dimming– reduction of light getting to the surface by the particulate– has slowed and even shown signs of reversing. As we clean up the air and more light gets in, so is the sun’s warming effect increasing.
It’s like environmental whack-a-mole: just as we hammer one problem down, another pops up. As we learn the relations, the number of solutions that seem viable is diminishing. We’re finding that we can’t make problems just disappear– we can, at best, transform one problem into a different problem that, for the moment, we think is the least of several evils.
2.4. Diminishing Returns in Efficiency Gains
Science and ingenuity have provided us with new products that provide similar utility with less energy utilization. Compact fluorescent bulbs use less power than incandescents. LED lighting will eventually use even less energy per lumen produced,6 but the fluorescents are sufficiently efficient that the gain is unlikely to be radical.Unfortunately, like in lighting, we have already made significant improvements in many of the products around us, so it is becoming harder to invent something that beats what we already have. Where we do gain efficiency, we increasingly have to “jump through hoops” to get a gain– hybrid cars, mentioned earlier, are a good example of this. It’s an instance of the law of diminishing returns. Let’s look at furnace history as an example:
The convection coal furnace of the 1800s and early 1900s was 10-20% efficient, leaving an easy 80-90% gain to be made. As oil and gas became available, they replaced coal furnaces7 and were built with new heat exchangers that provided 30-40% efficiency. With the general availability of electricity, blower motors were eventually added to newer furnaces, pushing efficiency up to 60-70% but with additional manufacturing costs– labor to to construct and install the motors and mine copper8 for the windings. Newer furnaces were more expensive but reduced operating costs, justifying the expense.
Moving to 80% created a problem: at 80% efficiency, sufficient heat is removed in heat exchange that the gasses no longer naturally vent up the chimney, creating the draft essential to sustain combustion. Thus, 80% and higher efficiency furnaces require a second motor to create an artificial draft. Furthermore, sufficiently cool waste gasses may condense in the chimney, damaging the clay liner in older buildings; this requires a stainless-steel insert be installed inside the chimney to prevent damage.
Burning hydrocarbons yields CO2, H2O, and heat; the heat ensures the H2O stays in gaseous form. At 90% efficiency, however, sufficient heat is removed in heat exchange to allow H2O to condense– rusting steel heat exchangers. Thus, further efficiency gain requires the heat exchanger be made entirely out of stainless steel, or be constructed as two heat exchangers– one of traditional materials for high temperatures, one of stainless steel or ceramic to deal with corrosive waste at lower temperatures. All these options drive up the cost of manufacturing and maintenance and thus the cost to the owner while providing a declining gain of 10%.
At this point, with 90% efficiency achieved, diminishing returns really kicks in. To get additional gain, there are a number of strategies: infinitely variable speed blower motors (which do have the advantage of electrical efficiency as well), multiple or modulating gas valves, multi-speed inducer motors; all require additional parts, increase complexity, and cost more to install and maintain. All this complexity has yet to produce an efficiency above 97%, with most in the mid-90s. When combined, each individual strategy yields a few percent improvement, with combination yielding less than the sum the individual strategies.
What’s the next step to squeeze the last little bit of heat out? Possibly adding a heat pump to extract the last heat before waste is vented, but heat pumps require a fair amount of electrical energy– a trade-off. The gain possible? The whole heat pump could at best deliver 3-5% efficiency because that’s all that remains before reaching 100% efficiency. Achieving 100% would be illusory because of the additional electrical energy needed to run the heat pump.
The progress we've made through the years in things like lighting and heating efficiency makes it very tempting to believe that we can sustain the rate of improvement. As I've shown, however, the significant improvements we've already made is why we can't sustain the level of improvement: we're reaching the point of diminishing returns. While there are certainly areas where improvements can be made, they won't be the easily achieved, huge gains we've previously reaped because of the incredible inefficiencies of the past.
2.5. Gains Offsets by Creative New Uses
Another problem is that as fast as we gain efficiency, we offset it by increased demand or use. When the City of Rochester upgraded street lights along a nearby street some years ago, they presumably installed the latest-and-greatest energy efficient lighting. Unfortunately, they also doubled the number of street lights.New computer hardware is increasingly efficient in terms of computational power per watt. An iPhone today has similar computing power to a 9-year-old laptop, yet runs on a fraction of the power. Unfortunately, we have invented numerous new applications over the last 10 years, all more complex than the prior generation and therefore demanding more computing power. Beefing up software requires beefing up machines, meaning modern machines use just as much power as prior generations (albeit doing much more with the same amount of energy).
Although we don't often think about it, even the Internet consumes power– all the web servers, all the communication equipment to connect us, the modems or routers in our houses. As demand for bandwidth has grown, more communication lines or higher-speed equipment has offset gains in efficiency that could have been made. In addition to the number of web sites growing, many sites have become more dynamic– requiring additional databases to serve data and track visitor activity, which translates into power and hardware. Even programming languages themselves have offset gains in hardware efficiency as the latest dynamic scripting languages– Groovy, Ruby, etc.– provide additional abstraction to programmers by adding computational complexity "under the hood", which demands more computing power and thus cancels possible gains in energy efficiency.
2.6. Disposal
Even getting rid of our stuff has become a problem. In the past, we reused everything– bottles were washed and reused, bags were reused or even sewn into clothing, scraps of cloth became patchwork quilts (which were painstakingly created to meet a purpose with available supplies, not as a wondrous creative outlet that represents your individuality).As the industrial movement progressed, bulk manufacturing drove down the price of goods and waste increased. Why waste hours upon hours sewing together fabric scraps when you could just buy a single, inexpensive sheet of fabric? Waste increased as labor-intensive tasks were relegated to “quaint” cottage industries, the rest of us sold on the ease of buying mass produced goods. As prices fell, we stopped fixing things in favor of replacing them. Instead of having in a repairman to fix our washing machine, refrigerator, or television we just put it on the curb and buy a new one. Coca-Cola stopped coming in glass containers with a deposit, instead packaged in aluminum or plastic bottles to be thrown away after use.
But we could not keep that up. Not because we are unable to produce more, but because the waste became problematic– landfills were filling up too fast. Many states reimplemented deposits on bottles and cans less to promote reuse as to prevent disposal as refuse. Although recycling does reduce mining by reusing materials, the bigger immediate goal is to prevent our garbage dumps from overflowing– the City of Toronto, for example, puts a huge emphasis on recycling and composting because refuse has to be shipped 500 miles to a landfill in Michigan.9
Even when we do dispose of things, that’s often not the end of the problems. Landfills often leach chemicals into groundwater. Drugs disposed down toilets are not fully processed by water treatment plants, polluting downstream waters with chemicals and hormones. And plenty of waste never makes it to landfills, ending up on the side of the road, in lakes and streams, or– if it is made of plastic– floating around in the ocean, often ending up in the Pacific Gyre or other eddy current, where it strangles wildlife that becomes entangled in it or starves creatures that eat it.
We could address some of the disposal problem by incinerating our garbage. Unfortunately, that often releases toxins that are in the materials being incinerated– and it produces more CO2. We're back to the choice of trading off one problem for another.
3. Solutions
3.1. Rethinking our wants, needs & Changing Behavior
There is little doubt that we can make good headway on the problem by changing our behaviors.Our culture of speed, of getting things done quickly and utilizing all our time, forces us into having our own vehicles and burning petroleum unnecessarily. If we slowed down a little, we could use shared transit (and maybe have a chance to enjoy a good book or conversation on the way).
We've been spoiled by having things easy. Instead of refilling a bottle, we toss it away and take a new one from the fridge. We use disposable tissues, napkins, wipes, and diapers rather than handkerchiefs, cloth napkins, towels and cloth diapers. It’s less toil for us, and it is also faster– the culture of speed again. When we do get outside for some exercise, many of us play sports in arenas with massive lighting arrays because we’re doing it at night– because we’re too busy getting stuff done in the daytime. Culture of speed.
We rarely even pause for lunch anymore. We have lunch at or desk, or pick up processed food from the drive-thr while zooming from one thing to another. We don't consider the paper wrapping, french fry box, and disposable cardboard cup that came with lunch– if anything, we’re just happy they're not plastic or styrofoam.
Then there's the issue of consumerism, and trying to buy our way to happiness and self-worth. I'm not going to address that here; it is a topic worthy of its own essay.
Changing the way we think, live, and consume individually is a start, but it is not enough.
3.2. Reducing Consumption vs. Reducing the Population
If the manner in which we consume can not fix the problem entirely, we must also scale back. But where? The choice is shown by simple arithmetic:We can either scale back individual impact, population, or a little of both, until the overall impact reaches equilibrium with the planet’s ability to “heal” (compost, absorb, deteriorate, accommodate, etc.).total_impact = impact/person * population
At present, we are unwilling to do either on a political level:
- Restricting individual impact would mean interfering with personal freedoms to live, consume, and enjoy life in the way one wishes to.
- Population control would be an even more obvious interference with personal liberty, affecting individuals’ ability to form families and have children. This would even violate freedom of religion for those religions that promote large over healthy families.
Unfortunately, if we only address one of the above, we will not address the problem. Even if we reduced individual impact to reach equilibrium, failing to regulate the population would invariably result in population growth– thus unbalancing things again.
If we transform the equation, we can look at it another way:
Looking at it this way, the higher the population goes, the more we would need to restrict individual consumption (freedom) to maintain biosphere equilibrium.impact/person = total_impact ÷ population
We now see 3 choices, all disturbingly similar to various dystopian futures in science fiction:
- Allow our impact to deteriorate the biosphere, destroying other species and reducing livability until natural forces regulate10 our own numbers.
- Manage our population.
- Create tighter restrictions on each new generation’s consumption until we eventually reach a minimum. At which point, we will have to restrict population anyway.
We may not like any of these choices. Nevertheless, we must make a choice or we get #1 by default, which is the worst of the cases.
3.3. An Argument for Population Control
I argue for population control. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and many enjoyable things are wasteful. I enjoy driving my car to see a movie or visit a friend when I want to. I enjoy setting my household thermostat at a comfortable level. Human nature is to do things that make our lives pleasant, regardless of the impact on other people, other species, or the world at large– especially when that impact is imperceptible.
If survival means having all the fun things taken away in necessity of attaining equilibrium with the biosphere, why live?
Population regulation may be the epitome of unwanted government interference in our lives. However, regulating population is essential in maintaining a good quality of life for future generations: having a healthy biosphere, and the freedom to do what they want, when they want to.
3.4. Implementation: Technological vs. Primitive Cultures
The obvious problem is that impact/person widely varies, with Americans (and especially the US) using hugely disproportionate portions of resources: 5% of the world's population uses 20% of the resources. A counterargument, then, is that we should focus on getting the US to stop over-utilizing their share, creating a 15% gain; and that we can't ask those who do not contribute much impact to control their population as they are not part of the problem.However, standards of living around the world are increasing (especially in India and China) and impact/person in those areas is increasing as a result. As technology spreads, more of the world will be on equal footing both in terms of resources owned and impact.
If US gains are balanced by growth of population by 15% in other regions, then the overall problem still remains.
Still, there are likely to be some hunter-gatherer or other cultures that contribute very little impact, although I expect the portion of the world contributing a share of impact to increase. Thus, I assert the excess 15% contributed by the US is a good opportunity for reducing current environmental impact, but as a one-time fix, it does not address the problems of the future.
Determining exactly how to implement population control, considering the variability in impact by different countries, is an implementation issue that I will not address beyond recognizing there are fairness issues that will need to be worked out.
3.5. Side Effects of Population Control
Our world today is built on growth. As our population grows, we need more industry to provide more jobs, more housing for people to live in– and both require we keep growing, consuming, expanding at increasing levels. We need more transit to get around, more reservoirs to supply us water, more energy to supply our larger numbers with heat, light, and convenience.When we decide to regulate the population, we will need to shift from a paradigm of growth to a state of stasis or shrink. As fewer children enter schools, we will either have to reduce staff and close schools, or have a better student:teacher ratio. As the size of the labor pool adjusts, the ability of workers to demand decent pay may return. Work may be done more slowly, or we may simply lose some of the trivial jobs that exist today.
Whatever happens, it will be a paradigm shift. We must be dynamic and adapt to newly found, unexpected challenges we will encounter along the way. Only one thing is for sure: it must be better than the madness for which we are presently on course.
