Conservatives and liberals argue over whether climate change is real, whether it’s man made or natural, how big the problem is, what we should do about it, and how fast we should do it. Political parties will always disagree on what our most pressing problems are—the open debate of ideas is the strength of democracy. So we should continue to talk to each other and make progress. However, the fixation on climate change misunderstands the nature of the problem facing us. I think the Left and the Right would benefit from approaching this debate from another angle.
In 1798 Thomas Malthus thought there was a limit to the human population on Earth. During his lifetime he saw a series of terrible famines in Ireland, Austria, Bangladesh and China. He saw populations grow in times of plenty and starve in times of famine.
Malthus theorized this boom and bust cycle was a natural law. Global population would always increase faster than our ability to increase food production. Too many mouths and too little food would eventually lead to wide spread famines thus limiting the population. Time has discredited Malthus. Human population has grown exponentially since then and the catastrophe he predicted never came to pass.
But his broader argument was that humans require resources to live and that those resources are finite. Therefore there is some number of total humans (carrying capacity) that the Earth can comfortably sustain. Malthus’ formula for Earth’s carrying capacity can be roughly summarized as such.
Carrying Capacity of the Earth
Looking around at the natural world it’s understandable how Malthus came to this conclusion. The lynx is a good example. Lynx eat rabbits almost exclusively. When rabbit populations boom, so do lynx. When rabbits are scarce, lynx populations plummet.
Likewise for the first million odd years when humans first appeared on Earth they fed themselves by gathering plants and animals that lived and bred without their intervention. When times were good, humans increased in numbers. When times were bad, the opposite happened.
2 New Variables
Malthus didn’t account for two variables that complicate this simple formula.
1. Innovation
When humans began to domesticate plants and animals the number of humans a region could sustain changed. A wild valley might sustain a tribe of 100 hunter gatherers. That same domesticated valley, now farmed with wheat and sheep, might now support 1,000 humans.
12,000 years ago, at the dawn of the agricultural age, Earth’s total population was 5-8 million—all nomadic hunter-gatherers. 10,000 years later when Jesus was born, at the start of our common era, there were 250 million people. 99% were farmers. Same planet. Vastly increased total population.
Humans had learned to innovate around a natural constraint to their population growth. We changed our environment and increased the carrying capacity of the Earth. Human creativity introduced a new variable into Malthus’ equation—the innovation factor.
After domesticating plants and animals, humanity’s next great innovative leap began at the end of the 18th century—when we learned to harness the power of fossil fuels in the industrial revolution. The advent of cheap energy has transformed our society, chiefly by making farmers more efficient. Before the industrial revolution 75% of the British population were farmers. In Canada now less than 2% of people grow enough food to feed the rest of us. Global population grew from 700 million in 1750 to 7.7 billion a mere 270 years later.
Malthus failed to appreciate humans ability to innovate. Our continued success in overcoming obstacles to our growth has lead some to believe that this growth trajectory has no limit.
The exact limit of the Earth’s carrying capacity is unknown, but unknown is not the same as infinite. I think there are good reasons why this optimism is misplaced.
2. The dawn of luxury
The agricultural revolution introduced another important variable into the equation. Nomadic hunter-gatherers required large areas to roam, but little in material possessions. Afterall, it’s too much of a pain to carry large quantities of things around.
But a sedentary lifestyle makes it easier to accumulate things. The excess food from farming also created larger communities. Those freed from food production initiated the creation of specialized labour and social stratification.
In a hunter-gatherer community the amount of things people had were roughly uniform. But fixed settlements with increasing numbers of people resulted in different lifestyles. The more people, the more society divided into classes. There were now farmers and kings and a multitude of lifestyles in between.
It was no longer simply a question of feeding people. A king’s lifestyle is characterized by an excess of needs. He lives in luxury. The resources required to live like a king are substantially more than the resources to live like a farmer.
The lifestyle we want will affect Earth’s carrying capacity. There are currently 7.7 billion people. The consequences if we lived like the Amish or like Elon Musk are very different.
Let’s update the formula with our two new variables:
Innovation factor increases Earth’s carrying capacity.
Increasing lifestyles decrease Earth’s carrying capacity.
Malthusian catastrophe
Malthus thought that the world has a finite carrying capacity. Anything above this will be unsustainable. When the two lines (limited resources and growing population) come closer to intersecting we would see signs of strain.
During Malthus’ life the signs of stress that accompanied a shortage of resources manifested in the worst possible way—human starvation. Every few years crops failed due to some environmental stress (bad weather, blight, insect infestation) and almost immediately famine struck. The signs of stress we see today manifest themselves differently.
Scientists have been studying the globe and have come up with 9 indicators of planetary health, of which climate change is one. Each of the nine have safe zones. Biodiversity integrity along with nitrogen and phosphorus runoff pollution are at dangerous levels right now. We’re okay with the others for now, but most are increasing. Even minus climate change, there are clear signs that the planet’s environment is under serious strain. Canada and America have lost 3 billion songbirds in 50 years. Winged insect populations are plummeting. By 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Solutions
Malthus’ formula helps conceptualize the problem. The things we have control over and the things we don’t. To reduce the strain on the planet we can:
Change our lifestyles to reduce our resource consumption
Innovate around our problems
Reduce the number of people (thus reducing our ask of the planet).
However, some resources are finite and cannot be increased. For instance, humans require space to live. If we lived like Hong Kongers, we could squeeze billions more people on to the planet, but eventually it’ll get harder and harder to find space for people no matter how austere our lives.
The formula provides important context for the issue of climate change. Importantly, climate change is not the root problem, but a symptom of a deeper one—the resources required for our cumulative lifestyles is straining the Earth’s ability to provide.
Let’s weigh the merits of each possible solution to climate change in light of this formula. Each option has its own challenges and rewards.
Green energy
Green energy falls into the ‘Innovation’ variable of our formula. We have come against a constraint to our growth (environmental degradation from greenhouse gasses causing climate change). Green energy allows us to innovate around the constraint while maintaining our growth trajectory.
People underestimate the challenge of creating a carbon neutral economy. Even if we somehow managed to transition all our electric generation and transportation emissions with renewable sources and electric vehicles—that only would reduce total greenhouse emissions by 40%. Not to mention the tonnes of raw materials it would take to build billions of wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars. That resource pressure would surely exacerbate habitat loss and other environmental problems. Manufacturing (steel, concrete, and plastic create significant emissions) and agriculture account for another 40% of emissions. It’s unclear how we’d reduce those, especially with developing countries increasing in wealth and therefore consuming more food/meat and steel and concrete for development. (The world’s building stock will double in area by 2060. That’s like adding another New York City every month for 40 years.)
The amount of innovation required to overcome this constraint is staggering. Most importantly, the problem with this strategy is that it mistakes a carbon neutral lifestyle with a sustainable life. Environmental degradation is also a different type of problem than a resource constraint.
Lifestyle Reduction
People love to troll environmental leaders for driving around in SUVs or travelling in airplanes or using disposable coffee cups. But this type of criticism misunderstands what a sustainable lifestyle looks like. So what does a sustainable lifestyle look like?
Underlying our conversations about the environment is this fundamental question. The answer might surprise you—there is no such thing as a sustainable life. A sustainable lifestyle is not some objective standard, but rather depends on what your fellow humans are doing. Earth would have no issue supporting 1,000 Elon Musks. But a billion billionaires living a jet set lifestyle is a different story. Whether or not the Elon Musk lifestyle is sustainable depends on the number of similar humans around. Likewise, a fossil fuel economy isn’t necessarily bad for the environment. It depends on the amount of emissions and the Earth’s ability to absorb them.
It is true that if the Amish lifestyle came into vogue most of our environmental problems would disappear because the resources required for our lifestyles would dramatically be reduced. But luxuries tend to become necessities. (In a decade smartphones have moved from luxury to necessity.) Since humanity settled down to farm, the resources required for what we consider ‘a good life’ have exponentially increased.
The traditional environmental movement has failed because it hasn’t grappled with the question of what constitutes a good life. Let’s look at my life:
I have two university degrees
Safira and I have a single detached house.
If I got sick I’d have access to advanced health care.
I often travel to India to visit my family there.
Few Canadians would characterize my lifestyle as luxurious, but when looking globally this lifestyle is resource intensive. The constant pressure of development, that environmentalists are fond of blocking, is simply the result of other humans trying to achieve what I take for granted.
Why shouldn’t Bolivians have access to modern healthcare? Why shouldn’t Congolese want higher education? Why shouldn’t Indonesians want to travel abroad?
Asking Canadians to live with less is a difficult ask. Asking developing societies to forgo development for the sake of the environment is hypocritical. But if the rest of the world reached even half the Western standard of living it’s hard to imagine the environment could sustain that. Can countries develop sustainably? How can they? What are the key components of a good life? Those are the questions we need to answer.
Sustainable consumer choices
Another component in the lifestyle variable is the idea that we can maintain our lifestyle by becoming eco-friendly consumers. If we only consumed sustainable products we could find balance with the Earth. A study looked at the impact of different environmental choices. This graph illustrates the comparative impacts of lifestyle choices. Smaller choices will have a positive impact, but are these efforts enough?
The Thanos Solution: Population control
This graph illustrates something obvious. Small sacrifices, small impacts. Major sacrifices, major impacts. The biggest impact comes from having less children. It makes sense. It’s also a ridiculous conclusion. Sure, we can solve climate change just get rid of humans?!
But the formula does reveal another aspect of the problem. The Malthusian pressure comes from a growing population. It doesn’t matter what lifestyle we choose: Amish, hippie, yuppie, Nascar dad, soccer mom, or billionaire because eventually we would begin to run out of resources and space. 7 billion Amish might be sustainable, but what about 50 billion Amish?
If the life we want requires significant resources and if the Earth would struggle to provide that level of lifestyle to everyone then why not simply reduce the amount of humans? If you’ve watched the Avenger movies this is the villain's plan. Thanos’ fictional home planet, Titan, experienced a population explosion and the resultant resource crunch. To relieve the pressure, Thanos suggests half the population be killed through a fair, equal, random lottery. Obviously, killing half the planet isn’t the answer to climate change, but you understand his logic.
Slowing population to fight climate change
What about slowing population growth to alleviate our resource consumption? It’s a non-starter to directly ask people to have fewer or no children. Direct policies to reduce population are a mistake because they infringe on a basic human need and will lead to terrible outcomes. China’s one-child policy is a cautionary tale. But what if there are natural ways to reduce our global population? Not policies to directly reduce the population, but rather a bet on what is likely to happen.
Global population continues to rise, but the growth is uneven in interesting ways. Here are Canada’s recorded fertility rates.
Replacement level fertility for countries is usually around 2.1 children per woman.
Our birth rate has dropped so far that Canada hasn’t had enough native born sons and daughters to even maintain our current population (the number of births equal to the number who died that year) since 1971. Currently on average there are 1.6 children born per woman. Immigration is the only reason Canada is a growing country. We’re not alone.
What’s driving this decrease in fertility in developed countries? None are having enough children to maintain their current populations.
A number of factors. The massive increase in agricultural efficiency over the past century is one. We need less people to farm than we used to. We’ve also cut our infant mortality rates so you can be assured more of your children will survive into adulthood. But the big one is women.
Women in developed countries are educated, participate in the work force and are now independently wealthy as never before. All factors that cause women to naturally delay, reduce or even forgo children. In a way these decreasing birth rates are a sign of progress.
It follows that if women in developing countries were educated at higher rates fertility rates have a good likelihood of decreasing. Access to broadly available public education is also a societal good in its own right. Education is a path to prosperity, both for the individual and society. Any slow down in population growth would simply be a helpful side effect.
It’s not the only policy we could pursue with this end in mind, but women’s education seems like a good place to start. While global population continues to grow, fertility rates have been dropping. We simply need to encourage this trend. The environmental benefit of reduced population would be significant. A declining global population will cause its own problems in the long term. But let’s face the immediate problem and leave an easier problem to future generations.
The solution to climate change is a combination of these variables. We should debate what level of lifestyle is a reasonable one for humanity to pursue, while recognizing people’s right to develop.
We should pursue some innovation, including green energy, to blunt our most pressing environmental problems. But since green energy won’t solve the root issue we shouldn’t break our backs in pursuit of renewable energy. We need to figure out how to lower emissions for agriculture and manufacturing. But in this light fossil fuels could always be a part of our energy needs.
We should make consumer changes to minimize our collective impact, while recognizing that simply using metal straws won’t save the world.
And yes, we should talk about population reduction as well. But we should always keep in mind the variables in Malthus’ formula. Because the Earth’s carrying capacity depends on our collective actions—sustainability is a moving target.