[MCN] Climate & the still-booming human population: My take

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpts : 

In May, 2018, the journal Nature Climate Climate <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0155-4> reported that “”The big challenge is still to deliver emissions reductions at the pace and scale needed, especially in a world where economies are driven by consumption.”

While there’s all the complexity anyone could want in our consumption’s power to force the heat to increasingly dangerous levels, at least three things are glaringly clear. First, the American and other major economics are driven by consumption. In the US, consumer spending props up about two-thirds of the national economy <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-retail/u-s-consumer-spending-strengthening-in-boost-to-economy-idUSKBN1OD1M2>.

Obviously enough then, any suggestion that consumers pull back on spending will immediately trigger cries that the economic skies will fall. Frugality is damned as  calamity.

Second, “The poorest half of the world population <https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf> is responsible for “only around 10% of total global emissions attributed to individual consumption.” 

Obviously enough, the poor just don’t have the spending power to drive much consumption in the first place. Hopping a flight to some distant football game, for example, is the last thing on this half of the world’s minds. Ditto for the purchase of a clothes dryer to substitute for hanging clothes out in the open air to dry, or a hair dryer to substitute for a towel. 

This leaves the rest of the world responsible for 90% of the consumption that’s been forcing the climate into increasingly dangerous change. We’re the ones, then, in position to make a difference to how hot the planet will be.


  There are billions of us, which means a world with lots of consumers, and our numbers make a huge difference. 
No matter how much consumption we indulge in, even if we relied entirely on combustion of fossil fuels, the heat we add to the atmosphere would be vanishingly small if the total human population added up to 100 people, even 100 million. Alas, the human population now adds up to about 7,000 million. 

Of these, an estimated 1,700 million have been identified as the”consumer class”—the people described by National Geographic <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2004/01/consumerism-earth-suffers/> as “characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of non-essential goods.”

For example, China’s middle class is but a fraction of its total population, but it’s middle class is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. And many of the newly well-off Chinese are adopting what then US president George H. W. Bush referred to as the American way of life — flying off to vacation hotspots, demanding more living space, buying food, fuel, furniture, and clothing from halfway around the world.

European consumers had already joined this parade. When researchers set out to quantify how European consumers could reduce their carbon footprint, they determined that about 25% of the possible reduction <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2018.1551186> could be achieved with reduction of spending on imports.”

In 2017, Barron’s, widely recognized as a heavyweight in financial reporting, made the same point, and implied a role for government policy in saying, “As a nation, we ask a lot of our consumers. In tough times, such as after the 9/11 attacks, we urged consumers to shop and eat out as a sort of civic duty.”

The article went on to say, “Today, we export American-style consumption to the world, with shopping malls in communist China, and McDonald’s feeding more than two million customers a day in the Middle East.”

End of excerpt 

The excerpts above add up to just a very small snippet from a broadly based analysis that includes, but is not limited to, the questions around population and consumption. Caveat, the complete analysis spans some 5,000 words and will require 10 to 15 minutes reading time. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/14/heat-and-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/14/heat-and-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/>

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“I just want it to be clear that the mainstream environmental movement has been asking very little of people for decades,” said Bea Ruiz, also an organizer with the U.S. national [ Extinction Rebellion ] team. “There’s no element of, ‘We are in an emergency. We all need to do more than what we’re doing.”

“We’re trying to put out there what’s necessary, not what people think is politically possible.”

Extinction Rebellion’s radical philosophy
July 22 2019
https://thinkprogress.org/the-radical-philosophy-of-extinction-rebellion-5857d3955b57/ <https://thinkprogress.org/the-radical-philosophy-of-extinction-rebellion-5857d3955b57/>
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A recent Ambio article by some heavyweights in climate sets out the situation well enough. 

A team including the likes of Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, Veerabhadren Ramathan, Johan Rockstrom, Marten Scheffer and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber begin the abstract of their article by saying “Over the past century, the total material wealth of humanity has been enhanced …”  

They end it saying,“we risk driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return.”

Their analysis is echoed across the scientists side of the situation. But it doesn’t take a scientist to get the drift of what’s going on. 

Liam Denning is former investment banker, former editor of one of the Wall Street Journal’s most closely read columns —Heard on the Street — and a former columnist for Financial Times. Writing about the Green New Deal for Bloomberg, Denning has come to the conclusion that, “We have built our standard of living on forms of energy that we now know pose a threat to our very existence,” and that, “this is a conversation that is long overdue — and necessarily begins with a shout, not a whisper.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/14/heat-and-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/14/heat-and-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/>



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