breathing earth

so i’ve never been much of a fan of the ‘zero population growth’ people, not because I’m in favor of runaway population growth but because most of the ZPG folks i’ve encountered have been closet racists and classists who think the solution to population growth is to forcibly sterilize the worlds poor. talk about your evil bullshit disguised as progressive politics!

however, i just ran across this site – http://www.breathingearth.net/ – which was apparently created to help people understand carbon emissions globally. One major flaw in it is that it sorts carbon emissions per country instead of per capita, so of course the big countries with millions of people end up showing huge carbon emissions and small countries show smaller carbon emissions. The U.S. is of course the most populous industrialized nation, so it shows up as the worst offender. It’s also the worst offender per capita, of course, but the difference is not as dramatic as the map might lead one to believe.

Aside from the carbon emissions though, the map displays numbers of births and deaths globally, and it becomes very quickly apparent that the global birthrate is more then twice the global deathrate, which has obvious and unmistakable ramifications for global population growth. Obviously there are limits on how many humans our planet can sustainably support, so the question becomes how can we bring down the global birthrate without resorting to authoritarianism? Sure, education helps and so does increased economic opportunity so the abolition of capitalism would go a long way. Unfortunately I don’t think it would go nearly far enough…
anybody out there have an answer? ‘cuz i sure don’t.

Posted: July 2nd, 2007 under ecology, economics, science and history.
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