When last fortnight’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh. Having pooh-poohed the 1960s “population bomb” alarmism that would have us all balancing on our allotted five square inches of Earth by now, we’ve grown complacent about increasing our 7.7 billion world population by at least a quarter in the next 30 years, and by about half in 2100, when we’re likely to number around 11 billion.
Perhaps it’s forgivable that an outfit called the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” would blame a perilous future food supply on climate change. Yet it’s astounding that in the report’s broad news coverage I never encountered mention of the main driver of agricultural stress. After all, what causes climate change? Even according to the most fervent of climate activists, the culprit is people. More people, more carbon emissions: double duh.
Back when human population was escalating unsustainably worldwide, demography was politically relaxing. We’re all in this together, we all have to have smaller families: the exhortations were high-mindedly globalist. But then fertility in the West plummeted to below replacement rates virtually overnight. Though also subsiding, birth rates still remained concerningly high in what we then called “the Third World”.
For decades, demographic PR ditched preaching contraception and focused on bolstering women’s rights, which correlate conveniently with having fewer children. The great and the good continue to feel uncomfortable about addressing the burdens of the population growth that’s now overwhelmingly located in Africa and the Middle East. It’s far more politically palatable to anguish about climate change.
As Africa’s population almost doubles by 2050 and reaches an anticipated 4.3 billion by 2100, expect more of this fig leafery. The resultant migrants to Europe will all be branded climate refugees. But in the main, on a continent that has never been especially hospitable to human life, they will really be population refugees. You’re unlikely, by the way, to ever trip across that term outside this column.
I’ve been uncharacteristically agnostic about climate change — sorry, Guardian, climate emergency. It’s actually the graph of human population, puttering along in the dirt for 200,000 years and then cutting to a near-vertical and streaking to the firmament over a mere 200, that most convinces me that an infestation of one animal on this planet — worse, an animal entranced with various forms of playing with fire — could credibly alter the weather. I’m less convinced that we can control such a complex, interrelated system like climate on purpose, technically or politically.
The weird thing about this issue is the feeling it seems to evoke in the West of orgiastic guilt. What makes the great and the good so at ease with raising the climate alarm is the often-tacit assumption that global warming is all the West’s fault. That makes inhabitants of Africa and the Middle East victims of our own short-sighted profligacy. Yet I wonder whether even the rabble-rousers behind Extinction Rebellion (winner of The Most Ungainly Protest Movement Title Ever award) have studied the figures. If you do accept the whole human-caused-warming model, the numbers are shocking all right, but I may not be referring to the statistics you think I am.
As of 2017, of worldwide carbon emissions, the US accounted for 13.7 per cent, Canada 1.6 per cent, Down Under 1.1 per cent, and the entire EU 28 only 9.6 per cent. Ergo, “the West” is responsible for a mere 26 per cent of emissions.
