In 1972, the world’s first UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, failed to even discuss human population. During the meetings, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, urged the delegates to consider ways to mitigate human population growth, as a driving force of ecological destruction.

Barry Commoner, the scientist who first detected radioactive Strontium-90 in children’s teeth, argued against Ehrlich, insisting that human population growth did not pose a critical environmental threat. Technology, he believed, would allow us to feed billions more people, and the real issue is wasteful consumption by the rich.

Ehrlich agreed about excessive consumption, but maintained that sheer population growth would degrade the planetary ecosystems and lead to humanitarian and ecological catastrophes. He urged environmentalists to advocate a global contraception drive to reduce unwanted pregnancies and the human fertility rate. Ehrlich’s proposals, however, collided with cultural, political, and religious resistance. The Stockholm conference avoided discussing population, and the environmental movement since 1972 has almost entirely ignored human population growth. Nevertheless, the nagging issue remains, 36 years and three billion people later.

Denial

Some resistance to discussing population reflects the common-sense reluctance to blame the world’s poor for our environmental problems. Most environmental groups have focused on the excesses of consumer societies, wilderness protection, pollution, and species loss, all valid issues. China’s response to burgeoning population, the “one-child-per-family” policy, appeared like totalitarian control over personal freedom. Ultimately, however, the greatest obstacle to addressing population growth has been religious and cultural hostility to contraception and women’s rights.

Growth advocates – real estate developers, retailers, and others who profit from population growth – insist that our communities can “grow forever.” Head cheerleader for this group has been Julian Simon, a corporate lobbyist in Washington, D.C. In 1995, Simon wrote:

“We have in our hands now … the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. … Even if no new knowledge were ever gained…we would be able to go on increasing our population forever.”

Simon – out of deception or ignorance – misrepresents the simple truth about organic growth. Any percentage growth, whether stable or variable, like compound interest in a bank, has a doubling time, and numbers reach extremely values after several doublings. Even if the current population growth rate of 1.14% could be reduced to half a percent, 0.5%, then human population would double every 140 years. After five doublings, 700 years – somewhat shy of “forever” – world population would be 32 times today’s 6.7 billion, that is, over 200 billion people. This is not remotely possible. Simon may secretly understand the mathematical certainty of this impossibility, but he hopes his audience can’t.

Optimism and facts

While the advocates of eternal human expansion deny the limits to growth, even environmental and government agencies often avoid discussing how to stabilize or reduce human population. For example, the inspiring UN Millennium Development Goals – eradicate hunger and poverty; reduce child mortality and disease; achieve gender equality, maternal health, universal education, and sustainable development – never mention stabilizing population.

The notion of “sustainable growth” became popular with the 1987 United Nations Brundtland Report. Presumably with good intentions, the report suggests: “What is needed now is a new era of economic growth … that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable… Sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.”

The report does not explain what it means by “sustainable,” the “changing productive potential” of an ecosystem, or how population could grow “in harmony” with this changing potential. However, none of these ambiguous ideas change the laws of nature. All growing organic communities – bacteria in a petri dish, mussels on a tidal shelf, or humans on a planet – eventually meet physical limits, stop growing, and reach maturity.

Dr. Albert Bartlett, Emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado, points out, “Any growth after maturity is either obesity or cancer.”

In the natural world, species growth ends in either a stable homeostasis with the environment, or in collapse. “Sustainable growth” is a nice idea, like “perpetual motion,” but equally impossible in the physical world. Bartlett – who urges scientists, environmentalists, and politicians to speak honestly about growth – explains, “The Brundtland Report’s discussion of ‘sustainability’ is both optimistic and vague. The Commission probably felt that, in order to be accepted, the discussion had to be optimistic, but given the facts, it was necessary to be vague and contradictory. … Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.” 

Real solutions

In the book version of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore writes: “The fundamental relationship between our civilization and the ecological system of the Earth has been utterly and radically transformed by the powerful convergence of three factors. The first is the population explosion.” However, when he gets to his list of 36 things we can do to change society – efficient lighting, recycling – he never mentions population. Is there some reason not to address the “first powerful factor” that has transformed the environment?

We might understand that politicians and even journalists, who are notoriously poor at math, might struggle to understand these properties of living systems. Economists should understand the limits to growth, since most economists are decent math students, but most economists are employed by those who profit from growth and have little interest in natural facts. However, anyone who claims to be an ecologists or a scientist surely must grasp the simple laws of growth if we expect economists and politicians to understand it.

From time immemorial, human population rates grew steadily until about 350 BC, when urban crowding, disease, and war decimated human populations. A great “urban crash” lasted two millennia until the 1700s, when advances in medicine and sanitation allowed population growth rates to match ancient levels, a modest 0.2% per year. Thereafter, human population took off, reaching a peak rate of 2.2% in 1963, during the era of cheap fuel and massive resource extraction. Since then, the human growth rate has declined to 1.14% and continues to fall.

Growth economists like to claim this fertility rate falls because of rising global economic activity (GDP), but the evidence suggests otherwise. Population growth rates and GDP rose together prior to 1964. Since then, fertility rates have fallen to zero in many European countries, but not in the US or Saudi Arabia where religious and cultural restraints keep rates high. In the 1970s, fertility rates fell in Spain and Italy, not due to a sudden increase of wealth, but rather due to an increase in women’s rights and available contraception. In Columbia, fertility rates dropped from 6 to 3.5 in 15 years after contraception was made widely available.

Some people fear that talk of stabilizing or reducing population invokes totalitarian oppression, the China policy, or worse. Politicians cower at the thought of challenging religious taboos against contraception. However, the best, proven means to stabilize population are simple and offer other humanitarian benefits:

1. Achieve women’s rights worldwide, and

2. Make contraception available.

The last doubling

Over the last 200,000 years, human population has doubled 19 times, from about 10,000 Archaic Homo sapiens to our present 6.7 billion. We have now entered the historic last doubling, which will not even reach completion. Human population will likely not reach 12 billion and will stop growing in this century for the first time in history (except for brief periods during the urban collapse and plagues).

Unless humanity experiences a cataclysmic crash to speed up the process, population growth rates will reach zero sometime between 2050 and 2080. By that time, there will be about 10-billion people on the planet. Currently, at 6.7 billion, 13%, 880 million, live at starvation levels, malnourished, and hungry. The UN attempts to feed about 75 million of these starving people (about 8%), but because of rising food prices, the UN announced this year that it could not even achieve that modest goal.

Since population growth will stop, the issue for humanity is whether we are clever enough to slow population by design, or if we simply let nature dictate the terms, which may not be pleasant for our children and grandchildren. Nature, in all her beauty and glory, is not sentimental. When nature steps in to stop growth, it does not offer niceties, as we may witness in the poorest, most ecologically degraded regions of our world, where 25,000 people starve to death every day.

Our regrettable hedging about population has proven unhealthy for the Earth. Since the first UN Environment Conference in 1972, three billion people have been added to the human load on our ecosystems. Both sheer population growth and excessive consumption contribute to the degradation of the ecosphere. Population growth in North America proceeds at about 1% per year, but since North Americans consume about 15-times the energy and resources of developing countries, this 1% growth translates into the world’s most urgent population problem.

Meanwhile, British physician Malcolm Potts estimates that 220,000 unplanned and unwanted conceptions take place every day, representing a massive “unmet demand for family planning.” If we wake up from the long denial about population growth, push governments to achieve women’s rights worldwide, make contraception available worldwide, and thereby reduce population growth to zero or below, we could save our progeny a lot of misery. Environmentalists should lead this change in attitude.

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See my Deep Green columns at Greenpeace International

See Dr. Albert Bartlett’s excellent video on exponential growth

In the 1980s, fishermen caught the last wild Beluga sturgeon from the Sea of Azov, source of prized caviar, and wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea failed to reproduce. The sturgeon catch plunged by 95 percent, and the cost of caviar soared. Such extraordinary price growth is known as "hyperinflation," or as economist Eric Sprott says, "the caviar syndrome."

This may sound trivial regarding caviar, but hyperinflation turns critical with commodities such as oil, gas, copper, zinc, water, or fine hardwood, all now growing rare on a global scale. Industrial civilization has already depleted the best and most accessible of these resources. Sturgeons might recover if we leave them alone, but copper and oil do not reproduce themselves.

As humanity scours every last region of the planet for resources, we enter a new historic period in which certain vital commodities no longer have a traditional market price linked to demand and supply, but rather to the cost of access.

Hitting the wall

In April, 500 migrating ducks landed on a Syncrude Canada oilsands tailing pond and perished. Syncrude CEO Tom Katinas reported being "very saddened" by this, quickly banned media from the site, and issued an internal memo: "It is our responsibility to ensure that the best interests of Syncrude are maintained." To clarify, the oil company’s best interest is cash flow, not ducks.

The Canadian oilsands, once promoted as a saviour of the world petroleum crisis, now appears anaemic. Shell Canada recently adjusted its oilsands production estimates from CAN$ 7.3 to CAN$ 11 billion, an abrupt 50-percent cost increase. Then, last month, Imperial Oil geologist Clement Bowman insisted that the Canadian government commit billions of dollars to solve "the huge environmental problems associated with the resource," namely, carbon-dioxide emissions, water divergence, a nuclear power plant to boil the sludge, dead ducks, and an obliterated prairie ecosystem. Bowman emphasized that unless these environmental issues are solved, "the oilsands have almost hit the wall."

There you have it. The "wall" is profitability. The "free-market" strategy to dodging this wall is public welfare: socialize the costs; privatize the profits.

The full environmental and social costs of doing business are never reported on the operating budgets of these billionaire companies. Public money and toxic lakes do not appear on the balance sheets. Why? Because it wouldn’t be profitable. Investments from the public and from nature don’t earn stock options, although the free market wizards need these investments to avoid hitting the wall.  

The Alberta, Canada oilsands: obliterated prairies 

Great powers  

Since 2003, the US has spent over a trillion dollars, and killed over a million people, to secure Iraq’s oil supply. The long-term public cost of the war is now projected to reach US$ 2-3 trillion, which roughly amounts to a US$ 30/barrel subsidy for every drop of oil in the Iraqi proven oil reserves.

Nations have waged oil wars for a century, since 1912, when the British Navy abandoned coal for oil and Winston Churchill declared, "You have got to find the oil … purchased regularly and cheaply in peace, and with absolute certainty in war." Such tactics are not lost on China. "A great power must be one that controls more resources," wrote Zhang Wenmu, a research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, "and there has never been a case in history where such a pursuit is realized in peace."

To gain access to forests and oil fields, China finances thugs in Burma and Sudan, just as the US has backed deadly juntas in El Salvador and Chile, or Russia in its provinces. China has caught up with the US and Europe in consumption, now using over a quarter of the world’s copper and steel, and half the cement. Note that we now discuss resource use in large fractions of the Earth’s entire supply.

Construction projects in poorer countries simply stall because there isn’t enough cement or steel at any price.

The rising costs of retrieving oil – war, subsidies, energy input, and ecological disaster relief – will increase the price of everything. Economists call this "cost-push" inflation, a more virulent strain than commonly reported inflation. Central banks are helpless to manipulate cost-based inflation with bank rates or money supply. This state of affairs is the logical conclusion of growth economics on a fixed planet warmed by a modest star.

Bidding wars

In 1979, Soviet geologists discovered the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits in Afghanistan. The CIA-armed Taliban booted out the Russians, and in 2005, companies from the UK, US, and Canada bid for the rights to the Afghani Anyak copper field. The bids came in at about US$ 1.2 billion, including infrastructure, roads, a power plant, and a profit margin acceptable to shareholders.

But then, in the fall of 2007, China offered Afghanistan US$ 2.8 billion for the copper, more than doubling the effective value in a single stroke. By financing US trade debt, China holds fist-fulls of rapidly sinking US dollars that they would rather trade for resources, Sudanese oil, Afghani copper, or swaths of northern Alberta. The estimated 12 million tons of copper in the Anyak field – the largest known untapped reserve in the world – will supply China for four years.

No profit-minded company could have matched the Chinese copper bid, because it left no profit. Overnight, world copper prices were no longer about supply and demand, but about access. Since 2003, the price of copper has soared from US$ 0.81 per pound to over US$ 3.90, a surge of about 38 percent annually. Traditional economic theory tells us that commodity price increases dampen consumption and boost supply by making marginal deposits profitable. However, the reverse is now true with oil, copper, and other limited natural products. As price accelerates, global demand still grows, and recoverable reserves still dwindle, unleashing hyperinflation, the End of Price, an era in which access to vital commodities is about power, not market mechanisms.

Human suffering also booms with commodity prices. Gulf News economics writer Sean Kelleher suggests, "we are into a new paradigm." Surging commodity prices, he writes, "might well be a boon to investors, but it will be a burden to the poorer end of all societies." Traditional wealth creation reveals its dark side. China’s Southern Metropolis Daily reports that an open child slave trade now thrives within China. Factory managers purchase children "like cabbages" in Sichuan street markets and ship them to the Pearl River Delta industrial heartland, following the tradition of English textile factories, Belgian rubber dealers in the Congo, or American cotton barons.

We now see the real face of modern industrialism: plunder public assets, enrich the wealthy, exploit child slaves, lay waste to living habitats, design obsolescence, and sell shoddy goods in community-killing giant box stores. On paper, it’s all profitable. In reality, the ship of industry steams forward like the Titanic.

The tech fix  

Another favourite theory of the growth economists is that "technology" will save us from resource depletion. Ethanol will replace petroleum. Oops. We forgot that corn grows in soil that once supported forests or supplied food.

Innovators, we hear, will allegedly find alternatives for everything, but copper and oil, for example, possess unique properties. Copper water pipe is strong and flexible at a wide range of temperatures, antibacterial, and easy to use. Copper remains essential for high-efficiency, high tech electronics that supposedly promise efficiency gains.

As James Kunstler explains in The Long Emergency, technology is not energy. Technology costs energy. Electronic wizardry does not replace a depleted earth. The world’s copper, lead, and tin consumption might endure for 20 years at current rates before it reaches the "caviar syndrome." Bauxite and iron ore may last 50 years. But the clock keeps ticking, 3 billion more people will inhabit the planet in 50 years, and nature shall not be mocked.

Bankrupt theories  

Robert Ayres, Professor Emeritus at the INSEAD business school in France, explains that eternal-growth economists make four erroneous assumptions:  

1. Steady growth projected into the future is a fallacy. There are no examples in nature of exponential growth continuing indefinitely.

 

2. Traditional economic growth models rely on an unjustifiable simplification of human activity, and an ignorance of nature’s laws and complexities.

 

3. Growth economists imagine abstract firms and consumers making optimum decisions with perfect information. None of this exists. Sovereign, monopolistic, and special interests direct decisions and foreclose valuable options.

 

4. The theory that capital, plus labour and technology, equals growth ignores nature’s requirements and limits.

To this we may add the so-called "invisible hand" of Adam Smith. The theory assumes that people pursuing their own self interest will guide civilization to the "best possible world." The evidence of history shows that no such invisible hand transforms collective greed into paradise. The history of slavery, sweatshops, and dead lakes filled with toxic sludge attest to this fallacy.  

Traditional economists – socialist and capitalist – have presumed that industrial output could grow forever. Other more visionary economists – Donella Meadows, Herman Daly, Hazel Henderson, E.F. Schumacher – long ago pointed out that traditional economic theory forgot to account for ecological systems and natural value.

Even some traditional economists now recognize the error. A 2008 Goldman-Sachs investment report about commodity shortages stated, "we see parallels with Malthusian economics." Engineers, planners, UN advisors, and investment bankers now commonly admit that the maligned economist Malthus was essentially correct. His work involves nothing more obscure than high-school calculus. The limits to growth are real.

Earth’s economics  

We now see that our galloping economies rely on handouts, massive debt, war, abuse, waste, and a diminished earth. Rivers die, species go extinct, forests disappear, deserts grow, and people suffer. This state of affairs signals social dysfunction on a global scale. The industrial world exhibits sociopathic and "ecopathic" behaviour. Innocent citizens sometimes appear traumatized, even while doing their best to remain optimistic and apply creative solutions.

Daly, Henderson, Ayers, Mark Anielski, Nicholas Stern, and many other sound economists have described more accurate economic theories that recognize natural value and authentic quality of life. What human enterprise must now learn is this:

The ecology is the economy.

Everything we use, every innovation, every human enterprise or simple pleasure rests on the bounty of the Earth. Economists ignore ecology at our peril. The end of conventional price puts ecology and nature in proper perspective: priceless.

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See this and other Rex Weyler blog posts

at “Deep Green” Greenpeace International