October 28, 2014
The Washington Post seems to have jumped the shark by running a Wonkblog piece that demands readers, “stop pretending we can fix the environment by curbing population growth.” The gist of the argument is that plausible changes in population growth will not be sufficient to prevent environmental catastrophe without other changes.
If there were people who thought that slower population growth would be sufficient to prevent global warming, then this piece would be a useful corrective. However if the point of this piece is that slower population growth should not be an important part of a strategy to limit global warming, then it needs to read the research more closely.
The world population in 2100 in the high fertility scenario shown in the piece is more than twice as high as in the low fertility scenario. This implies that we would need to have less than half as much greenhouse gas emissions per person in the high fertility scenario to have the same impact on global warming as in the low fertility scenario. It would be quite expensive to reduce per person emissions by an additional 50 percent against the reductions that would be needed even in the low fertility scenario. For this reason, it would make a great deal of sense for population control (in the form of access to birth control and empowerment of women) to be an important part of an environmental agenda.
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