Paul Ehrlich With Another Warning Of Global Overpopulation

[Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. Wikipedia:  It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.]

Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Huffington Post, March 24, 2011 10:23 AM

The current unrest in the Arab nations has called the world's attention to some of the political and economic consequences of the West's addiction to petroleum. But sadly it hasn't brought back into focus two more fundamental and interrelated problems. The first is the population explosion; the second is the expectation of perpetual growth in per capita consumption, not just for several billion poor people, but for the billion or so who are already rich.

In the next forty years the populations of already-water short Arab nations are going to increase dramatically, and at the same time their people will be aspiring to catch up with the living standards of today's developed countries. For example, Egypt, with 80 million people today, is projected to grow to some 138 million by 2050. Per capita income in Egypt is now about $5,500, compared with about $47,000 in the United States and $30,000 in the European Union.

The aspiration gap is even more stunning for sub-Saharan Africa, which is projected to explode from 870 million people to 1.8 billion in the next 40 years. Per capita income there is now $2,000, and less than a third of the population has access to a toilet. That gap will doubtless widen further as the poor suffer disproportionately from climate disruption, the spread of toxic chemicals, and an extinction episode unmatched in 65 million years, threatening the natural services upon which people are utterly dependent. Given the additional need to invest in completely re-engineering the planet's energy-mobilizing and water-handling infrastructure and rising pressure on resources, even maintaining today's standards of living in both rich and poor nations will be increasingly difficult.

The press is full of stories about problems caused at least in part by the conjoined but unmentionable twin elephants of population growth and overconsumption. But spiking food and energy prices, water shortages, increasingly severe weather, melting ice caps, dying coral reefs, intersex alligators, disappearing polar bears, collapsing infrastructures, terrorism, and novel epidemics are almost never connected to the elephants. While obviously there are limits to sustainable human numbers and to humanity's aggregate consumption, those limits are almost never discussed.

Indeed, when the Census Bureau announced in 2010 that the United States had passed 308 million people, it was treated as some sort of triumph, with emphasis placed on reallocation of congressional seats. No mention that we "plan" to add more than 110 million more by 2050 and then grow to infinity (don't hold your breath). We expect no better media analysis when the global population rockets past 7 billion this year -- much more than tripling the population in our own lifetimes. Will the media explain that the additional 2 billion people expected in the next thirty-five years will do much more environmental damage than the previous two billion? Human beings are smart; they pick the low-hanging fruit first -- and we have. Every additional person now, on average, must be fed from more marginal land, supplied with water from more distant or difficult to purify sources, and use minerals won from ever-poorer ores.

Will technology save us? It can help, but its record is generally dismal. When The Population Bomb was published in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people, and we were called alarmist -- technology could feed, house, clothe, educate, and provide great lives to even 5 billion people. Nuclear agro-industrial complexes or growing algae on sewage would feed everyone. Well, they didn't. Instead, the roughly half-billion hungry people then have increased to about a billion, and a couple billion more are living in misery. Why don't the growth maniacs stop asserting how many billions more people we could care for and focus first on stopping population growth and giving decent lives to all the people already here? And spare us that old bromide about how the next kid may turn out to be the Einstein who saves us; considering the rich-poor gap, it's more likely to be an Osama Bin Laden bent on destroying us.

There is sometimes confusion among environmentalists about the relative roles of population and per-capita consumption in causing environmental deterioration. But one can no more separate them than distinguish the multiplicative roles of a rectangle's length or width in contributing to the area of a rectangle. One can, however, determine their parts in changing the area (or, analogously, the environmental damage).

For instance, in the past two centuries, population growth and expanding per capita consumption have contributed roughly equally to humanity's assault on its life-support systems. Reducing the assault and transitioning to a sustainable society will require action on both factors. It will take much longer to humanely reduce population size than to alter human consumption patterns. Many decades of moderately reduced fertility would be required to have a significant effect on human numbers, but with enough incentive, consumption patterns can be transformed very rapidly, as World War II mobilizations showed dramatically. Because of that time difference, moving toward population reduction now in the U.S. and globally is required if humanity is to attain a sustainable civilization. But if overconsumption by the rich continues to escalate, the benefits of ending population growth will be compromised. And if underconsumption by the poor is allowed to continue or worsen, then the cooperation we need to resolve the human predicament is unlikely to materialize. Equity issues and environmental issues are also conjoined twins.

Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich are in the Department of Biology of Stanford University. They are co-authors of The Dominant Animal, and Paul's latest book, co-authored with psychologist Robert Ornstein, is Humanity on a Tightrope.

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Current U.N. predictions for world population growth after the jump.

Wikipedia:  Projections of population growth

According to projections, the world population will continue to grow until at least 2050, with the population reaching 9 billion in 2040, and some predictions put the population in 2050 as high as 11 billion.

According to the United Nations' World Population Prospects report:

• The world population is currently growing by approximately 74 million people per year. Current United Nations predictions estimate that the world population will reach 9.0 billion around 2050, assuming a decrease in average fertility rate from 2.5 down to 2.0.
• Almost all growth will take place in the less developed regions, where today's 5.3 billion population of underdeveloped countries is expected to increase to 7.8 billion in 2050. By contrast, the population of the more developed regions will remain mostly unchanged, at 1.2 billion. An exception is the United States population, which is expected to increase 44% from 305 million in 2008 to 439 million in 2050.
• In 2000-2005, the average world fertility was 2.65 children per woman, about half the level in 1950-1955 (5 children per woman). In the medium variant, global fertility is projected to decline further to 2.05 children per woman.
• During 2005-2050, nine countries are expected to account for half of the world's projected population increase: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, United States, Ethiopia, and China, listed according to the size of their contribution to population growth. China would be higher still in this list were it not for its One Child Policy.
• Global life expectancy at birth, which is estimated to have risen from 46 years in 1950-1955 to 65 years in 2000-2005, is expected to keep rising to reach 75 years in 2045-2050. In the more developed regions, the projected increase is from 75 years today to 82 years by mid-century. Among the least developed countries, where life expectancy today is just under 50 years, it is expected to be 66 years in 2045-2050.
• The population of 51 countries or areas, including Germany, Italy, Japan and most of the successor States of the former Soviet Union, is expected to be lower in 2050 than in 2005.
• During 2005-2050, the net number of international migrants to more developed regions is projected to be 98 million. Because deaths are projected to exceed births in the more developed regions by 73 million during 2005-2050, population growth in those regions will largely be due to international migration.
• In 2000-2005, net migration in 28 countries either prevented population decline or doubled at least the contribution of natural increase (births minus deaths) to population growth. These countries include Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Qatar, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom.
• Birth rates are now falling in a small percentage of developing countries, while the actual populations in many developed countries would fall without immigration.
• By 2050 (Medium variant), India will have 1.6 billion people, China 1.4 billion, United States 439 million, Pakistan 309 million, Indonesia 280 million, Nigeria 259 million, Bangladesh 258 million, Brazil 245 million, Democratic Republic of the Congo 189 million, Ethiopia 185 million, Philippines 141 million, Mexico 132 million, Egypt 125 million, Vietnam 120 million, Russia 109 million, Japan 103 million, Iran 100 million, Turkey 99 million, Uganda 93 million, Tanzania 85 million, Kenya 85 million and United Kingdom 80 million.