Saleem Ali

GLOBAL WARMING DEBATES IGNORES THE 800 POUND GORILLA

Robert Hardaway and Judy Swearingen

As the global warming debate degenerates into a proxy fight between competing political ideologies which have little to do with global warming itself, it becomes clear that both sides to the debate have lost sight of the underlying issues.

Those who claim that global warming caused by human activity will be the cause of an imminent environmental catastrophe are essentially beating a dead horse—namely that the planet is being environmentally degraded by modern civilization and the inevitable consequences of the industrial revolution. True enough, although the experts continue to debate both the percentage of global warming due to human activity and the significance of recent warming when measured on a scale of billions of years and countless cycles of global cooling and warming. Not to be forgotten is that some of the same “experts” who are now predicting catastrophic global warming, twenty five years ago were predicting a catastrophic ice age.

Where the forecasters of doom fail is in setting forth a solution to the problem of human activity. Most often implied, though rarely specifically set forth, is that the solution is to reduce per capita consumption.

The problem with this solution is that it has already been tried--back in the 1930’s. It was called “The Great Depression”, and most people didn’t like it.

On the other hand, those who claim that human consumption has no effect on the environment and may be safely ignored unit the evidence is actually “confirmed” by the loss of coastal cities seem equally adept at missing the 800 pound gorilla casting its shadow on the entire debate.

Most environmentalists are familiar with the Holdren equation for measuring environmental impact: I= PCU, which states that total global impact is the multiple of 1) population, 2) per capita consumption, and 3) the environmental impact of each unit of consumption.

Governmental environmental policy to date has focused on the third component by attempting to reduce the environmental impact of each unit of consumption, such as a car or refrigerator. The failure of this approach has been recognized by former EPA Director Lee Thomas as a self-defeating “circle game” in which pollutants in the air are simply transferred to the soil, or vice versa: “This circle game has got to stop… At best it is misleading—we think we are solving a problem and we aren’t. At worst, it is perverse—it increase(s) rather than reduce(s) pollution….”

This leaves the two remaining components, per capita consumption and total population. By favoring reducing per capita consumption as the solution for reducing global warming, the global warming lobby has conveniently ignored the self-defeating nature of this approach. Even if every consumer in the land could be induced to spend $50,000.00 on a hybrid car and thereby manage to cut his per capita gasoline consumption by 10-15%, it is difficult to see how total environmental impact will be reduced when at the same time a billion new consumers are lining up to drive cars (most recently in China).

The truly inconvenient truth is that such an approach can only result in environmental disaster, not to mention untold human suffering: taking three steps back for every one foot forward.

This leaves the final component, population as the only realistic component upon which to focus as a solution. It has been estimated that simply making birth control available to all women worldwide, as well as promoting the reproductive rights of women, would stabilize the world’s population and begin to immediately moderate total environmental impact.

Every one third of a second, about the speed a machine fires it bullets, the planet makes room to accommodate one additional human being, most unwanted and left to starve or be doomed to a life of degrading poverty. In her lifetime, each new human spews an average of 3.2 tons of carbon into the atmosphere and demands 297GJ of energy from nonrenewable resources; her waste products include her share of 355,000 tons of phosphorus dumped into the oceans, 30,000 of sulfur,, and 80,000 of carbon monoxide spewed into the air. To provide living space for each new human, 100 acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed every minute, and one entire living species is sacrificed each day, including one vertebrate species every six months. When she dies, her epitaph is written on a monument of garbage and waste 4000 times her body weight.

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, a sign posted prominently in Democratic headquarters remind campaign workers of what the election was about: “It’s the economy stupid.”

Today the sign that posted in both camps of the global warming debate should be: “It’s the population, stupid.”

Robert Hardaway is Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of law, and the author of twelve books on law and public policy, including “Population, Law, and the Environment” (Praeger Press. Judy Swearingen is an environmental researcher and co-author of “Tropical Forest Conservation”).