OpinionIf you were really serious about getting a handle on our climate impacts then its the richest 10 per cent you should focus on

Wednesday, 12th February 2020, 5:47 pm

You would struggle to find someone who thinks planet Earth needs more humans. For most of human history, the global population fluctuated around the low millions. Its been the past three centuries that something remarkable happened.

Largely as a consequence of industrial revolutions, populations across the world began to rise. The 20th century saw huge increases with an additional 80 million people a year being added in the early 1970s. Since then, the total number of humans has doubled and now stands at 7.6 billion. More people need more food, water, and energy.

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And so more people means more climate change and more biodiversity loss. Its only been relatively recently that we have realised that these environmental impacts could actually impact us. Climate change becomes dangerous climate change when it threatens supplies of food, water and energy.

Organisations such as Population Matters advocate for the decrease in the global population as being an essential component in any climate policy. If you were to follow this reasoning further, you could arrive at a much more radical conclusion. For example, if harm to the planet is reduced by reducing the number of humans, then with no humans there will be no harm to the planet.

So is the only solution for climate change is letting the human race become extinct? Thats one of the rather strident claims of the book The Ahuman Manifesto by Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. Given how incurably destructive we humans are, how much suffering we cause other animals, she argues the planet would be much better off without us.

The perennial problem with population solutions to sustainability challenges is that they assume the problem is humanity. But when it comes to climate change, the problem is largely caused by only a fraction of it. Half of all global emissions of carbon dioxide are produced by the richest 10 per cent, while the poorest 50 per cent of the global population only produce 10 per cent of global emissions. Yet it is this poorest 50 per cent that will be most harmed by climate change. If you were really serious about getting a handle on our climate impacts then its the richest 10 per cent you should focus on.

However, MacCormack is skeptical that any fundamental change is possible. She boils down her central argument to this: humankind is enslaved to the point of zombiedom by capitalism, and because of the damage this has caused, phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world.

MacCormack does not advocate a violent end to the species Homo sapiens. But even a phasing-out would prove extraordinarily challenging. It would involve the complete reorganisation of societies to ensure that rapidly ageing populations would have sufficient resources to care for the most vulnerable. There is also the matter of how to deal with human reproductive rights.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about the self-extinction argument is that someone can entertain the wholesale economic, political, and social changes involved with extinction but not the alternatives to capitalism. But then can you imagine a world that is not only devoid of the combustion of coal, oil and gas, but also absent of the exponential growth of energy and material consumption driven by seeking unending economic growth? Unless that changes, humanity probably does not have any long-term future on Earth.

You may not think that a tragedy. But there is a great deal to be done before we reach that point. Billions of peoples lives, not to mention the fate of much of the rest of the biosphere, is going to depend on what we do over the next few years and decades. When it comes to doing our best to live sustainably on Earth, population does matter. But right now, inequality matters more.

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A professor has said only human extinction will save the planet- but I have hope - inews