People and Warming

My pro-nuke friends spend a great deal of time reading Science Magazine and circulating articles they find most germane to environmental issues.  This piece, People & Warming, suggests that there are four misconceptions about population policy that inhibit otherwise top-notch organizations like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) from making the connection between population growth and global warming, and thus, from pushing the public sector to become more aggressive in this space.

Part of the issue here is that attempts to control population growth are controversial.  Catholics don’t approve of contraception, Islam doesn’t permit sterilization, and the Chinese one-child policy is widely regarded as abusive.

As a result of these and other factors, the world population is expected to grow by perhaps two billion in the next 30 years, further stressing the planet’s resources and increasing greenhouse gas emissions accordingly.

A couple of points:

Many women in developing nations are desperate for tubal ligation or contraception.  I heard a talk by Melinda Gates in which she said, “It’s funny.  Whenever I converse with these women, all I want to talk about is vaccinations, and all they want to talk about is conception.”  I’m not sure what’s funny about this, in any sense of the word. They seem to understand that ameliorating misery means manufacturing less of it in the first place; that seems abundantly clear; all we need to do is listen to them.

This also underscores the need for educating women in countries with high fertility.  Educated women don’t have 15 children; they tend to have smaller, more stable, healthier, and far more affluent families.

And here’s a tie-in to renewable energy: small amounts of electricity are required to provide light for reading at night, and for accessing the Internet.  This is why bringing solar PV-powered microgrids to the developing world is such an extremely important endeavor. Cultivating markets for the importing, distribution, sale, installation, and maintenance of solar PV should be an extremely high priority among governments and NGOs.