Why is overpopulation a bigger crisis than climate change?

By Frosty Wooldridge

While you hear and read about climate change, a better wording might be “climate destabilization.”  Average Americans cannot or refuse to wrap their minds or emotions around something that advances incrementally.  While they experience it in multiple tornadoes, tsunamis and Hurricane Katrina’s—they cannot quite get their arms around what’s happening around the globe.

In other words, they cannot accept or will not accept a scientific paradigm shift.  The bombastic radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, as bellicose as anyone, calls climate change, “A hoax!”  His millions of listeners believe him.  Therefore, he runs on emotions and rhetoric rather than science.

At the same time, environmentalists Bill McKibben, www.350.org , tells us that we must deal with green house gases from fossil fuel burning, but he won’t address overpopulation as the root cause. The Natural Resources Defense Council wants to save animals and habitat, but won’t address the overpopulation issue causing the problems.  The Sierra Club attempts to save the environment, but stringently avoids any and all mention of overpopulation.  Included in these groups are Greenpeace, Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and many more.  They rake in millions in donations, but as Dr. Paul Ehrlich said, “All causes are lost causes without limiting human population.”

That’s where my Canadian friend Tim Murray enters the picture.  He doesn’t address climate change or carbon footprint—but he does zero-in on human overpopulation.  Why don’t you talk about climate change Mr. Murray?

“I don’t spend my time debating the veracity or falsehood of climate change,” said Murray.  “I simply question why climate change has hijacked the environmental discussion and become the maniacal obsession of so many. Peak everything, the collapse of biodiversity services and/or the chemical, biological and/or nuclear war that issues out of relentless and increasing resource scarcity will do us in LONG before the ravages of climate change (man-made or not) drive the final nail into our coffin. It is NOT, as Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May has said, the most “urgent” problem of our time. And Canada’s Chair on Energy and the Environment (recently named as Canada’s top scientist) Dr. David Keith, on the other hand, would agree with me. He explained his reasoning in an interview he gave to the CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/podcast.html

“In a nutshell, this was his verdict on climate change: it’s serious, but not that serious. Not what soft green climate-obsessives want to hear. In fact, there is enough in his message to disappoint and challenge everyone from deniers to alarmists alike. Dr. Keith believes that climate change is occurring at a pace that is too dramatic to be the result of a natural cycle, and that something must be done about it, or in one hundred years there will be shocking contrasts to life as we know it now. But he does not see such climate change as this “apocalyptic, existential threat” that must be addressed” in years rather than decades.” There simply is “no credible science” to back this alarmism up. While he sees climate change as a dominant environmental problem, he declared that “If I had a dollar to spend in the next decade I put it into fighting poverty and disease in the undeveloped world.” Dr. Keith, BTW, is also the scientific advisor to Bill Gates, so good luck on trying to dismiss him as a denialist crank.

“I focus on overpopulation because I agree with Dr. Keith’s priorities, but for one amendment. I believe that reducing our numbers is key to reducing poverty (aka scarcity). The fewer of us there are, the larger our per capita slice of the shrinking resource pie will be. I refer to carbon emissions data in my arguments mainly because audiences have been conditioned to regard them as the only metric of environmental degradation. Thus, for example, I will tell them that since 1991, mass immigration has been responsible for four times as much GHG emissions as the entire Alberta tar sands development, which Ms. May and her green constituency thinks is the crime of the century.

“But what is at least equally important to me is that immigration-driven population growth has been responsible for the development and despoilment of four times as much land—usually prime farmland—-than has the tar sands project. Almost all of the species on our endangered list are threatened by continuing urban sprawl, sprawl that is not simply the result of bad planning but population growth. The perimeter of Canada’s 5 major urban centers has become the killing zone of wildlife and the pavement of our Class 1 farmland—some 60,000 acres a year in Ontario alone. This has little to do with climate change. It is the consequence of a deliberate program to grow the economy with more consumers and cheaper labor.

“I don’t want to provoke a debate on this, for that debate would further fuel the focus on climate change. I simply regard climate change as more a symptom more than a cause. Perhaps if I didn’t live in the frozen north but in the land of raging wild fires ‘down under’, my priorities would be different. While the case for AGW may be 95% watertight, within the AGW camp there is obviously a spectrum of differing views. One end there is Dr. Keith, and on the other end there are folks like your Andrew Glikson.

“I prefer the hard numbers that American analyst Chris Clugston has provided. No one seems able to tell me whether the ocean will be one meter or six meters high by the end of this century, but Clugston has shown me that certainly within 40 years (or less) our global industrial economy will be without the NNRs it needs to function (and it is not all about oil or energy). Telling me to focus on climate change is like telling a 21 year old skydiver to quit smoking because statistically he has a high risk of getting lung cancer when he reaches his 50s. Should it not be more important and urgent to tell him that he must not be so sloppy in packing his parachute?

“We are all alarmists —that is why we are in this business. But some of us are more alarmist than others concerning the six constituents of the Perfect Storm, and we tend to ring the claxon louder on one of the dangers than others. I ring it vigorously on over-population, while McKibben rings the climate change bell so loud that he can’t even hear the bad news about our 7 billion milestone (ditto Monbiot). For me, the number 7 is far more significant than the number 350.”

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You may reach Tim Murray: http://sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com or http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com, said, “I came upon an orchestration, the environmental movement, and all the musicians were playing violins to the tune of “Overconsumption, overconsumption, overconsumption.” They refused to play any other tune or use any other instrument to compliment that narrow repertoire. Apparently some corporate donors were paying them to be a one-trick pony.

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Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as seven times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com He is the author of: America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans. Copies available: 1 888 280 7715