If you don’t believe that the climate is changing, please don’t read this but make an appointment with a psychiatrist; you are out of touch with reality.
I have not written about climate chaos (as I prefer to call what’s happening) for a long time. It is too frightening.
I’m breaking my silence on climate chaos to write an update with some good news – and some bad.
The formula for our impact on the planet, including the atmosphere, is I = P x A x T. The greater the population, the greater the impact, and the more affluence (or consumption) of people, the greater the impact. In the case of climate chaos, the most important consumption is of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, T for technology is a relatively small player.
CO2 levels continue their relentless rise; indeed, they are rising faster now than ever. The human population is also rising, but more slowly. The peak number of people added to the planet was in 1987, when births exceeded deaths by almost 93 million people. Currently, although the base population is much higher than 38 years ago, the annual net increase is about 80 million. In fact, the population growth rate is the lowest it has been for a century – but our numbers are still growing.
The bad news is that our consumption is rising faster than our population. A small part of this increase is among the 3+ billion people who live on $5.50 a day or less and who are working to improve their economic level. They deserve to have better lives! However, most of the increase in consumption is at the richer end of the global wealth spectrum, where billionaires are sending millions of tons of CO2, as well as themselves, into space.
In the 70 years from 1950 to 2019, the population almost tripled, from about 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion, and the global gross domestic product has grown almost five times, from $3,500 to $17,000. Together, there has been almost a 15-fold increase in global economic activity in 70 years. To make things worse, there’s been an eight-fold increase in fossil fuel use.
The number of people on the planet is increasing at just over 1% a year. Although this doesn’t sound like much, it is like compound interest. Indeed, even current “high– yield” savings accounts don’t yield more than 1%! If we continue growing at this rate, our population will have doubled to 15 billion by 2090. Will the population growth rate continue to drop, which is necessary to approach sustainability, or will it rise again?
The UN’s International Panel on Climate Change declared “Code Red” for human-driven climate heating in its report released Aug. 9.
What can we do? Please remember that the least expensive and most effective way to slow climate heating is with voluntary family planning. Unfortunately, having a small family will mainly help in the long run, but it won’t make much immediate difference.
Economist and author Robert Reich, who served three American presidents, offers this short list of actions that can help soften the climate blow in the short run:
- Create “green” jobs in renewable energy.
- Slow use of “dirty” energy by putting a price on carbon, cutting off all subsidies to fossil fuels and limiting new fossil fuel development.
- Kick fossil fuel companies out of our politics.
- Require fossil fuel companies to compensate the communities they’ve harmed – especially poor communities and people of color who are harmed inordinately by fossil fuel development, refining and use.
We must act now to protect our children and grandchildren from the worst of climate chaos. I fear that it might be far more disruptive and more deadly than our current pandemic.
Richard Grossman, M.D., is a retired obstetrics-gynecology physician who lives in the Bayfield area. He has written this column for The Durango Herald for 26 years.
