by Joseph N. Pelton
Pelton and Marshall Associates. 2010. 212 pages. $17.95.
key words: POPULATION; SUSTAINABILITY
According to professional futurist Joseph N. Pelton, humanity’s most serious problem in the twenty-first century is too many human beings. Pelton spells it out in his new book Megacrunch, where he warns that the global human population—expected to total 12 billion people by 2100—is impossible to sustain with the world’s limited supplies of food, energy, and water. The world population must shrink, or the entire human species risks extinction.
Pelton links a host of problems directly related to overpopulation. They include:
• Climate change. Glaciers across the planet are melting, and as they disappear, so does the availability of usable freshwater. More than 25 million people have already migrated due to climate-related droughts.
• Super-Automation. In the next two decades, computers will become intelligent enough and sophisticated enough to fully replace billions of human workers. Production everywhere will become much more efficient as a result, but joblessness will reach levels never before seen in recorded history.
• Deteriorating Ozone Layer. The thinning of earth’s ozone layer due to endemic atmospheric pollution is triggering waves of ailments and mutations in animal and plant life across the globe. Human health too, will be at greater risk if the ozone depletion continues.
• Endemic resource over-consumption. With rising ranks of middle-class consumers across the globe comes out-of-control resource consumption. Fossil fuels, drinking water, and other natural resources simply do not exist in great enough supply to keep up with demand indefinitely.
Reducing the world population will not in itself solve all of these problems, but it is a prerequisite. Each will be vastly easier to address if there are fewer people living on earth. Each new human being born becomes an added source of greenhouse gases and pollution, as well as a consumer of resources. Moreover, with fewer jobs to be done in a super-automated economy, more babies today may mean more chronically jobless adults tomorrow.
The world’s current population now totals some 6.5 billion.
Long-term sustainability demands that it revert to its level circa 1950, about 4 billion. This will necessitate worldwide promotion of birth control, coupled with financial incentives for not having children, and heavy taxes imposed on adults who choose to have many children. Price incentives are important, Pelton argues, because people are far more likely to adopt a new behavior if it saves them money.
Confronting the environmental crises will also require using price incentives, in this case to reward sustainable behavior while making polluting and resource-wasteful behavior more costly. Examples would include higher gasoline prices, fines for not recycling, and housing taxes that rise progressively for larger homes, tax credits for electric automobiles, and consumer incentives for energy-efficient home renovations, recycling, and mass-transit usage.
Taxes and fees need not be the only financial motivators, however. Pelton calls further for a wholesale reorienting of the prices of goods and services to reflect their environmental costs. Whereas in the status quo wine is more costly per liter than petroleum, in the new paradigm oil will cost more per liter to offset its deleterious pollution effects and its limited supply.
In conjunction with the price incentives and price indexing, the world community must significantly increase its investment in renewable energy and energy-efficient systems, as well as more strictly regulate pollution and prosecute polluters. It is possible to phase out all coal-fired power plants in the OECD countries by 2030 and in all other countries by 2050.
Even a smaller population will still need jobs and livelihoods.
Extensive retraining programs could equip displaced workers with skills relevant to a super-automated economy. More generalized allocations of public expenditures for education, health care, and community-outreach programs that channel youth toward productive social and economic activities will likewise be money well-spent. It would also greatly reduce the sums that countries like the United States now expend on law enforcement and penitentiaries.
For any of these reforms to take place, international cooperation must reach a radically higher level. Governments of all nations must act together to adjust their market mechanisms and enforce laws that protect the environment. Individuals and communities everywhere must become proactive about conserving resources and having fewer children.
Pushback is inevitable, Pelton notes. Conservative religions, such as the Catholic Church, are longstanding opponents of birth control. Also, powerful free-market interests heavily sway American political discourse and effectively block new taxes, regulations, and curbs on business activity or marketplace spending binges. Pelton is hopeful that many of these conservative and free-market opponents may soften their stances over time, however, once they realize that the long-term survival of humanity—including their congregations and businesses—is truly at stake.
For the last three centuries, societies and economies have developed under the assumption that growth is both good and inevitable. They have expected to continue to accumulate wealth, build their infrastructures, and support bigger populations.
We must now accept, if we have not done so already, that permanent growth is impossible. The recessions of 2008 amply showed that unchecked pursuit of economic capital leads to occasional crashes. Likewise, the growing shortages of water, food, energy, and raw materials across the globe prove that developing cities, roads, and towns with no regard for planning or resources limits will leave human societies empty-handed.
A better future lies in a new capitalism whose highest principle is not “growth,” but “sustainability.” It will be a more desirable world for the planet and for the humanity that lives here. A lower-population world that embraces sustainability will not only be greener. It will also be more equitable. All its inhabitants will have access to health care, affordable energy, adequate educational opportunities, and decent housing.
[NOTE: Political pundits and average citizens usually talk as though the economy, health care, education, and the environment are separate issues. Joseph Pelton, however, knows better. In Megacrunch, he does away with this popular delusion and shows how all of these issues intersect. He also identifies a (literally) larger problem that relates to all of them—unchecked population growth.
His big-picture outlook includes a sweeping policy formulation that confronts and resolves all of these problems at once. He acknowledges that his approach is not likely to be politically popular. But he is speaking with foresight in mind, and not opinion polls. Megacrunch is a frank, direct indictment of the mess that humanity has gotten itself into and what people must do to get out of it.]—Rick Docksai
“Saving our environment and preserving a livable planet can be accomplished at a cost much less than that of another world war.”
Megacrunch: Ten Survival Strategies for 21st Century Challenges