| Refugees & population growth not to blame for climate crisis |
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| Michael Kandelaars 04 February 2010 |
 Climate change will endanger the lives of millions of people all over the world. The 2007 report from the IPCC stated that if the Earth warms an extra 1.5 degrees Celsius, between 20-30 per cent of all animal and plant life will be made extinct. One of the most frightening documents about the effects of abrupt climate change was published by the Pentagon. In its 2003 report, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” they outline a scenario where the thermohaline cycle breaks down (basically the way that warm water flows through the North Atlantic), plunging Europe and North America into Siberia-like conditions and creating millions of refugees. If we don’t act quickly, a human catastrophe will be upon us. Already the UN is predicting that by 2050 there will be up to 150 million environmental refugees, and this number will most certainly rise. Blaming poor non-whites
But in light of the possible destruction of the planet, there is a noxious argument that puts the blame for climate change not on the US, or Britain, or on big polluters like Shell or BHP Billiton, but on overpopulation. Not the overpopulation of just anyone, but of poor non-whites – particularly from Africa, India, and China.
Figures such as David Lovelock, Sir David Attenborough, Sir Bill Gates and other rich white men are some of the major proponents arguing for and funding programs to limit population growth in the third world to solve climate change. Lovelock and Attenborough in particular are key members of the British based Optimum Population Trust which argues that carbon emissions in the West can be offset by sending condoms to Africa.
The well-respected National Geographic magazine, in its Collectors Edition: State of the Earth 2010, opens with an A3 photo of Asian faces with the headline, “Crowding our Planet”. This is followed on the next page by a photo of a boat carrying “Undocumented African immigrants…”
Even Scientific American in its November 2009 edition has an article entitled “How women can save the planet”, in which we are told that “empowering young women will help reduce overpopulation and avoid extremism in the children they raise”. The article specifically mentions Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Gaza as problem areas.
These arguments are nothing but racism cloaked in environmentalist rhetoric to shift the blame of climate change from the big polluters to the poorest people on the planet, and are based solely on myths and lies.
Are there too many people?
The rich countries, not the poor, are responsible for the most carbon emissions. Australia is the worst polluter per person, followed by Canada, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The United States has only 5 per cent of the world’s population, yet it’s responsible for 23 per cent of total world energy use.
In the developing world, gas flaring in Nigeria by Western oil companies Shell and Exxon Mobil has contributed more emissions of greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined. In Nigeria alone, $US2.5 billion of natural gas is destroyed every year because it is deemed too expensive to capture it.
It is an absurd argument to blame population growth, and particularly ordinary people from developing countries, for environmental destruction. As George Monbiot has pointed out:
“Between 1980 and 2005, for example, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5 per cent of the world’s population growth and just 2.4 per cent of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4 per cent of the extra people, but 14 per cent of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.”
So the only link between population growth and carbon emissions is that countries with the lowest birth rates make the greatest contribution to climate change.
Old argument, same class prejudice
With current projections that world population is going to peak at 9 billion people by 2050, it is fast becoming a popular idea that the Earth has reached its “carrying capacity” of human life and can sustain no more. Much like the racism of blaming non-whites for climate change, this idea too is in fact a very old one. It is class prejudice with a green tinge.
Thomas Malthus, who wrote his “Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798, thought the world was getting overpopulated then, when world population was less than 1 billion people. Malthus argued that it’s a law of nature that population growth is faster than growth in food production. Therefore any increase in the living standards of the poor would lead to them having more children, causing an imbalance between food production and population which would lead to famine and disease, thus removing these surplus mouths and restoring equilibrium.
He argued that inequality was natural and good (along with smallpox and slavery) while speaking out against soup kitchens and early marriages.
While Malthus used no supporting data to back up his claim, he was taken very seriously. His “theory” provided a justification for the poverty created by the emerging system of capitalism, as peasants were forced off their land to work into the factories for the capitalists.
Where Malthus was completely wrong is that the amount of food any society can produce is historically conditioned and completely depends on the level of technology and the type of society at the time. In hunter-gatherer societies for instance, you might only be able to support a few hundred people in one particular area, whereas with modern farming techniques the same area could support millions. So it is incorrect to simply say the Earth has a “natural” carrying capacity. As Marx put it:
“The overpopulation e.g. among hunting peoples, which shows itself in the warfare between the tribes, proves not that the Earth could not support their small numbers, but rather that the condition of their reproduction required a great amount of territory for few people.”
With modern technology and farming techniques, we see today far fewer people involved primarily in food production. In 1900 had 50 per cent of the population of the US lived and worked on farms; today it is around .03 per cent! Yet there is more food produced today than ever before.
So much food, that last year was the highest cereal production ever on record with enough food produced to give everyone on the planet 2,800 kilo-calories per day. The UN predicts that by 2030, when we have 8.3 million people on the planet, there will be enough food to give everyone 3050 kilo-calories per day.
Yet despite this abundance of food, one in seven people in the world are seriously malnourished. That's 923 million people! This occurs because food is produced for profit, and if it can’t be sold for a profit, it simply rots while millions starve.
The problem today is not overpopulation or lack of food, but the result of capitalism, a system that puts the needs of the rich and profit ahead of everyone else.
What about water resources?
Constantly we are told in Australia that we are running out of water, which is used as justification for not accepting refugees or population growth. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
In his book The Water Dreamers, Michael Cathcart exposes how Australia has the highest amount of water per capita compared to any other country. The problem, he argues, is the way it has been and continues to be used. From white settlement in 1788 until today, he shows a hidden history of rivers being polluted beyond use, the flooding of lakes and how our water catchments have been sold off and destroyed for mining interests.
Today, with the planned expansion of Olympic Dam in South Australia for uranium mining, its water usage will go from 37 million litres of water per day, to a whopping 250 million litres of water every day.
The continuing growth of cotton and rice in Australia’s climate is utterly ridiculous. The combined water usage of just these two industries alone is more than household use of water, which is only 11 per cent of total water use. There is plenty of water here to sustain a higher population.
It is vital to understand that these neo-Malthusian ideas about overpopulation have the same goal as Malthus himself did. They seek to justify the current system and the wealth of the rich, while blaming the poor to make them pay for the problems of capitalism. It’s not the poor who are destroying the planet, it’s the capitalists. They have a complete disregard for the environment, as demonstrated by their profligate use of fossil fuels such as oil and gas; the waste of these fuels through things like gas flaring; nuclear weapons, and of course, their wars.
The market is the problem not the solution
All the ideas that governments have put forward to cut emissions are about maintaining this wasteful system and the wealth of rich. Their market-based solutions to reducing carbon emissions have already failed in the European Union, with a net increase of carbon emissions since their carbon trading scheme introduced in 2005. The ETS proposed by Rudd is a handout of $A6 billion to the big polluters and its target is to cut emissions by 2020 by only 5-15 per cent!
They want the market to be the solution; but actually the market is the problem. The same unplanned and anarchic market that sees food destroyed to make biofuels while one person dies every second from starvation or malnutrition; the same market that sees investments soar in oil and not in renewables because it’s more “profitable”; the same market that wastes our water on growing cotton and rice or uses our metals to build tanks and bombs to kill people instead of building wind turbines; the same market that has brought us the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression – they want that same market to fix the environment.
Their solutions are so pathetic that it could be easy to think they don’t know the destruction that climate change could cause. But the reality is, they do know. They know that at least 150 million could be displaced, they know millions will die, and they even know they are responsible, but they are more concerned with maintaining their wealth and continuing to make profits while the rest of us starve. But don’t just take my word for it, take the word of Todd Stern, the US’s lead delegate and negotiator to Copenhagen. In a recent interview he said:
“There is no question that we have – the United States has – the largest historical emissions of greenhouse gases… We absolutely recognise our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that.”
If that doesn’t make your blood boil, the 2003 Pentagon report that predicts climate change resulting in millions of refugees offers this solution:
“The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries… A no-regrets strategy should be identified and implemented to ensure reliable access to food supply and water, and to ensure national security… Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.”
We already know how the Australian government treats refugees when there are only a few hundred of them. Imagine if it were a million.
How we can save the planet
Firstly, the blame for climate change should be put squarely on our governments and the heads of oil, gas, mining and car companies who have profited from the destruction of the planet and created this mess.
Australia should be preparing for more refugees and should welcome as many as needed. For starters, the $A61.8 million Rudd is going to spend on expanding Christmas Island detention centre should be spent on building more houses and funding social services, and the centre closed down.
We know what dangers may lie ahead with abrupt climate change, and we need a rapid response to cut carbon emissions to ensure that a human catastrophe is averted.
In late 2009 researchers from the University of Stanford published a report showing that we already have the technology and resources to run the world on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Under a massive program of wind, solar and wave power, we can produce enough energy to power everything from trains to office buildings.
Our governments and the heads of corporations dither about whether to put money into renewables and cut carbon emissions claiming it’s too expensive, yet they easily find money for other things – like bailing out the banks – at the drop of a hat. To them, the $US13 trillion of capital invested in infrastructure directly related to oil and gas production is worth more than the lives of millions upon millions of people. This is the reality of capitalism in the 21st century.
For the solutions we need, we must to do away with any idea that the market can fix climate change. The state needs to massively intervene in the economy. To show this is possible, the state intervention into the world economy at the outset of World War II is a useful example. Not because there was anything good about this war; it killed millions, used nuclear weapons and saw working class living standards drastically driven down. Rather, it simply shows how quickly production can be reorganised if the political will is there.
At the end of 1941, when the US entered the war, Congress gave Roosevelt a military budget of $US50 billion – the equivalent of the Gross National Product of the US. All the car factories were immediately retooled to produce tanks and bomber planes. Ford factories for instance could produce a bomber plane every 63 minutes! It took six months of retooling factories to achieve this.
When they want to kill as many people as possible, suddenly they can intervene and retool everything. What we need is this same intervention with the aim of saving as many people as possible. How about building a wind turbine every 63 minutes?
If production was geared towards the needs of humanity and not profit, we could achieve this and build a world run by renewable energy, create jobs, and truly make poverty history. |
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