Population and Climate Change

The recent world conference on climate change has given the South African Government a new stick with which to beat the public.  The Minister of Environmental Affairs used a program on SABC TV to berate the West for their intransigence in resolving to meet the climate crisis that is threatening, praising the ANC for its forward-looking stance, and saying that the Government has plans to achieve the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to one and a half degrees (of course, the Government has plans for everything:  however, apart from the demonstrated ineffectiveness of those plans in meeting the need, the ANC is unable to implement any plans that do not pay off to its senior members).  However, the Minister failed to understand that there is a prime requirement of leadership, the adoption of the wonderful principles by the leaders themselves.  Putting that aspect aside as the subject of a future article, one must consider a major foundation for the threat of climate change that faces the world now.

One of the things that is abundantly clear about the climate change argument is that the more people there are, the greater will be the forces promoting climate change.  Some examples of this are the following:

More people require more food.  This implies that forest land, a major carbon dioxide sink and climate change moderator, is cleared and dedicated to the growing of crops and breeding of cattle for meat and milk.  Once the trees have gone, the absorption of carbon dioxide is decreased, and the factors that promote a healthy climate are reduced.  Consider that a tree could be viewed as solid carbon dioxide, extracted from the atmosphere, to a mass of as much as several tonnes each.  If that tree is not there, the carbon dioxide it represents remains in the atmosphere.

• The trend towards meat.  Cows are major generators of methane, a gas that is twelve times as effective as carbon dioxide in trapping the heat of the sun on earth.  The more beef we eat, the more Big Macs we demand, the greater the number of cows are needed, and the higher the temperature will go.
• The need for more housing, particularly in cities.  People need homes, and the increasing move towards the cities promotes the construction of housing for them, causing more land near the cities to be lost to agriculture, more concrete (a significant producer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) to be produced to build them, more cars to be used for transport from the new homes to the new factories, and more heat islands to be created and so to modify the local climate.  A house on a farm has a relatively low climate change impact; one in the city has a high and enduring impact.
• The need for more transport.  Where a farmer typically lives on what the local area produces, an expanding city, required by an expanding and urbanizing population, draws in food and a vast variety of other products not usually needed in a rural environment, from an expanding area, requiring ever-more transport to supply the ‘needs’ of the population, and more transport means more burning of fossil fuels for energy.
• The need for more factories, warehouses and distribution outlets, coupled with more packaging.  Where a farmer used to walk over to the neighbor and buy a gallon of milk to take home in his own reusable glass bottle, the same man, displaced to the city, drives to the supermarket where he is sold the same milk, at a price ten times as much, by a supermarket that sourced it from a milk factory, via at least one intermediary warehouse and several tens of kilometers of transport, in single-use plastic bottles made from scarce fossil fuels and destined to form an enduring part of the garbage mountain produced by the city and packed on shrink-wrapped palettes, the lot stored for days in refrigerated conditions, all requiring energy.
• More roads.  The area of land lost to a road, an airport, a dam, a pipeline or a railway line might appear to be negligible, but when all of these are aggregated, the surface area that might have been used for agriculture, or left as virgin forest to absorb carbon dioxide, is staggering.  A road is not just the tarred strip:  it includes the strips alongside, which might be as much as 200 meters wide, the intersections and all the other infrastructure required for the safe use of the road, amounting, perhaps, to as much as 20 square kilometers per hundred kilometers of road.  That is a lot of farmland that is lost to the community, or forest that is lost to the world!  And roads, airports, railway lines and all the other necessities of a modern city infrastructure do not build themselves.  They require huge amounts of energy and materials, not the least being cement, for their construction and ongoing maintenance.
• More energy.  While the Minister talked about reducing the activities that promote climate change, the Government of which she is part is constructing five of the world’s largest coal-fired power stations, each one of which will emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other noxious gases.  Eskom, the operator of these power stations, is exempt from the laws and regulations controlling the emissions of dangerous substances into the environment, and any carbon tax, if, indeed, it were to be levied on Eskom, would simply be passed on to the consumers, and amount to no more than another tax on the public.  The Minister used words that suggested that South Africa is a world leader in the use of renewable energy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The actual amount of renewable energy consumed in South Africa is a miniscule portion of the total.  Although the Government might conceivably be pleased to adopt further clean renewable energy sources, one might suspect that it has not yet found a way to ensure that a ‘finder’s fee’ be payable to the ANC before that can happen.
• More politicians at all levels, each one using an office in a large building, a fancy home, a large gas-guzzling car and a force of bodyguards with a fleet of blue-lighted escort vehicles to protect them from their devoted constituents, all producing hundreds of regulations each year that, in turn, require an ever-growing force of officials, each in a fancy office, with a gas-guzzling car to travel about in on their sterile missions, and a cadre of secretaries, personal assistants, accountants and auditors to hide their corruption.
• More industries to enable the people to hold ‘meaningful’ jobs paying at least a ‘living wage’, so that they can afford all the ‘necessities’ of living in a ‘civilized’ city environment.
• More taxes, to support the huge infrastructure of costs that would not be required by a smaller population, adding a cost factor of at least a third to a half, and probably more if one takes into account the incidental costs imposed by such factors as fees for owning or doing things, like owning a dog or getting approval to build a shed or a toll for driving on the road, all of which adds to the unproductive production requirement of a large population.

Jacob Zuma, the ‘culture-loving’ South African President, has a multiplicity of wives to produce his horde of children, 23 at the last count, if one ignores the illegitimate ones.  He is a prime example of the failure of a ‘leader’ to lead the nation, in thought as well as in deed.  He is not the only one.  The previous Swazi King was reputed to have had 900 wives and 1 800 children!  Of course, all of those wives and children had to be supported, and future means of support provided for them.  It is no surprise that Zuma’s ‘home’ at Nkandla cost about R250 000 000!  It had to be large to accommodate all of those people!  Zuma appears not to understand that, while in the distant past, a family had to be large to provide for labor to work the farm, and to account for the high child mortality rate then prevalent, the availability of modern medical treatment has reduced the mortality rate dramatically, and the evolution of the modern single-family household with its working members engaged in wage-earning employment has changed the need dramatically, but the paradigm remains deeply seated in the developing world, a paradigm that is urging the world towards a climate and resources catastrophe at an increasingly rapid rate.  For as long as a large proportion of the African population follows the examples of Zuma and the Swazi King, it is safe to assume that global warming is here to stay.