But actually there is lots we can do about population. Women with more education and more personal power (I.e. access to contraception and abortions) have fewer children and have them later. So people have been doing something, just not as much as is needed.
I said: nothing we can do about population today. The education and empowerment of women - something never advocated by ZPG types, since they tend to be high-consumption middle-aged and older males - takes a generation, 20-30 years to have a significant effect. And then it just levels off population, it doesn't shrink it.
Whereas we can shrink our consumption today.
Now, the education and empowerment of women can and should happen at the same time, because whatever it does or doesn't do to pollution etc, it's the right thing to do. But this doesn't give us a pass to keep on with our happy motoring and producing vast quantities of rubbish.
You kind of missed my point. If we had taken ZPG seriously back in the 70s, what would global
Population be today? China obviously did. I did. And it isn't just number of children, it is parental age. Population grows faster if parents are young, i.e. a short generation time. Any population ecology textbook can explain this.
So yes we need to reduce consumption, but we also need to do things which encourage low reproductive rates. Having 6 or 8 or 15 children makes perfect sense when child mortality rates are high and a couple may end up with 2 surviving children. Not so much sense having 3 or 4 or 5 children when they all survive to adulthood. Our biology and our technology are not working well together at this time.
The one child policy was enacted in 1979 and Chinese population will peak in a few years, around 2023. Enacting a one child policy today, would the worldwide population peak 40 years later? Around 2060?
But lets examine ZPG. China is #1, by country (not by capita) for emissions (27.2%) and has had less than ZPG since 1979. USA is the second largest, 14.6%, and has a growth rate of 0.7% so the population is growing slowly; cumulatively that's a majority of emissions and it averages as under ZPG. The majority of the worlds emissions and yet when combining the population growth, its ZPG.
Here's the UN take on the futility of ZPG in mitigating climate change:
Two-thirds of the projected growth of the global population through 2050 will be driven by current age structures. It would occur even if childbearing in high-fertility countries today were to fall immediately to around two births per woman over a lifetime.
- note most of the population growth is in low emitting countries, except for 78 million new Americans. Unfortunately an american emits far more than most other people.
In other words, even if we enacted ZPG today, we would still see growth.
As an extreme, if Americans adopted a lifestyle such as India, that would be a 90% reduction in GHG. 13% of the worlds emissions, just by reducing consumption. If India is not your liking, if Americans were like Germans or Japanese, the worldwide emissions would drop 7%.
What amount of reductions would be achieved from ZPG by 2050? According to the UN, none, worldwide emissions would increase.
