Population Pressure

An Absolution for Baby Boomers

I’ve been puzzling myself with concerns about population pressure, so I looked up a couple of articles on population growth. I’ve begun a practice of trying to check the credibility of sources when I do any quick google research, and to that end I use a site called Mediabiasfactcheck.com. I trust that site because what it says about news sources with which I’m familiar (CBC, CTV, BBC, CNN, FOX,) is consistent with my experience with those sites. S0, the two sites I referenced (Quartz, and OurWorldInData.org) both got rated slightly left leaning with good credit for factual reporting. And both articles referenced UN projections in the data they provided.  Just in case you needed to know.

I wanted to establish that basis because I’m about to throw a lot of data at you, and I wanted to verify a) that I didn’t just make it up and b) that while I haven’t researched it in enormous depth, I’ve done enough data scratching to convince myself that these numbers are more than accurate enough for my purposes. So, here we go.

Back in the 60’s and 70’s it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about the population explosion. You don’t hear that terminology quite so much these days. There’s a good reason for that – the population explosion is fizzling out. The Quartz article said “the global population growth rate jumped from around 0.02% per year in the early 1400s to 0.23% in 1600 and then 0.33% in the mid-1700s. By 1970, it peaked at about 2% per year, and began its return to the norm. Last year, population growth tumbled past 1.1% per year on its downward trajectory that demographers expect will approach zero (or even fall below it) by the end of the century.” Yes, that’s right. Demographers predict that population growth will recede to replacement level within 80 years.

Here’s the trajectory of world population

 1700 – 600 Million

1950 – 2.5 Billion (quadrupled in 250 years)

 2019 – 7.71 Billion (tripled in 70 years)

The fact that the population has tripled in my lifetime doesn’t sound to me like the explosion is over. But demographic experts assure us that by the end of the 21^st century, population of the world is likely to be approaching an equilibrium value. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the “near- equilibrium” value is estimated to be something like 10.9 Billion persons. That means that we’re looking at adding an additional 3 billion people. So while we may say that the “population explosion” is dying away, its impacts are still being felt, and population pressure is going to be an enormous factor in the next 80 years.

What does that mean for us today? If we think about things with a hundred-year outlook, in which we have to accommodate a 40% increase in the world’s population, how would that thinking affect climate change policy? Would we need to think differently about our attitudes on immigration? Do we think about population control measures? What is the real value we place on human life? (I’m not sure I’m going to tackle that one!)

But before we go there, let us use this information to provide absolution for the Baby Boomer generation. (Not guilty, your honour, not guilty!)

We often hear that Baby Boomers are the first generation which will have a higher standard of living than the generations that follows us. I feel bad about the challenges facing my children and grandchildren, but I feel less guilty now.  The standard of living issue may well be just a reflection of our inability to extract 3 times as much from the world’s resources now as we did in 1950. Rising population and dwindling resources make it highly probable that it’s going to be more difficult for the next generations to achieve the standards of living that we experienced.  That doesn’t mean we were selfish, or extraordinarily greedy.  It means that we were lucky to live in a time when rapidly expanding technological capability came together with material availability to create unusual prosperity.  Five hundred years from now this seventy-year period may be seen as a blip in history.  Maybe it just wasn’t sustainable in light of the population growth we’re experiencing.

Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Maybe we can continue to find ways to exploit the planet’s resource at an accelerating rate that keeps pace with the world’s population. But it doesn’t seem like a good bet to me. There are three factors at work here. First, the tripling of population suggests that we need three times as much “stuff” as we did 70 years ago just to have the standard of living we enjoyed in 1950. That’s three times as much food, three times as much oil, three times as much mineral ore – it’s a daunting challenge. and that “three times” requirement is going to grow by a minimum of 40% just to accommodate the 3 billion additional people we’re going to produce. So we need to quadruple, not triple, the 1950 level of production.

Second, the continuing development and industrialization of the world suggests that, in fact, quadrupling the 1950 exploitation level isn’t sufficient – not if the whole world is to enjoy the standard of living enjoyed by Europe and North America in the post-WWII era.

And third, in the nature of things, we reaped the low hanging fruit first. The fact that Canada is attempting, (with perhaps limited success) to extract oil from the frozen oil sands is a good example of the world turning to material sources that were considered impractical in the 1950s. So we’re looking for more stuff than ever before and we’re finding it in tougher places.

So, I’m going to say that we’re not guilty of excessive greed or intentional environmental abuse. We ARE guilty of procreation, thus contributing to the population pressure, but I’m not going to apologize for that to the generations that resulted from our….procreation.

‘Life’s tough, Millenial. Sorry it worked out this way.”…. “OK Boomer.”