Perceiving the Population Bomb: The real damage began about 60 years ago.

• Author: Ferguson, Andrew R.B.
• Position: Books and research - Statistical Data Included

Thirty-two years ago, in 1968, Paul Ehrlich sounded a wake-up call to the world with his book The Population Bomb. Now that we can see the Bomb in historical perspective, even establishing when it went off, let us set ourselves the task of perceiving--with rigorous objectivity--the explosion of the Bomb and the collateral damage it has caused.

It was only in the 199Os that many demographers came to realize that Ehrlich's message was essentially correct. Writing in 1991, Clive Pointing started the preface of his great book, A Green History of the World, with these words: "As some people climb mountains because they are there, others find themselves writing books because they are not there." His book was indeed ground-breaking; before it was published, few people can have had an adequate grasp of humanity's impact on the environment. Two years later, in 1993 the biophysical scientist, Vaclav Smil, wrote: "We have at least started to realize the enormity of environmental transformation which is imperiling the survival of modern civilization." Smil identified a spectrum of critical changes taking place in the Earth's condition, and noted that "these changes can be ordered into three broad categories: declining availability of critical natural resources and services; changing composition of the atmosphere; and the loss of biodiversity." [Italics added.] It may be impossible to rank those three in importance. However, we can use the "changing composition of the atmosphere" to establish when the Bomb went off, so let us look at that first.

In 1990, the world was emitting, from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production, about 4.2 tons of carbon dioxide per person, indicating an energy use of about 64 GJ (gigajoules) per person per year. Sixty-four GJ/capita, as well as being the average use of energy in 1990, is a reasonable lower limit for average energy use. Vaclav Smil provides the evidence. He shows us graphically that infant mortality drops precipitously as per capita energy use rises to 50 GJ per year. Thereafter, further improvement becomes more gradual. Of course there is no clear changeover point, but 64 gigajoules a year per person seems a judicious minimum. In any case, should you want to argue for a lower average use of energy than 64 GJ/year, then you will need to argue for accepting an infant mortality higher than 15 per 1000 births. Countries like Greece, Japan, and the United Kingdom, which have better infant mortality rates...