George Monbiot: Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling
When a
major study was published last month, showing that the global
population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had
assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop
blaming all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was
wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse. Next week the
BirthStrike
movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to
have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse will dissolve itself,
because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by
population obsessives.
The founders explain that they had “underestimated the
power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”. It is true that, in
some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular
kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture
into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for
housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/panic-overpopulation-climate-crisis-consumption-environment
