Energy Efficiency

Recently I wrote the feed-able (growing food naturally post peak oil) population peak for Britain as 31 million, however, corporate government (where corporations dictate population – read more consumers – to the government of the day) sees the UK set to become the most populous country in EU, with water and food shortage causing the population to grow.

The term ‘lifeboat’ is often used by Peak Oil theorists as an area of land most likely utilising permaculture practices to grow a sustainable food supply for a specific number pf people.

Britain may well be see by many as a world ‘lifeboat’, considering rainfall and food production, however, more realistic research may prove that the UK is still a net importer of much of its food and won’t be able to cope.

Although Britain will become one of the world’s major destinations for immigrants (as the world heats up and populations continue to soar), statistics indicate the US and Canada are likewise taking in more people and although the countries are huge, America is also a net importer of many of its foods; the problem with Australian immigration and the recent baby boom is our small footprint of arable land and erratic rainfall.

But its not just demands on food and water, it’s the carbon dioxide emissions, but infrastructure in housing, transport, wastes and energy requirements. Of course short sighted corporate views use the cheaper labour and supply of young workers, with demographers suggesting that by 2050, more than a third of the population will be aged 60 or over.

But deciding what numbers any country might support is a highly controversial issue and will be the focus of a conference on sustainable populations which will be held this week in London. Organised by the Optimum Population Trust, the meeting will hear that the United Nation expects that by 2050 the world will be inhabited by around 9.2 billion people, compared to its current level of 6.8 billion.

Every day, the equivalent of the population of a large city is added to the numbers of humans, a rise that is now straining the planet’s resources to breaking point.

At the same time, Britain’s population will rise from its current level of 61 million to 72 million by 2050. The nation will then be the most populous in the European Union, outstripping Germany, whose population will slump from 82 million to 71 million people as its immigration figures plummet.

The idea that Britain could one day support such numbers has been questioned by Aubrey Manning, emeritus professor of natural history at Edinburgh University. “There are far too many people living in Britain already,” he said. “Once our population passed the 20 million level around 1850, it became too numerous. That is the figure at which we could no longer sustain our population from our own resources. We are now three times over the limit and heading for more. We have long passed the line of sustainability. As for the planet, its maximum sustainable population is no more than 3 billion, I would say.”

The rise in population indicates that the country is set for some considerable overcrowding. Britain’s land area is only two-thirds that of Germany, yet it will soon support the same number of citizens. “This population rise, brought about by rising immigration, will strain our infrastructures – our housing and water supplies – and bring very little advantage to the nation,” said Dyson, who will address the conference. “Nor do I think these extra people will be able to help in looking after our older people.”

But these points were disputed by Tim Finch, head of immigration for the Institute of Public Policy Research. “A healthy economy sucks in young, educated people and that is what has happened to this country over the past couple of decades.

These young immigrants have helped keep the country running as our population has started to get older and they will become more important as the decades go past and that ageing intensifies. The immigration system picks out the best and the brightest of immigrants and they will be of great service to Britain. That is just a fact.”

The problem is that discussions of population numbers in the past have been associated with talk of eugenics and with attempts at controlling ethnic populations. As a result, there is little discussion today of the subject or its impact on the environment, a point stressed by James Lovelock, the distinguished environmental scientist. “The subject has become a taboo, a matter of political correctness,” he said last week. “And that is dangerous, for the numbers of humans on Earth are going to be crucial to our survival.”

Manning added: “We have stopped worrying about population because other issues – acid rain, climate change and others – have occupied our attention and because past fears of global food shortages were proved unfounded. But the subject will not go away. Our planet is now dangerously overpopulated.”

Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, in London, agreed. “We desperately need to bring down our emissions of greenhouse gases but the truth is we will never get the contribution of each individual down to zero. Only the lack of the individual can bring it to zero, and that is an issue for population control which we need to talk about openly and urgently.”

Rapley tells that the Earth’s population is now rising at a rate of around 80 million a year. “That is roughly the same as the number of unwanted pregnancies across the world,” he said. “If we can prevent unwanted pregnancies, we can halt this spiral in our numbers.” To do that, contraception will have to become universally available – and political and religious opposition to birth control removed. If that happened, the world’s population could be stabilised to around 8 billion by 2050, added Rapley.

But many climatologists believe that by then life on the planet will already have become dangerously unpleasant. Temperature rises will have started to have devastating impacts on farmland, water supplies and sea levels. Humans – increasing both in numbers and dependence on food from devastated landscapes – will then come under increased pressure. The end result will be apocalyptic, said Lovelock. By the end of the century, the world’s population will suffer calamitous declines until numbers are reduced to around 1 billion or less. “By 2100, pestilence, war and famine will have dealt with the majority of humans,” he said.

One of the few places to survive the worst impacts will be Britain. “Our climate will be one of the least affected by global warming,” added Lovelock. “As a result, everyone will want to live here. We will become one of the world’s lifeboats. The trouble, of course, will be that, even if we wanted to, we will not be able to pick up everyone. There will be some hard decisions to make.”

Many experts predict that disaster will strike long before 2050. Last week, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, said the planet faced “a perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages which could strike in less than 20 years. In a speec to the Sustainable Development Commission conference in London, Beddington said that one in three people were already facing water shortages and that by 2030 world water demand would increase by more than 30%; energy demands would increase by 50%. “There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected.”

In the long run, however, humanity should benefit, said Lovelock. “If you look at our species over the past million years, there have been a number of major climatic events, some devastating. Between the Ice Ages, sea levels rose by 120 metres and tracts of land were flooded. Yet that period covers the time that early humans emerged and evolved into Homo sapiens, “Often our numbers were brought to catastrophically low levels by climate change and numbers were reduced to only a couple of thousand on a couple of occasions. Every time things got bad, our numbers plummeted and we improved as a species. That is certainly going to happen again over the next 100 years.”

The world by numbers

• 1 million – Britain’s population in Roman times
• 6 million – Britain’s population around the time of the English civil war
• 47 million – Britain’s population in 1945
• 52,000 – The number of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere every minute
• 267 – The average number of births every minute worldwide; the average number of deaths per minute is 118
• 78 million – The planet’s annual population increase, a number roughly equivalent to the population of Germany
• 1 million – The number of chimpanzees in Africa in 1900. Today, thanks to habitat loss and hunting, numbers have dropped to around 15,000
• 38.4 – The median age in the UK rose from 34.1 years in 1971 to 38.4 in 2003 and is projected to reach 43.3 in 2031. (The median is the age that separates the oldest half of the population from the youngest.)
• 10 billion – The number of chickens eaten by man worldwide every year
• 500 million – The number of ducks eaten every year
• 1.3 billion – The population of China
• 1.2 billion – India’s population
• 500 million – The population of the EU
• 74 million – The number of barrels of oil pumped daily across the planet; 15 million tonnes of coal are dug every day
• 9 – Between 2010 and 2050, nine countries will account for half of the world’s projected population increase: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the United States, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Bangladesh, Tanzania

Sources: World Clock; Poodwaddle; UN Population Division, The Guardian