The debate about population growth and the environment has raged for decades, if not centuries. Does A Pivotal Moment have anything new to contribute to the debate?
Yes. Debates about the role of population growth on the environment have often been polarized, with some claiming that population growth is the greatest threat to a sustainable future, and others countering that population is a complete non-issue.
In A Pivotal Moment, we show that reality is somewhere in the middle. Population growth is not the sole cause of our environmental problems, but it magnifies the impact of unsustainable resource consumption, harmful technologies and inequality. It’s a piece of the pie; slowing population growth is part of what we need to do to stabilize the climate and build a sustainable future. But it’s a piece of the pie that’s worth addressing, since everything we need to do to slow population growth is something we should be doing anyway: ensuring access to family planning and reproductive health care; educating girls and empowering women; and promoting sustainable, equitable development.
You say that slowing population growth will help fight climate change. But population is growing most rapidly in the developing countries, where per capita emissions are very low. So how can slower population growth help address climate change?
The answer lies in the future. The developing countries are where the lion’s share of population growth will occur, and they are also where development must occur for half of humanity to escape from grinding poverty.
The benefits of slower population growth are twofold: slower growth can spur development in low-income countries, because it enables families and nations to make essential investments in education, health care and economic development. At the same time, a smaller population size will help limit the environmental damage that development brings.
Does your book advocate “population control”?
Absolutely not. You don’t have to control anyone to slow population growth. Instead, you need to make sure that all people are able to make real decisions about childbearing. That means making sure all people have access to family planning and reproductive health services. It means education and opportunity for girls and women. It means ending harmful traditions like child marriage. And it means investing in young men and women, to ensure that they have options in life.
What would it cost to make family planning and reproductive health care universal? Wouldn’t that be prohibitively expensive?
The developed countries’ share of the cost to provide reproductive health services for every woman on earth is $20 billion a year—about what the bankers on Wall Street gave themselves in bonuses last year. The US share of the total is about $1 billion—equal to what we spend on the war in Afghanistan every 13 hours.
In the US and other developed countries, population-environment issues are being used to advocate for sharp limits on immigration. Do you advocate for reduced immigration levels to protect the environment?
Here’s why limiting immigration won’t solve our environmental problems. Americans have the biggest environmental footprint of any nation on Earth. Americans comprise 5% of the world’s population and use 25% of the world’s energy. Closing the borders won’t change that.
More broadly, these anti-immigrant groups misrepresent the nature of the environmental challenges we face today. They imply that we are in a lifeboat with limited resources, and if too many people get in, we’ll all sink. But there’s a flaw in that thinking: We may be in a lifeboat, but it’s not the United States. It’s our planet, and we’re all in it together.
From a global perspective, immigration actually reduces population growth and—in the long term—environmental impact. That’s because many immigrants come from countries with higher fertility rates than the US, and after a generation or two in the US, their fertility falls to US levels –about 2 children per couple. So immigration actually helps slow population growth, on a global level.
Climate change and other environmental problems do not respect national borders. That’s a big problem for our neighbors in the global South, who emit far less in greenhouse gases than we do, but suffer disproportionately from the effects of increasing emissions. One consequence of global warming will be increased drought in some areas, like the one that has already driven many poor Mexican farmers off their land. In this case the anti-immigration crowd would simply have us turn away refugees from the problem we have created.
Of course, most immigrants are economic, not environmental, refugees. But here, too, we have a role in creating the problem. For example, NAFTA flooded Mexico with cheap, subsidized corn from the US, putting many farmers out of business and sending a wave of immigrants northward. It’s time to rethink the economics—and the morality—of a global trade system that ships commodities around the globe in search of higher profits, with little regard for environmental and social costs.