Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is already a stretch to imagine how we are going to carry out a clean-
energy revolution for
today's
level of population - of whom 1.5bn have
yet to be connected to an electricity grid - let alone contemplate how
to extend this revolution to 2.4bn more energy consumers over the next
forty years. The expected growth in world population - a further third by
2050 - means that we are trying to hit a moving target of steadily rising
energy-demand.
The link between energy and population is complex. It works both ways
- that is to say, energy has also helped increase population growth in the
past. Of course, there were many non-energy factors, such as advances
in medicine, involved in the population explosion that accompanied
Western Europe's industrial revolution. But it is the case that when the
human race used only biomass - from the beginning of time to around
1850 - the population multiplied only very slowly. Extrapolating the pop-
ulation growth rate of the “biomass era” for conjectural purposes would
give us a gobal populace of just over 1bn today, compared to the 6.8bn of
us currently alive. Widespread use of coal from the mid-nineteenth centu-
ry onwards speeded up population growth considerably. On one estimate,
the “coal population” level - the number of people the world could sustain
if coal were the only energy source - would be around 2.3bn today, a third
of the current population. This hypothetical coal population is harder to
estimate than the biomass population because quite quickly - by the early
twentieth century - coal ceded its energy primacy to oil.
But just as movement
up
the hydrocarbon ladder - from wood to coal,
then from coal to oil and gas - helped increase the world's population in
the past, so movement
down
the hydrocarbon ladder - by using less fos-
sil fuel and more wood/biomass - might reduce population because of a
return to less energy-rich fuels. It is entirely possible that climate change
itself will have a dramatic demographic impact.
For catastrophic climate change would spell an extreme downward
pressure on population, due to floods and droughts. James Lovelock, the
environmentalist and “Gaia theorist”, forecasts that climate change will be
catastrophic and that it may well kill several billion people.
Population control is always a controversial issue, and its emergence in
the energy/climate debate is no exception. For instance, an organisation
called the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) has proposed a scheme called
PopOffsets, whereby people can offset their carbon footprint (from, say, air
travel) by making a financial contribution to “funding the un-met need for
family planning”.
