Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
OPT's rationale is that the fewer emitters there are in the world, the less
emissions there will be. But the scheme has been criticised for a neo-colo-
nial approach: its long-term solution effectively allows the rich to maintain
their lifestyle by restricting the number of the poor in developing countries,
who have the greatest “un-met need for family planning”, but who often
contribute least in per capita terms to emissions.
A more common-sense approach is for governments to make respon-
sible birth control - meaning citizens' access to informed but voluntary
means of contraception - part of their climate change (and therefore,
indirectly, energy-use) strategy. This is all the more necessary because the
basic energy needs of today's 6.8bn population have to be taken as given
in any future climate regime. Each of us deserves the modicum of energy
needed to sustain a reasonable life.
Wealth
Over the past two hundred years, the world's population has grown six
times, but energy consumption per person has risen by a factor of eight.
This discrepancy is due to rising incomes: the more money we have, the
more energy we tend to use. So it would appear that the amount of energy
each person uses, which is determined largely by their income, is a lot
more important than the number of people on the planet requiring ener-
gy. Generally, there is a stabilizing point: once a certain level of relative
wealth has been attained by people within a given country, they will even-
tually spend a smaller relative share of their money on energy consump-
tion, so ultimately this rise in their energy-use tails off. But this tailing-off
only occurs at a very high level of both energy use and income, well above
the level China and India are expected to reach in the near future.
The middle classes of China and India will go on aspiring to US levels of
consumption and, until they reach these levels, they will continue to use
more energy. In China's cities, rising incomes have raised energy demand,
as newly well-off city dwellers have treated themselves to cars and domes-
tic appliances. In contrast to city residents in OECD countries, whose
energy consumption is less than those living in the countryside, China's
urbanites consume more energy than rural Chinese, for the simple reason
that they are much richer.
The result has been to blunt the effect on energy demand of China's
population-control policy. Through the one-child policy (which has now
been modified to allow parents to pay a fee for having a second or third
child), it had succeeded in slowing the rate of population growth, from an
