Tom Nilsson

Our Governments are clearly not taking climate change seriously enough. John Howard has only recently started to even pretend to take an interest in addressing climate change, and that is only because of the opinion polls. Howard’s proposed carbon trading scheme will not come into effect until 2012, which is five years away. Even then any targets associated with the scheme are likely to be modest. We should be doing much more, and we should be doing it right now.

A British think tank called the Optimum Population Trust recently released a report which found that the best way to fight climate change is to have fewer children. The report calculated that each new UK citizen less means a lifetime carbon dioxide saving of nearly 750 tonnes, a climate impact equivalent to 620 return flights between London and New York.

Based on a “social cost” of carbon dioxide of $85 a tonne, the report estimates the climate cost of each new Briton over their lifetime at roughly £30,000. The lifetime emission costs of the extra 10 million people projected for the UK by 2074 would therefore be over £300 billion.

In Australia the argument for reducing our birth rate is even stronger because Australians on average emit a lot more greenhouse gases than British people.

On a global level, if the global human population was only two billion instead of six and a half billion then climate change would not be the problem that it is. The Optimum Population Trust report found that global population growth between now and 2050 will be equivalent in carbon dioxide emissions terms to the arrival on the planet of nearly two more United States or ten Indias.

See – http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.release07May07.htm

Tom Nilsson
President
Sustainable Population Australia, Tasmania Branch