Attenborough's Political Foray Criticised as Simplistic PDF Print E-mail
Miriam Rose, 14 December 2009
In the tightly packed environmental column space in the run up to the Copenhagen summit, one organisation has been getting a lot of publicity for its push to cut world population growth.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) argues that population is the 'biggest single environmental problem', and the cheapest to solve and in a prime-time Horizon special programme last week, the trust's patron David Attenborough ventured into the political arena, connecting population to climate change.

The trust's chair Roger Martin (a well-spoken career diplomat and former deputy high commissioner for Zimbabwe) has spent years urging environmentalists and governments to break the 'taboo' on discussing population, and make it a key issue at the current Copenhagen summit. He claims:

'A quarter of a million more people are born each day. Until we address that there's no point in doing anything else'.

He has also been promoting their controversial carbon offset scheme called Pop Offsets, that balances continued carbon emissions in the West with contraceptive programmes in Africa. Martin says “It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can’t shoot down as we want, while the population keeps shooting up.”  

Though the Trust makes some important points about the multiple benefits of women's education, including reducing unwanted births (of which there are many) the offsetting scheme and the organisation itself have been criticised by other environmentalists for putting too much emphasis on the developing world.

Friends of the Earth released a statement calling the idea of offsetting rich nations carbon-intensive lifestyles with condoms for the developing world  'repugnant' , while commentator George Monbiot noted that one sixth of the world’s population (and those with the fastest growth rate) are so poor that they produce virtually no emissions at all. He calls the OPT's scheme 'the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich' , and cites scientific evidence which shows that although population size is a factor, it is the number of wealthy consumers, not 'total emitters' which dictates carbon levels.  

The idea that carbon emissions are directly tied to individual behaviour also puts too much emphasis on the consumer and neglects the impact of state-sponsored industries such as the arms trading or 'defense', an enormous polluter and carbon emitter worldwide.  

Supporters of the Trust argue that as the poorest nations necessarily 'develop' they will (like us) consume and emit more carbon. This idea is substantiated by official figures which guide policy decisions at Copenhagen and other powerful bodies. For example the Wall Street Journal announced in December that;
 
"The International Energy Agency projects that nearly all the growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions over the next two decades will come from developing countries -- and that fully half of that total will come from China alone."

What these figures don't tell us is how much of those emissions are generated by outsourced industries which feed predominantly Western consumer needs. Neither do they shift from the assumption that the only way to 'develop' is to emit, pollute and waste as much as we do in the West. They fail to address our own part in the poverty, resource scarcity and carbon emissions of the Global South.  

The eminent environmentalists of the OPT (who include nuclear advocate James Lovelock, Jonathon Porritt, and Sir Crispin Tickell) are not alone. In May 2009 a Sunday Times article, 'Billionaire club in bid to curb population' showed that business leaders and mega-wealthy individuals were jumping on the population reduction train, identifying the growing population as the number one social and environmental issue (and one which they argue is mostly the fault of the developing nations). Promoting 'cheap' carbon offsetting to address this plays directly into the hands of big industry at Copenhagen who will be pushing for policies which allow for their carbon intense profit-making activities to continue.

Trust chair Roger Martin seems to imply more concern over prolonging the consumption-based wealth of the West, than the damaging planetary effects of increasing carbon use and emissions when he  asserts in a high profile conference that, 'every person not born in the future means there's more carbon for the rest of us.'  

The Trust's zero net-immigration policy for the UK  also arguably plays dangerously in relation to the resurgence of the far right.

The think tank's heavyweight membership has gained its influence and credibility at a politically crucial juncture. However, the OPT should be wary of saremongering over immigration and population. The issue is not how many of us there are but how much we consume, how we live on the planet, and how we treat our fellow human beings, and if this issue becomes lost we really are scuppered, at Copenhagen, and as a human race.
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