China’s Birth Policy
China has more than 1.3-billion people living in an area the size of Canada, more than thirty times our population. More people live in China today than lived in the world 100 years ago. One out of every five people in the world live in China. And their population is still growing in what is the fastest expanding economy on Earth.
Now you may not agree with China’s policies, politics or style of government, but they, in their wisdom have instituted what may be the most progressive stance against human induced global warming of any country in the world. What you say? How can this be? They have a one couple, one child policy. And they mean to keep that policy in place for at least the next decade. Its an incredible and very important step, one that we should applaud and take note of. Now why do I think this is note worthy for us?
In my new book and most of the talks that I do about climate change, I outline three significant obstacles to making a dent on our ability to mitigating climate change. They are our growth based economy, our population and our consumption.
In that vein China, with the world’s largest population, has probably done more to than any other country in the world given its ability affect the global climate. Its sheer size is staggering. And by choosing to reign in its population it is addressing one of the three most critical problems plaguing the environment today. Only one hundred years ago china’s population was under 300 million, where the United States is today. The exponential rise in population brought on by the miracle of fossil fuels has made the twentieth century a boom for humanity and a plague for the rest of creation. Now, many in the west point out that our population has stabilized and that it will not increase as quickly as it has in the past, if at all. What they fail to mention is we continue plague the Earth with our consumption. We are adding toys, plastics, cars, houses, roads and an accelerating lifestyle to our already hyper-consumptive ways. So that even though our gross population is comparatively small, our consumption is enormous.
From the right wing radicals (read Conservatives et al) I hear a lot of claptrap about Canada’s insignificant contribution to climate change, that we only produce 2 per cent of the total of the world’s CO2. Bull feathers! Because of our rampant consumerism and globalization, our true footprint is distributed to the third world. In short, our companies and capital are shifting to the third world where we can take advantage of their huge poverty prone populations. We just shift the burden overseas and trumpet, “look at them, they are the problem”! We then import the goods back to home and say, its not our industry that is creating the problem. Let them reduce. Let them cut back. But what we fail to realize is that they already have and if they cut back any more they wind up with death.
We have to recognize that this is a problem that affects us all and that there are no borders anymore when it comes to the climate change. If you consume, you doom. China has begun to solve the problem, we have to help.