Sir, – Swithun Goodbody rightly points out that “the level of population growth of the 1950s and 1960s might have been sustainable if we had all continued to live as we did in the 1950s, but we haven’t” (Letters, November 11th).
However, it is important to unpack who that final “we” refers to.
According to Oxfam, during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth, the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population was responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion poorest people.
According to Our World in Data, the richest 50 per cent of people emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions while the bottom 50 per cent only emit 14 per cent. The very poorest countries, which are home to 9 per cent of the global population, are responsible for just 0.5 per cent of emissions. Adding several billion people in low-income countries would leave global emissions almost unchanged, but adding one billion high-income individuals would increase global emissions by almost one-third.
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Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are together home to 2.35 percent of the world’s population but emit just 0.1 percent of total global CO2 emissions. These three countries are experiencing an unprecedented drought and are at risk of famine. In these countries, it is estimated that one person dies due to this crisis every 48 seconds.
Ireland has just over five million people. Somalia has more than three times this figure, at 16.3 million Kenya over 54 million and Ethiopia over 117 million. However, in Ireland we produce nearly 54 times higher emissions than Somalia alone.
Countries like ours owe a climate debt to poorer countries. According to a study in the Lancet, the Global North was responsible for 92 per cent of climate breakdown, with the Global South responsible for just 8 per cent. Even though it contributes least to climate breakdown, the Global South suffers more than 90 per cent of its impacts, and 98 per cent of the related deaths.
By withholding loss and damage, we are prolonging an injustice whereby many people in these countries do not reach a social threshold for education, safe drinking water, gender equality, political voice, and healthcare. These crucial human needs only become more out of reach by denying these countries the “climate debt” that they are owed by the Global North for the “atmospheric colonisation” that we have driven, as the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it.
The truth is that we can meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, according to the 30-year update of the seminal Limits to Growth, as well as the recently published book Earth for All.
However, what is difficult for world leaders to swallow is that current rates of throughput generated by the global economy cannot be maintained at current levels. Since the industrial revolution, increased economic growth has been tightly coupled to increased greenhouse gas emissions. In some countries this is slowing, and in fewer still the relationship is decoupling, but nowhere is this happening fast enough to stay within planetary boundaries.
Instead, a systemic change of our economic and political systems is required, gearing them more towards debt cancellation, redistribution, reduced consumption, and indeed loss and damage, ensuring our economies are focused on good lives for all where human needs are fulfilled rather than arbitrary economic growth.
Conflating population growth in less developed countries with the excess consumption and production promoted by “developed” countries fosters an exclusionary process of otherisation.
The real elephant in the room is unfettered economic growth, the benefits of which mostly accrue to the countries that caused the climate crisis in the first place.
Mr Goodbody has a point about population growth, but it is incomplete.
Logically followed, the data shows us that we need fewer billionaires and luxury lifestyles, not fewer people who are already impoverished. – Yours, etc,
MEAGHAN CARMODY,
Drimnagh,
Dublin 12.
Sir, – Justine McCarthy writes that connecting broadband to every “nook and cranny of the country” has become a “harmful monster” (“Our false sense of security will prove to be our ruination”, Opinion & Analysis, November 11th).
As a beneficiary of this online outreach, should I cancel my digital subscription to The Irish Times and walk 43 minutes to the nearest supermarket to see if there is a copy left? – Yours, etc,
Dr JOHN DOHERTY,
Gaoth Dobhair,
Co Dhún na nGall.
A chara, – I agree with Justine McCarthy totally about the capitalist race to the bottom. But it is not fossil fuels on its own. Nowhere does she mention animal farming.
How many people in the world, what percentage, actually eat meat? Cattle and sheep eat a lot of grass. How much grass would we need to feed our animals if the whole world lived on an animal diet?
Why can’t the world’s human population eat the grass, by which I mean vegetables, directly, instead of diverting it to animals first. It is massively inefficient. And here’s the point. The animals generate methane and nitrous oxide.
Sooner rather than later the whole world is going to go vegan.
The humble cow is the elephant in the room. – Yours, etc,
DAVID McCARTER,
Hillsborough,
Co Down.
Sir, – Maybe we’re overthinking the climate debate. Perhaps it’s a case of there being many of us, consuming too many things, that often come from places too far away. – Yours, etc,
PADDY MEYLER,
Delgany,
Co Wicklow.