EcoRadio

Category: Articles

  • UK population growth needs to be reversed

    UK population growth needs to be reversed

    Ecologist

    9th June, 2010

    Sustainability watchdog argues for an end to larger family tax benefits and a bigger political debate on reducing population growth and its impact

    Population growth is not just a ‘poor world’ problem and needs to be reversed in the UK too, says sustainability NGO Forum for the Future.

    The UK’s population is forecast by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to increase from 61.4 million today to 70.6 million by 2030.

    Forum for the Future says that whilst a population of 70 million is not inherently unsustainable, managing that level of population sustainably will require an ‘extraordinary combination of planning, investment, and innovation’.

    In a new paper, ‘Growing pains: population and sustainability in the UK‘, the group says that the UK should aim to reduce that growth and its impact through more targeted family planning and an end to GDP-led growth.

    ‘Most classical economic theory still supports the expansion of population as a means of creating an economic surplus. This analysis is now dangerously outdated because classical economics has ignored the ‘boundary conditions’ set on the economy by the ecological and physical limits of the planet.

    ‘We should, therefore, aim for the redefinition of human well-being and quality of life in terms of a much broader basket of economic, social and ecological factors,’ the report says.

    Reform family benefits

    One key recommendation is to reform tax benefit policies so as not to encourage larger families.

    ‘Current tax structures and family leave structures give us a system where taxpayers and employers have effectively agreed to provide continually increasing levels of support for a family of any size (e.g. tax credits, tax-beneficial childcare vouchers and increases in statutory maternity pay).

    ‘There would clearly be very difficult issues in reframing these benefits whilst creating a family-friendly society where no child is in poverty, but government may need to rethink the direction of incentives.’

    The report also supports proposals to raise the retirement age to 66 in 2016 to shift attitudes away from seeing older people as a burden, as well as allowing people to ‘rethink how to spread work, take time out for rearing children or caring for family or for learning throughout our lives’.

    It says the obsession with immigration is wrong, and while limiting it would help to reduce UK population growth and associated impacts, it would have no impact on the global population picture.

    Useful links
    Growing pains: population and sustainability in the UK

  • The Money Gusher

     

    Pollution has been defined as a resource in the wrong place. That’s also a pretty good description of the company’s profits. The great plumes of money that have been bursting out of the company’s accounts every year are not BP’s to give away. They consist, in part or in whole, of the externalised costs the company has failed to pay, and which the rest of society must carry.

    Does this sound familiar? In the ten years preceding the crash, the banks posted and disposed of stupendous profits. When their risky ventures failed, they
    discovered that they hadn’t made sufficient provision against future costs, and had to go begging from the state. They had classified their annual surplus as profit and given it to their investors and staff long before it was safe to do so.

    Last week the British government bumped into another consequence of failing to take future costs into account. Chris Huhne, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, revealed that nuclear decommissioning liabilities will cost the government £4bn more than it was expecting to pay over the next three years(4). This will cancel out two-thirds of the vicious cuts the government has announced and swallow most of his department’s budget. As Huhne pointed out, “It is a classic example of short-termism. I cannot think of a better example of a failure to take a decision in the short run costing the taxpayer a hell of a lot more in the long run.”(5)

    The decommissioning costs imposed on society by nuclear power will be dwarfed by those imposed by the fossil fuel industry. They include, but are not confined to, the money that will have to spent on adapting to climate change. The United Nations estimates this cost at $50–170 billion a year, but a report last year by British scientists suggested that this is around three times too low, as it counts only a small proportion of likely impacts(6).

    The UN has hired the consultancy Trucost to estimate the costs dumped on the environment by the world’s 3000 biggest public companies. It doesn’t report until October, but earlier this year the Guardian published the interim results(7). Trucost had estimated the damage these companies inflicted on the environment in 2008 at $2.2 trillion, equivalent to one third of their profits for that year. This too is likely to be an underestimate, as the draft report did not try to value the long-term costs of any issue except climate change. Nor did it count the wider social costs of environmental change.

    A paper by the New Economics Foundation in 2006 used government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions to calculate the liabilities of Shell and BP(8). It found that while the two companies had just posted profits of £25bn, they had incurred costs in the same year of £46.5bn. The oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well is scarcely more damaging, and its eventual impacts scarcely more expensive, than the oil which is captured by neighbouring rigs then processed and burnt as intended.

    The full costs imposed by the oil companies, which include the loss of human lives and the extinction of species, cannot be accounted. But even if they could, you shouldn’t expect the companies to carry them. They might be incapable of capping their leaks; they are adept at capping their liabilities. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which is owned by Transocean, is registered in the Marshall Islands(9). Most oil companies pull the same trick: they register their rigs and ships in small countries with weak governments and no international reach. These nations are, in other words, incapable of regulating them.

    Flags of convenience signify more than the place of registration: they’re an unmistakable sign that responsibilities are being offloaded. If powerful governments were serious about tackling pollution, the first thing they would do would be to force oil companies to register their property in the places where their major interests lie.

    US lawyers are drooling over the prospect of what one of them called “the largest tort we’ve had in this country”(10). Some financial analysts are predicting the death of BP, as the fines and compensation it will have to pay outweigh its earnings. I don’t believe a word of it.

    ExxonMobil was initially fined $5bn for the Exxon Valdez disaster, in 1989. But its record-breaking profits allowed it pay record-breaking legal fees: after 19 years of argument it got the fine reduced to $507m(11). That’s equivalent to the profit it made every ten days last year. Yesterday, after 25 years of deliberations, an Indian court triumphantly convicted Union Carbide India Ltd of causing death by negligence through the Bhopal catastrophe(12). There was just one catch: Union Carbide India Ltd ceased to exist many years ago. It wound itself up to avoid this outcome, and its liabilities vanished in a puff of poisoned gas.

    BP’s insurers will take a hit, so will the pension funds which invested so heavily in it, but, though some people are proposing costs of $40 or even $60bn, I will bet the price of a barrel of crude that the company is still in business ten years from now. Everything else – the ecosystems it blights, the fishing and tourist industries, a habitable climate – might collapse around it, but BP, like the banks, will be deemed too big to fail. Other people will pick up the costs.

    There is an alternative, but it is unlikely to materialise. Just as Norway has treated its oil money not as profit but as provision against a tougher future(13), so the governments in whose territories oil companies work should force them to pay into a decommissioning fund. The levy should reflect the costs economists are able to calculate, plus a contingency for those we can’t yet foresee.

    This would outrage the oil firms, as it would render many of them unprofitable. But there’s a simple answer to that: the money currently defined as profit is nothing of the kind.

    www.monbiot.com

  • Population and environment – whats the connection?

    Australia is a large country with a small population. In 2003 we had a population density of 2.5 people per square kilometre; by comparison, the figure for Japan was 338 people per square kilometre, for the United Kingdom 244 and for France 109. Of the world’s developed countries, only Canada (3.2) and Iceland (2.8) have comparable population densities (Box 1: Trends in world population).

    A complex problem

    While the global and local list of environmental problems is long and growing, it’s difficult to be certain of the extent to which population growth is a contributing factor. For example, land degradation in Australia is a major concern. Rabbits are a major cause of land degradation in some regions of the country, yet they were introduced to the country by just one person. This is a problem of too many rabbits, not too many people.

    Clearly, the relationship between the environment and population is complex. To explore it further, we need first to look at population growth.

     

    Population growth in Australia

    Nobody knows how many indigenous people lived here before European settlement: estimates range between 300,000 and 1.5 million. It is known, however, that their numbers declined significantly after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.

    Related site: AusStats: Population clock
    Up to the minute projection of Australia’s resident population.
    (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

    By 1887 there were probably about 3 million people, of mostly European origin, living in the colonies. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that the 1901 census counted 3,773,801 people. One hundred years later, in 2001, the national census tallied 18,972,350 people. The estimated Australian population mid-2004 was 20,111,300.

    The human population keeps growing

    The human population at the global level has been growing exponentially over time (Box 2: Exponential growth). The absolute number of humans has continued to increase, and the distribution of the population has changed, due to differing birth and death rates and the movement of people from one region to another.

    Australia’s population also continues to increase. The three factors which have the greatest impact on the population of any nation are birth rate (fertility), international migration and death rate (mortality rate).

    The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime. A TFR of 2.1 is considered to be the replacement rate, which is the fertility rate needed to keep the population stable if there is no net migration. Australia’s TFR in 2000 was 1.7. Most developed countries have TFRs below the replacement rate. The 2004 estimate of the world average TFR is 2.8, ranging from 1.2 to 8.

    Immigration adds to the Australian population in two ways: firstly, the immigrants themselves; and secondly, their Australian-born children (Box 3: Immigration and population growth). The contribution of net overseas migration to Australia’s population growth has averaged about 39 per cent for the past 25 years. This is projected to increase as the Australian fertility rate decreases.

    The age structure of a population can also contribute to its growth. A population with a large percentage of people in the child-bearing years (15-45) will continue to increase even if parents do not produce enough children to replace themselves. This is because there are a lot of young people yet to have children and a low number of old people who will die in the next few decades.

    Related site: Australian social trends – population
    Fertility, death rate and migration influence the size and structure of Australia’s future population.
    (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

    The combination of birth rate, migration and death rate affects both population size and the age profile. Australia’s population is steadily ageing. Over the next few decades in Australia, the number of people over 65 years of age is predicted to increase, and children will make up a smaller proportion of the population. Population ageing is mostly due to falling fertility rates and increasing life expectancy. An ageing Australian population has economic and social consequences.

     

    Our consuming passion

    Although some aspects of the Australian environment are in relatively good condition, Australia has many environmental problems: land degradation, endangered species, an increasing incidence of toxic algal blooms in our rivers, declining fish stocks, land clearing, air pollution, and vulnerable water supplies. There are more, but that will do for a start.

    Many environmental problems can be attributed to poor management techniques, policy failure or even feral animals. Such factors are largely independent of population, but the sheer number of people can also contribute to the problems.

    Consider, for example, the issue of consumption of material resources. On average, Australians have become steadily richer over the last few decades. As monetary wealth has increased, so has consumption. As a nation we now own more goods, use more energy, eat more processed food and have larger houses than ever before. All this consumption can create environmental problems. In effect, the populated areas of Australia are a sink for natural resources, draining the continent of nutrients, minerals and water. What we don’t consume we export, generating revenue which we use to buy consumer items from abroad. High levels of consumption help to deplete our store of resources, generate waste and increase the stress on the natural and agricultural environments.

    The environmental impact of copious consumption may not be confined to the local area. For example, the use of fossil fuels for energy in Australia can have an impact on global carbon dioxide levels and resulting environmental effects.

    When Australian consumption is viewed from a global perspective, we leave a large ‘ecological footprint’. The ecological footprint is a measure of how much productive land and water is needed to produce the resources that are consumed and absorb the wastes produced by a person or group of people. In 2001, there were 1.8 hectares of globally productive land per person. In 2004 Australia’s ecological footprint was calculated at 7.7 hectares per person (among the world’s top four resource-consuming nations) compared to the average global footprint of 2.2 hectares. Clearly, the consumption of resources at current levels is not sustainable.

    The limits to growth

    Some economists have described humans as the ‘ultimate resource’, because they can turn previously useless things into resources by being intelligent, adaptable and creative. Much of what we value and what makes life enjoyable is the product of human endeavour. However, something good can become a problem when in excess – when there is ‘too much of a good thing’.

    Factors such as population growth, population distribution and migration combine with high-consumption patterns to put stresses on the environment. There is a limit to the environment in terms of supply of resources and the ability to absorb waste products. Examples include the rate of tree growth for timber harvesting, the available fresh water for irrigation and human consumption, and the time required for the recycling of organic waste. Land degradation, loss of forest cover, pollution of water and air, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity are all occurring at a fast pace, and are evidence of the impact of an increasing population on the environment.

    Population and the environment

    The maximum number of a particular organism that an environment can maintain indefinitely is often referred to as its carrying capacity. How do we calculate the human carrying capacity of the Earth? We can’t do it by numbers alone because the relationship between population and environment is neither simple nor straightforward.

    To come up with the best solution, insights and ideas need to be drawn from many disciplines. These include, but are not limited to, environmental science, geology, economics, demography, human biology and health, geography and political science. The future of both the global human population and the global environment relies on bridging disciplinary divides.

    Boxes

    1. Trends in world population

    2. Exponential growth

    3. Immigration and population growth

    Related Nova topics:

    Australia’s threatened species

    Cleaner production – a solution to pollution?

    Feeding the future – sustainable agriculture

  • Waterspouts

    There seems to be some confusion over whether the
    Lennox Head event was a Tornado or waterspout.
     
    Wikipedia defines today’s event as a Tornadic waterspout.
     
    There are also non-tornadic waterspouts.
     
    See Wikipedia for full explanation of these events. They are very active around the
    Florida Keys area,which could cause problems in the oil-spill areas, though the oil
    slicks may inhibit this activity.
     
    Neville Gillmore.

    “Tornadic waterspouts”, also accurately referred to as “tornadoes over water”, are formed from mesocyclonic action in a manner essentially identical to traditional land-based tornadoes in connection with severe thunderstorms, but simply occurring over water.[7] A tornado which travels from land to a body of water would also be considered a tornadic waterspout.[8] Since the vast majority of mesocyclonic thunderstorms occur in land-locked areas of the United States, true tornadic waterspouts are correspondingly rarer than their fair-weather counterparts. However, in some areas, such as the Adriatic, Aegean and Ionian seas, tornadic waterspouts can make up half of the total number.[9]

     

     

     

  • Offshore energy report could dash defeatist arguments against the rocks

     

    I don’t know how to explain this unreasoning antagonism, but it casts an interesting light on the oft-repeated myth that it is environmentalists who are hostile to new technologies.

    But even the defeatists might be swayed by some of the findings of the Offshore Valuation report, just published by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc). It’s the first time anyone has tried to work out how much electricity could be produced by offshore renewables in the UK, and the results are fascinating.

    It examines only existing technologies – wind turbines with both fixed and floating foundations, wave machines, tidal range and tidal stream devices – and the contribution they can make by 2050.

    It accepts the usual constraints on offshore renewables: maximum water depths, the need to avoid dense shipping lanes and other obstacles, the various technical limits. Having applied these constraints, it finds that the practical resource for offshore renewables in the UK is 2,130 terawatt hours per year. This is six times our current electricity demand.

    Were we to use only 29% of the total resource, the UK would become a net electricity exporter. We would be generating energy equivalent to 1bn barrels of oil a year, which roughly corresponds to the average amount of North Sea oil and gas the UK has been producing over the past four decades.

    The report estimates that this industry would directly employ 145,000 people and produce annual revenues of £62bn. The construction effort would be roughly similar to building the North Sea oil and gas infrastructure: eminently plausible, in other words, if propelled by strong government policy.

    Were we to make use of 76% of the resource, the UK would become a net exporter of total energy. This is a tougher call, but not necessarily impossible: we’d be producing the equivalent of 150% of the energy output from UK’s peak production year for oil and gas (1999).

    It would mean building an average of 1,800 7.5 megawatt wind turbines every year. This is likely to stretch available manpower and construction capacity to the maximum, possibly beyond. But if enough investment is sunk into training, manufacturing and transport, the potential for creating both employment and income is enormous.

    The national grid, the report estimates, could accommodate about 50% variable renewables (power sources whose output depends on the weather) by 2050, as long as it had 34 gigawatts of backup capacity, energy storage and interconnectors linking it with the continent. This is both plausible and affordable. (Backup, to address another persistent myth, does not mean that the necessary thermal power plants are kept running all the time, just that they are available if needed.)

    There are some interesting implications. The UK could close its looming energy gap without using new sources of fossil fuels. It could do this without encountering the public hostility which often scuppers onshore windfarms.

    The best wind resources are mostly way out of the sight of land: the further out to sea you go, the stronger the wind becomes. A recent study shows that offshore windfarms can greatly increase the abundance of fish and crabs. (My hope is that the foundations could be connected by a web of steel cables, so the windfarms could function as marine reserves which never needed to be policed, as trawling through them would be impossible.)

    It also raises some important questions. If the offshore resource is so abundant and its deployment likely to cause hardly any political fuss, should we give up fighting for onshore windfarms? I don’t know, but I would appreciate your views.

    The report also makes me wonder whether, in the light of the damage they will do and of the far greater resources in the open sea, a Severn barrage and other tidal range devices are worth developing. The report suggests that the total practical resource for offshore wind is 1,939 terawatt hours per year, while the total tidal range resource is just 36 – and more expensive to deploy. Given the aggro tidal barrages will cause and the habitats they will destroy, are they worth developing?

    If any of this is to happen, the big decisions will need to be taken in the next year or so. So if ever you meet ministers or officials, ask them these questions. Have they read the report? What do they intend to do about it?

    monbiot.com

  • Overseas student numbers plummet

    Overseas student numbers plummet

    INTERNATIONAL student enrolments could drop by as much as 20 per cent next year, costing the economy up to $2 billion, as a consequence of the Rudd government’s “abrupt” tightening of immigration requirements and rising competition from North America and Britain for the lucrative student trade.

    Australia’s largest international student recruiter, IDP chief executive Tony Pollock, warned that changes to visa rules and priority skills were being made without giving the industry time to adjust. As a result, student demand had plummeted and the sector’s market standing was at risk.

    Mr Pollock said international placements into Australia across IDP’s network were down 37 per cent in April compared with a year ago, with current Indian demand almost wiped out. He said the Australian High Commissioner in India had told his staff there that the number of student visa applications it had on hand had crashed to just 200, compared with 8600 a year ago.

    The Australian was unable to verify these numbers with the commission. According to the Department of Immigration, its latest application figures for the nine months to the end of March 31 show that applications from Indian nationals are down 47 per cent at 23,601.

    Related Coverage

    Mr Pollock said further negative fallout was expected as more students were stranded by private college collapses caused by the downturn, and frustration grew among the thousands of students already enrolled in courses that have been culled from the Skilled Occupations List that provides a pathway for permanent residency. “My concern is that the numbers for the next 12 months are going to be severely impacted,” he said.

    Immigration Minister Chris Evans has tightened visa requirements and refocused on a narrower range of skills to clamp down on rorts and student exploitation.

    These included “visa factories” or dodgy courses in areas like hairdressing, cookery and community welfare that were focused solely on permanent residency.

    International education is Australia’s third-largest export earner behind coal and iron ore at about $17 billion a year. International student fees have become a key revenue source for universities following declines in government funding, accounting for more than 15 per cent of revenue.

    “The government’s desire to clean up the industry is entirely admirable, but they have made the changes so abrupt that there is little time for the kind of structural adjustment that is necessary in any big change of this nature, both for the students and the institutions,” Mr Pollock said.

    A spokesman for the Department of Immigration said the changes to a more “demand-driven” immigration program had been signalled as far back as early 2008.

    “The recently announced changes to skilled migration remove incentives for students to seek permanent residence through low-quality education courses, a practice that damaged the integrity of both the migration program and the education industry,” the spokesman said.

    A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said the sector was well placed to weather the changes.

    “The introduction of the new Skilled Occupations List will require a refocusing for some education and training providers, but we believe the market is well placed to continue as a world leader in international education services,” she said.

    International students are set to protest against changes to the skills list at a demonstration in Sydney on June 3. So far this year, 15 private colleges have already closed, affecting 3713 students, of which only 57 per cent have been placed at other providers or given refunds.

    The latest government figures show international student commencements rose by just 0.3 per cent in the nine months to March, compared with average growth rate over the past eight years of 8.6 per cent. While commencements at universities were up 11.8 per cent, they were down in the vocational and English language sectors that are key feeders for universities.

    32 comments on this story