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28 May 07
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Population and Climate Change
A “Malthusian” theory about the relationship between population growth and the environment suggests that as populations grow, they will strip their resources leading to famine, hunger and environmental degradation.
As detailed further in this site’s section on population, that is an oversimplification and has largely shown not to be true. Instead, it has been factors such as politics and economics (i.e. how we use our resources and for what purpose) that has determined environmental degradation or sustainability.
For example, the world’s wealthiest 20% (i.e. the rich countries) consume approximately 80% of the world’s resources, while the rest of humanity shares the other 20% of resource consumed, as noted in the consumption section of this web site.
In regards to climate change, countries with large populations such as China and India have not been the countries contributing greenhouse gases for the decades that has been required to trigger climate change, as noted further above.
While in total amounts their emissions might be high (China is second largest emitter after the United States, for example), per person, their emissions are significantly smaller as noted earlier.
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as countries such as China, India and Brazil grow in prosperity, there will be large populations with purchasing power, consuming more goods and services, thus making more demands on the planet.
Indeed, many environmentalists have constantly noted that if such countries were to follow the style of development that the rich countries used and emulate them, then our planet may not be able to cope much longer.
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researchers have found that depending on what variables you factor in, the planet can support an extremely large population, or an extremely small one. These ranges are ridiculously wide: from 2 billion to 147 billion people! Why such variance? It depends on how efficiently resources are used and for what purpose (i.e. economics).
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