Earth 2100

Did anyone else catch Earth 2100 on ABC last week?

We DVR’d it after hearing it was a worthwhile and informative watch, and I finally trudged my way through it this past weekend.

Intended to be a “worst case scenario”, it starts in the present day (2009) with people doing the things we do, like recycling, studying alternative fuels, going green, etc., all while still driving cars, having babies, eating  meat, and basically living life.

Then it take us through the next ninety years of climate change, population pressure, and resource depletion which lead to economic collapse, massive human death, and a new dark age.

Cities destroyed. Food shortages. Wide spread pandemics. Life as we know it… GONE!

Bleak, right?

The solutions advocated by the documentary are centrally controlled global resource management and sharply reducing population growth. I’m all for conservation. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Awesome. I’m willing to do my part, but apparently that’s not enough.

So, global population control? Based on whose standards?

While our global population is growing, it isn’t due to birth rates. It’s due to longer life expectancies.

The message I got from the whole thing is that in spite of all of our efforts to be “green”, unless someone tells Nana that her time is up, there’s not much we can do about saving the Earth.

Did you watch it? What did you think?

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Here are ten reasons why population control is NOT the answer to climate change…

Blaming too many people for driving climate change is like blaming too many trees for causing bushfires.

The real cause of climate change is an economy locked into burning fossil fuels for energy and unsustainable agriculture. Unless we transform the economy and our society along sustainable lines as rapidly as possible, we have no hope of securing an inhabitable planet, regardless of population levels.

Population-based arguments fail to admit that population levels will impact on the environment in a very different way in a zero carbon emissions economy. Making the shift to renewable energy — not reduction in human population — is the most urgent task we face.

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