July 27, 2021--Too Many Toyotas

I posted something a couple of weeks ago about climate change, claiming, like Thomas Malthus, that unless we do something serious to reduce the earth's population there is no effective way to address the climate crisis. 

Too many people means we run out of resources in a hurry and along the way are destined to experience, as we are right now, a collapsing environment, pandemics, and mass deaths.

For a glimpse of how things are unfolding, I picked up Tom Friedman's slightly outdated The World Is Flat.

He is not my favorite reporter but occasionally gets things right. In this case what is happening in China as it urbanizes while the population continues to grow.

Here's something from Friedman that a makes things vivid. And, sorry, scary--

"Another enormously powerful threat to the flattening of the world is on the horizon.  It is not a human resources constraint or a disease, but a natural resources constraint.  If millions of people from India, China, Latin America, and the former Soviet Empire, who for years had been living largely outside the flat world, all start to walk into the flat-world platform--each with his or her own version of the American dream of owning a car, a house, a refrigerator, microwave, and a toaster-we are at best going to experience a serious energy shortage.  At worst, we are going to set off a global struggle for natural resources and junk-up, heat-up, garbage-up, smoke-up, and devour up our little planet faster than at any time in the history of the world.  Be afraid.  I certainly am.

"The resources consumed and the waste put out by each person varies greatly around the world, being highest in the first world and lowest in the third world.  On the average, each citizen of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan consumes thirty-two times more resources, such as fossil fuels, and puts out thirty-two times more waste, then do inhabitants of the third world.  But low-impact people are becoming high-impact people.

"Indeed, the flattening of the world is making low-impact people into high-impact people faster, in greater numbers, and with greater impacts than at any other time in the history of the world.  

"I [Friedman] asked Michael Zhao, a young researcher in the New York Times's Beijing bureau to check on the increase in the number of motor vehicles in China.  Michael wrote back to me the following:  

"Hi Tom, I hope this email finds you well.  On your question about how many cars are added each day in Beijing, I did some research on the Internet and found that car sales in Beijing for April 2004 were 43,000--24.1% more than the same period the previous year.  So that is, 1,433 cars were added daily to Beijing.  New car sales this month were 30,000 or 1,000 cars each day added to the city.  The total car sales, new and used cars, from January to April 2004 were 165,000, that is about 1,375 cars added each day to Beijing over this period.  This data is from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Commerce.  The city's bureau of statistics has it that the total car sales in 2003 were 407,649, or 1,117 cars added each day."

You get the point. We're in trouble and will make it worse if we do not do a better job of controlling population growth. 

I urge you to put it high on your list of global concerns.