Overpopulation

by Jeremy Cohen Hoffing May 2, 2010

By 2053, the United Nations projects that there will be more than 9 billion people on the planet, thanks to improvements in health care, disease eradication, and economic development. Specifically, the United Nations Population Division issued a report stating that “the world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion over the next 43 years, passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. If present health trends continue today, many of these new mouths are going to live ten years longer. This overpopulation is driving loss of arable land, deforestation, overfishing, water shortages, and air and water pollution. As the world population explodes, more and more pressure is put on the planet’s limited natural resources as nations compete for energy. At the same time, more and more people are moving up the economic ladder into the middle class. As they earn higher wages, these several hundred million new players will consume more things and produce more things. All these consumers will want to live an American lifestyle- having a car, a house, an air conditioner, a cell phone, a microwave, a toaster, a computer, an iPod- this enormous demand will devour tons of energy, natural resources, land, and water and will in turn emit lots of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The coupled effect of overpopulation and consumer behavior poses the greatest threat to the global environment. Imagine this scenario: Once the next billion people are all here, we gave each of them one sixty-watt incandescent light bulb. If we were to turn them all on at the same time, it’d be 60,000 megawatts. Let’s assume that these billion people will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we’re down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. We’ll still need around twenty 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants –just so the next billion people can turn a light on! Imagine how many power plants will be needed in the future and how much pressure we will put on the planet’s resources, when billions of people will turn on multiple light bulbs for much longer then 4 hours, and will consume and produce many more products.