Tilting at population windmills

For example, the Murray-Darling river system is undoubtably under strain - an environmental problem often mentioned by those who complain about population, although it is not directly related to population as such but to food production in the basin. But instead of trying for the impossible option - i.e. general depopulation - why not look at measures such as limiting the water-intensive activities of rice and cotton growing or place the control of the whole basin under the auspices of one authority?

That last point has caused some inter state pushing and shoving. If water supply for major cities is a problem then we still have the much-maligned desalination plants as a fall back, if there is no other way? Perhaps we can mandate dual-reticulation systems for new suburbs? (Recycling of water but with the treated waste water only being used for gardens or flushing toilets and the like.) These are just a few of the debates on adaptive strategies in which the anti-growth lobby can usefully become involved. Note that these are simply suggestions.

But what about the looming shortages of food and resources? The resources industry has long given up paying any attention to those who try to put absolute limits on the life of resources - coal, iron ore and so on - as opposed to limits on particular identified mineral deposits, or deposits in a region. One possible exception is that of oil. Some commentators have suggested that the production of easy-lift oil (that is, cheap oil in big reservoirs) should have peaked last year, with that peak likely to prompt a hurried switch to other types of oil (petroleum locked in sands and shale and the like). The “peak oil” controversy has been kicked around a lot by commentators, and for a time last year’s price spike was thought to confirm the warnings of the so called early peakers or early toppers, but then oil prices collapsed. Perhaps we should note a report issued last year by the US Government’s Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2008 which gives a range of expected prices for oil in the coming years. Prices are now well below the forecast scenario entitled “low world oil prices”.

As for food, there is very little in the official statistics to indicate any problems on the horizon. A glance at a report produced by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics entitled Factors affecting Australian agricultural exports (PDF 264KB) produced late last year shows that the terms of trade (prices received for food exports against prices paid for farm inputs) have consistently moved against Australian farmers (see graph page 10) since the 1940s. They have remained ahead of the game only by increasing productivity (see page 11) - and note that productivity has generally improved while the whole ecosystem is supposed to be under increasing strain.

None of this adds up to any limit, but what about the looming collapse of agriculture due to climate change? So far the gloomy forecasts for big temperature increases remain forecasts, and a glance at temperature records since the turn of the century - about when people started taking the forecasts seriously - show that temperatures have been trending down since then, not up. The most authoritative of the five centres that track global temperatures is the Hadley centre in the UK. For a handy graph of annual temperatures go here. If you want a higher resolution graph of temperatures since 1990, copy the data in the ASCII into a Excel spreadsheets. But isn’t this pause just a natural variation before temperatures start marching up again? Perhaps but everyone would feel more comfortable about accepting the forecasts if the actual physical system was not doing the exact opposite of what scientists expected.

As far as available resources are concerned, then, it is difficult to see just why we would want to limit population. There may be strains on the ecosystem but just what this has to do with population directly, rather than agriculture or perhaps industry is not clear. There is also no hint in existing statistics of a general decline in the agricultural system, let alone a collapse. So why do we need to “fix” the population problem by depopulating Australia?

In any case, as previously noted, the whole problem is moot because all the proposals by the anti-population push are sure fire election losers. This particular brand of doom-sayers would be better off pushing for adaptation, or finding other windmills to tilt at.