Population, Global Warming, and Environmental Degradation in the Aftermath of Pandemic:

How Political Paralysis Leads to Climate Policies that Address Symptoms Rather than Causes of Global Environmental Degradation

Robert Hardaway

 

ABSTRACT: The Coronavirus that swept the world in 2020 provides a path for reflection and a unique lens from which to view the environmental impact of population growth. In addressing global environmental degradation, policies that confuse symptoms with underlying causes have led to wasteful, ineffective, and self-defeating programs and agendas. In a single lifetime, an inexorably expanding human race, quadrupling from just over two billion in 1950 to eight billion in 2022, has expanded to 83 percent its ruthless hegemony over earth's Ice-free land area for its own use. In the process, it has mindlessly exterminated sixtynine percent of all wildlife on Earth. Even as the relatively meaningless rate of human expansion slightly declines, the raw number of humans ravaging the earth's limited resources continues to expand by the billions. The current political divide and paralysis explain the policy of addressing only one of the many symptoms of environmental degradation, such as global warming, while ignoring so many others, including the loss of biodiversity-all while perversely ignoring population expansion as the underlying cause of all these symptoms. Population deniers within each wing of the political divide, including the business, governmental, and academic communities, have their own Ideological reasons for denying the effect of population on the environment for fear of compromising their ideological, religious, or cultural views.

‘Too many greens are not just ignorant of science, they hate science. They are like some over-anxious mother figure who is so concerned about small risks, that she ignores the real danger... I wish they would grow up and focus on the real problem: how can we feed, house, and clothe the (everexpanding) human race without destroying all other creatures.’

James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia, THE GUARDIAN (27 July 2022, 11:54 PM).