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Why Abortion Isn’t Green

A friend once asked me, “Why are you an environmentalist?” In essence, he was asking me why I cared so much. Of all the issues to be passionate about in life, why the environment?

I wasn’t sure how to answer him at first. I could have replied with any one of a hundred reasons. I thought about mentioning global warming, or cancer villages, or rainforest deforestation, or even oil spills. I had so many reasons that it felt impossible to answer the question with a single sentence.

But eventually, I decided to keep it simple. I told him that I was an environmentalist because I cared about protecting people.

In the end, I wasn’t an environmentalist because I cared that much about nature in itself. Preserving the earth’s ecosystems as its own end goal isn’t worth getting passionate about — but protecting people is.

Unfortunately, many environmentalists don’t share the same motivation. In their zeal to protect our planet’s beautiful ecosystems, they have forgotten the humane motivations behind their work. Instead of protecting people, they advocate that we kill them instead — in the form of abortion — to lower our environmental footprint (1).

They think that by having more children, we will only place greater pressure on the earth’s ecosystems. If we could only limit the birth rate, there would be fewer people alive to pollute, which would lower overall greenhouse gas emissions. Any method of population control, including killing the unborn, is a noble cause for the sake of the environment.

The Bible speaks so clearly against abortion that it leaves no room for debate. Even when a fetus is still in his mother’s womb, God considers him to be a human. As it says in one poem:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:13-15)

From the moment of conception, we human beings bear the likeness of God’s image. Human life has sanctity — no one is allowed to arbitrarily take life away. As it says in the Bible: You shall not murder (Exodus 20:13). Terminating the life of another human, no matter how young or how small, regardless of the noble environmental intentions, is still murder.

The irony with abortion is that it doesn’t really solve any environmental crisis. In fact, we have many reasons to suspect that more abortions will simply increase our net environmental footprint.

The underlying root cause of environmental crises is overconsumption, not overpopulation. In the past, hundreds of millions of people inhabited planet earth without causing any of the environmental crises we face today. There were no problems with carbon emissions, landfills, e-waste, smog, or shrinking oil reserves. So clearly, these problems aren’t caused by overpopulation alone. It takes a short-sighted, modernized, Western culture to produce such catastrophes on a global scale.

A country’s population actually has very little to do with its levels of pollution. That’s because not all people pollute equally. The amount of pollution a person generates is roughly proportional to his wealth, since money represents control over natural resources. 80% of the world’s global income is controlled by the hands of 20% of the earth’s population. These wealthy 20%, located mostly in Western countries, are responsible for the vast majority of oil consumption, e-waste, and global warming. The remaining 80% of mankind survive on less than $10 each day; they are simply too poor to do much harm.

Ironically, it’s precisely those countries with low birth rates that are causing the most environmental damage. These nations tend to be wealthier and have stronger consumer cultures. Think of it like this: A single wealthy suburban American can produce more pollution than a hundred African slum-dwellers combined. The American lives in a McMansion, drives an SUV, takes cruise trips to Europe, eats fast food, and buys tablet computers. Slum-dwellers can’t really afford to do much besides buy food and water. And even when it comes down to basic essentials like water, we somehow manage to waste more per person as Americans than the rest of the world.

Fertility rate by country. Notice that the women in the Southern Hemisphere have lots of kids (3+ children per family) whereas women in the modern, Westernized nations in the Northern Hemisphere have far fewer children.

Carbon dioxide emissions per person per country. Notice that the most of our carbon emissions is coming from Western nations in the Northern Hemisphere.

Average daily water use per person by country. The average American uses around 10-30 times as much water as the average person from the Third World.

Encouraging a Westernized, child-free lifestyle, along with abortion, will probably make environmental crises worse. This is because families with children tend to pollute less per person than families without children. If a married couple has ten kids, they will be forced to spend most of their income on basic essentials like shelter, food, and clothing. Even if they wanted to pollute, they wouldn’t be able to afford to — they have too many mouths to feed. However, a married couple with dual-income and no kids will have plenty of extra cash. They’re more likely to buy sports car, SUVs, mansions with private swimming pools, round-the-world plane tickets, cruise vacations, and wide-screen TVs.

Clearly, what matters is not the absolute number of people on the planet, but our per person rate of pollution. This rate is determined by how much a society is influenced by our Western, consumer culture.

Sadly, most policymakers still think that murder by the millions is the appropriate solution. They’re even trying to export this atrocity to the developing world. Yet at the same time that we advocate abortion, we’re also advocating the American Dream.

We have seen this policy fail before. Since the 1970s, China has followed a one-child policy, which fines families for having two or more children. As expected, China’s population growth is slowing. However, its carbon footprint is growing exponentially. Within a few decades, it may even surpass the USA!

This child-free, consumer culture may also catch on in India. Yes, abortion would result in fewer people, but expect the total pollution to skyrocket. If more Indians start driving cars, eating fast food, and buying consumer electronics, pollution will rise even as the population remains stagnant.

Ultimately, there are two ways to view our planet earth:

On one hand, there are those believe that earth’s resources are scarce. Life is nothing more than an endless competition for limited natural resources like food, water, land, and oil. To survive, it is necessary to steal, attack, and kill. Unborn children aren’t human beings — they’re just competitors. So the less children we have, the greater our own share. Ultimately, this belief is either fueled by ignorance or by sheer greed.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that the earth has plenty. If society would only plan for sustainable development, there would be enough to share. Wise stewardship, not competition, would be the solution to our present environmental crises. If we only gave up consumerism, it would be possible to house, feed, and clothe all of earth’s billions of people.

There’s no false dilemma between caring for the environment and caring for humanity. They are one and the same. After all, that’s why I’m a Greenimalist — so that our future children can enjoy the earth for decades to come.

Abortion is murder, plain and simple. However, most environmentalists are willing to consider it. Grist, for example, consistently advocates this atrocity. These environmentalists forget that the reason we protect the environment is to protect people, which include the unborn.
Photo credits: tonrulkens, CC BY-SA. PlatypeanArchcow, public domain. Dbachmann, CC BY-SA. Date 360, United Nations Human Development Report 2006.

Our Future Water Crises

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In the past few years, we’ve made great strides in energy-efficiency. With climate change entering the mainstream, people are starting to drive less, carpool more, and take out their old bicycles. It has helped us to save money, spur our economy, protect our forests, and reduce our dependence on oil.

Despite our progress in energy-efficiency, this is no time to rest on our laurels. It’s actually a cause for great concern. Subtly but surely, sustainable living is being reduced to nothing more than the single issue of reducing carbon emissions. Our society talks about carbon dioxide as if greenhouse gas management is all that there is to caring for the earth. Environmental protection, however, means so much more than not burning gasoline.

One vital issue that has been sorely neglected is water conservation. Very few people realize that water, much like gasoline, is a scarce resource that’s being depleted at unprecedented rates. In fact, water production may someday peak, just as oil will. As of today, the world has managed to increase water production to temporarily meet rising demands. In the future, however, water supply may hit an apex and then slowly decline. The world has already seen how declining oil reserves can hurt economies and increase political instability. But the situation will be far worse with water, since without this essential resource, drought and famine can devastate entire civilizations.

The situation already looks dire. In America, about one quarter of all irrigated land relies on the Ogalla aquifer. The precious groundwater from this aquifer is vital to agriculture in the Midwest: we use it to raise livestock and grow wheat, corn, and soybeans. In the last two decades, groundwater levels have declined at alarming rates, with the water table declining by over 30 feet in some areas. New wells must be drilled ever deeper to extract groundwater that is quickly running out.

Water shortage is a looming crisis for the rest of the world, too. Even though India is not a dry country, it struggles to supply enough water for drinking and agriculture for its population of over one billion. In more arid regions, prolonged drought can force communities to ration water. In the last few years, Australia has been forced to undergo strict water rationing to avoid permanently damaging the Murray-Darling basin. Farms in this region have been forced to shut down, and local communities have even been forced to limit showering in efforts to conserve water.

Global water crises are only getting worse. Consumer culture is putting an ever greater strain on the earth’s limited supply by increasing unnecessary industrial use of water. Global warming also threatens to change rainfall patterns, which will make the water situation more unstable. If climate change occurs, moist areas are likely to experience heavier rainfall, which will lead to flash floods. Dry areas, however, are prone to becoming even drier, which may lead to deserts.

As water supplies continue to shrink, less water will be available for agriculture. This food scarcity will result in a prolonged spike in food prices. This could be catastrophic for the poor, who spend much of their income on food alone. Climate change, combined with underground water depletion, could devastate our agriculture and harm our economy. Unfortunately, water shortage is an urgent environmental crisis that the public is failing to grasp.

To appreciate the importance of water, it helps to understand the water cycle. It all begins when the sun heats saltwater from the ocean. As water evaporates, it forms water vapor which can condense to form clouds. If these clouds move over land, water droplets can precipitate as rain, which can fall on vegetation or the bare ground. Rain that hits vegetation provides the water for photosynthesis, a biological reaction that helps plants grow. Water that hits bare ground can run-off the surface to pool in larger bodies of water, which helps forms streams and rivers.

Much of the water that falls on the ground surface will evaporate once again to reform water vapor. However, some of the rain water can also infiltrate into the soil, where it can collect as groundwater. In the diagram, the water table is the surface at which all sediment beneath it is completely filled with water. The height of the water table can increase or decrease, depending on factors like the rate of rainfall. Groundwater doesn’t always stay underground permanently. It can naturally resurface at lower elevations to form springs on the surface, or it can be extracted by man-made wells.

All of these processes — evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and infiltration — are occurring constantly to form the water cycle.

Although the earth has plenty of water, most of it is not fit to drink (the water is not potable). Most of the earth’s water is saltwater, which cannot be used unless it is desalinated by expensive, energy-intensive processes. Less than 3% of the earth’s remaining water is freshwater, but unfortunately, even these sources are often undrinkable. Most freshwater is frozen in glaciers; of the remaining freshwater, much of it has been tainted by pollution. In the past, rivers were often contaminated with biological pollution including human feces, which transmitted disease such as typhoid and cholera. Today, however, modern pollutants involve chemicals like mercury, lead, and pesticides. Pollution can make it difficult, if not impossible, to safely purify water for drinking.

There are many methods to collect water. One method is to catch rain as it falls. Using rain catchment systems (1), it’s possible to store rain for drinking during dry seasons. In the same fashion, farmland in moist areas might rely entirely on rain instead of using irrigation to grow their crops.

Besides rainfall, we also turn to rivers and springs for water. Unfortunately, a civilization’s demand for water usually exceeds what’s available on the surface. That’s because people are generally terrible at conservation. Besides satisfying our basic needs for food, drink, and hygiene, we like to indulge in water-intensive luxuries. Modern man enjoys living in deserts, wasting food, watering lawns, taking long baths, and owning private swimming pools. Given our insatiable appetite, surface water just won’t cut it.

To deal with this water shortage, we often build underground wells that tap into the ground water. There is about sixty times more groundwater than there is surface water, so in the short run, this vastly improves our supply. Our wells extract water from underground aquifers, which have collected infiltrated rainwater through the centuries. Because these wells pull from a large reservoir, they can supply far more water than is normally replenished through rainfall.

But cheap water is a mixed blessing. Whenever a scarce resource appears to be virtually unlimited, we tend to waste it with devastating consequences. In only a few years, it’s possible to squander groundwater that took centuries to deposit. Usually this groundwater is not allowed to replenish naturally, which results in shrinking reservoirs each year. This can result in the formation of deserts and massive water shortages in the future.

This environmental catastrophe can lead to human catastrophes like economic collapse and even water wars. What makes these crises so tragic is that they’re mostly preventable. Our planet has plenty of water for all if we chose to build a culture centered around sustainable development.

We must act conserve and we must start now. Time, along with our water supply, is quickly running out.

Here’s a video of a simple, off-grid rainwater barrel that’s worth checking out. Collecting rainwater is a great idea, mostly because it helps the average homeowner to appreciate the scarcity of water.
Photo credit in order: Schilling 2, CC BY-NC-ND. Kbh3rd, CC BY-SA.
United States Geological Survey, public domain.
US Geological Survey, slight modification to make words look clearer.
National Department of Agriculture Rural Inforeach, PDF file.

The Jevons Paradox

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Energy-efficiency has become the talk of the town. Scientists, marketers, journalists, and politicians alike are showering praises on the new technologies that promise to revolutionize our planet. From zero-emission electric cars, to smart electric grids, to green laptops, high-tech sustainable solutions seem to promise the world a brighter future (1). It’s a positive message at heart: to solve the world’s energy problems, all we need is better engineering. And with many prototypes near completion, who wouldn’t be excited?

The economists aren’t, for one. These contrarians are quick to point out that most attempts towards energy-efficient technology have proved utterly futile. History has repeatedly shown that energy-efficiency rarely leads to net energy reduction. In fact, quite frequently, efficiency improvements makes things worse by actually encouraging a net waste in energy. This counter-intuitive effect is known as the Jevons Paradox.

This energy-efficiency paradox was first described in the mid-1800s by a British economist named William Stanley Jevons. During this era, coal was the fuel that powered industrialization in Britain. Britain was blessed with this valuable resource: geologists estimated that it had around 90 billion tons of natural coal reserves (2). This ample supply of cheap energy provided the power for the nation’s vast array of steam engines. These engines, in turn, powered the manufacturing industries that made the British Empire wealthy.

Over time, Britain’s economy became increasingly dependent on coal. Since 1770, the amount of coal being consumed each year was growing exponentially. Assuming continued exponential growth, England would exhaust its vast coal reserves in the next 100 years — not good at all for the powerful British Empire. Engineers, therefore, were racing to produce machines with better energy-efficiency. If only efficiency increased, they believed, we could reduce the demand for coal. Jevons, however, knew better.

In 1865, Jevons published The Coal Question, which investigated the relationship between efficiency and total energy use. His results were absolutely startling: energy-efficiency was worse than useless — it was positively harmful. Historical records showed that the more efficient steam engines became, the more coal Britain ultimately consumed. Better technology within the 18th century had actually caused coal consumption to grow exponentially.

This paradox is best illustrated by example. Suppose the average car gets 25 miles to a gallon of gasoline, with each gallon costing $4. Using hybrid electric technology, engineers could create an improved car that gets 50 miles using a single gallon. As a result of this breakthrough, the improved car could produce the same amount of work using half the amount of gasoline.

The economics, however, look different from the consumer’s point of view. To the consumer, this improvement in efficiency has effectively halved the price of transportation. Whereas it used to cost $4 to travel 25 miles, now it only costs $2. Now that transportation is much cheaper, it’s possible to drive more than ever before. Our driver can now afford to do more than just commute to work; he can take cross-country road trips every month, if he so pleases.

Suppose our driver originally burned 10 gallons of gasoline each week. With new technology, he can save half the fuel, or 5 gallons of gasoline, each week. Unfortunately, our driver decides to take extra road trips, and drives an extra 150 miles each week. As a result, he ends up burning 8 gallons instead of 5. That’s 3 gallons more than what he could potentially have saved, had he kept his driving habits constant. We say that the rebound effect is 60%, since that is the percentage of potential savings that was forfeited (3).

At this point, it still looks like energy-efficiency could be of some use. After all, a 60% rebound effect still implies that 40% of the potential savings were retained. Isn’t it better to have our driver conserve 2 gallons of gas, rather than no gas at all? But here’s where it gets peculiarly disturbing: the rebound effect frequently exceeds 100%. Returning to our analogy, a rebound effect greater than 100% would means our driver is now burning more than 10 gallons of gas each week. If our sustainable car suffered from 120% rebound (3), that means 11 gallons of gas are burned instead of 10. This backfiring is the paradox that Jevons observed with steam engine technology.

What exactly happens to all of the potential savings?

For one, as machines become more efficient, engineers tend to add more features and provide better performance. Hybrid-electric cars might accelerate faster, become roomier and heavier, and include more electronics. Those extra creature comforts squander all the potential savings in fuel technology.

Drivers might also suffer from greenwashing. Let’s suppose our driver is environmentally-conscious. When he used to drive his old clunker, he’d feel guilty about wasting gasoline. But when he drives a zero-emission hydrogen car, he does so with clear conscience. After all, most people don’t stop to realize that hydrogen fuel requires energy to produce, which currently still uses coal to produce (4). Besides, he’s already spent thousands of dollars going green; what’s a little extra driving here and there?

But perhaps most importantly, average consumers simply don’t care about conservation. Many passengers take the bus each day, not because they care about the environment, but because gasoline is expensive. By increasing the fuel efficiency of cars, the effective price of driving decreases. This provides the average passenger with extra encouragement to drive instead of taking public transit.

Even non-driving activities contribute to the rebound effect. If our driver spends less money on gasoline because of fuel efficiency, he now has more disposable income. He might choose to use that extra cash for a cruise to the Bahamas or a plane ticket to Europe, activities which both waste tons of gasoline.

Altogether, these effects usually ensure that the rebound effect is greater than 100%.

The Jevons Paradox can be quite disheartening, especially after you realize how often it occurs.

Architects, for example, are now wasting more energy than ever before using energy-efficient LED lighting. They do this by plastering buildings with LED lights to create gigantic lighting displays (5). The buildings are lit all night, 7 days a week. Such lighting was previously too expensive using traditional lightbulbs, but energy-efficient LEDs now make it cost-effective.
As another example, refrigeration may result in increased energy usage. The benefit of refrigeration is that, by preventing food spoilage, consumers can save electricity the electricity used in food production. However, refrigeration inadvertently encourages us to buy too much food. Today, the average American throws away 40% of the food he purchases — you could hardly call that saving electricity (6).
Energy-efficient heating and cooling may have resulted in increased electricity demand. The problem is that energy-efficient air conditioners and heaters encourage people to leave these systems on longer. Lower costs might even encourage the average home-buyer to buy a bigger house. Any potential savings are thus wasted cooling and heating extra space (7).

The Jevons Paradox makes it clear that technology by itself can’t solve our present energy crisis. If new innovations aren’t accompanied by a cultural shift towards conservation, they are likely to waste more energy than ever before.

The trouble with sustainable living is that it requires a total lifestyle change. Life apart from consumerism can be difficult to imagine, so we resist. It’s much easier to just keep searching for the next big thing. We want to be environmentally-friendly, but we don’t want to give up our cheap energy, shopping sprees, fast cars, quick profits, and junk food. So we’ll be sure to see plenty of paradoxes for years to come.

These technologies are an improvement, but they’re still not sustainable. Zero-emissions cars aren’t really zero-emissions; they still require electricity, which is produced by burning coal. Smart grids will save some energy, but we will just waste the savings by powering more gadgets. Lastly, even the greenest laptop will produce some e-waste, since electronics aren’t biodegradable.
From Wikipedia’s summary of The Coal Question.
If he had the potential to save 5 gallons, but only saved 2, then he wasted 3 out of 5 gallons, which gives 3÷5 = 60% rebound effect. An 120% rebound effect is equivalent to 120% = 6÷5. In other words, he had the potential to save 5 gallons, but actually wasted 6 more.
Physics Professor David McKay writes that the Hydrogen 7, the hydrogen-powered car made by BMW, requires 254 kWh per 100 km – 220% more energy than an average European car. In other words, hydrogen cars are worse than conventional cars.
Low-Tech Magazine explores LEDs and energy-efficiency paradox.
From an abstract in The New Yorker.
One writer argues that efficient heating and cooling has led to a rise in McMansions.
Photo by nugefishes, CC BY; our own picture.