With the COP 28 only a little more than a week away, the University of British Columbia held a press conference about key issues. In the breakout session, Cortes Currents asked Dr Simon Donner a former COP delegate and professor from the Department of Geography and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, two questions.
- Many people on Cortes and Quadra Islands believe in the Overshoot theory. What do you say to people who believe that Climate Change is a symptom of a much larger problem: there are too many of us living on a planet with rapidly diminishing resources?
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Rev. Thomas Malthus, author of ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). – Photo above was taken from John Linnel’s portrait of Rev. Malthus, reworked by the Fotowerkstatt and transferred to Wikimedia by BokicaK (Public Domain)
Dr Donner referred to this as a Malthusian argument: “That we’re using up the world’s resources and its contributing to the changes we’re seeing in the atmosphere, the climate and the environment. I hear everybody. I think it’s a very tempting argument but actually, if you really dig into the numbers, it doesn’t really work because population is not the main driver of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, it’s consumption.”
“We could have a huge population on the planet; we can have the population we do on the planet without consuming as much and without consuming it in the same way.”
“The potential exists to transition to renewable energies so we would not be producing fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions in the way we do.”
“As was being pointed out earlier by one of my colleagues,* in many parts of the world it is cheaper not just to generate electricity through solar power and wind power. It’s actually cheaper to build new solar and wind than it is to keep running your coal burning power plant because the technology is so much better.”
“Of course, you can’t live without any footprint on the planet. So anything we’re going to do is going to use up some bit of planetary resources but the point is about consumption and the best data I can point you for that was in this year’s UN Emissions Gap Report.”
“It showed that the wealthiest 10% of the world’s population, I’m not talking about just Canada, but in the world, are responsible for almost half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s 46% to 49%.”
“The point being that the issue is consumption. If we take the greenhouse gas emissions from Canada and divide it by the number of people in Canada, we emit nine times as much as the average person in India. It’s tempting in our part of the world to look at other parts of the world, look at their population growing and say, it must be the population, but actually you’d have to add almost 10 people in India to equal the impact of one Canadian.”
“If people want to fight this from a resource standpoint or an energy standpoint, I get it, but it should be about the resources we’re consuming in the developing world, not about population around the world.”
2. Cortes Currents: What should we look for at COP 28?
Simon Donner: “COP 28 Is three different things at once.”
“It’s the actual diplomatic negotiations. You can hear about that. There’s the trade show side of it, where it’s just all these different things surrounded by real climate solutions, mitigation, adaptation, et cetera, that are going to get talked about. And then there’s all the sort of side agreements and things that will get announced from the actual negotiations.”
“I’d say the main thing to be paying attention to is what happens with the language around phasing out fossil fuels because it is very controversial that this climate summit is being held in the United Arab Emirates, right in a fossil fuel producing emirate, and how will that affect the decision?”
“The Presidency of the COP doesn’t necessarily dictate the decision, but it can steer the conversation a little bit and so I would say watch for that.”
“The second thing I think people should really watch for is what’s going to happen around these questions about climate change financing.”
“One of the main goals of this COP is to figure out what is going to be the new goal for the world in terms of mobilizing funding to help the developing world or the global south respond to climate change. What makes it complicated is you’ve got various things that have to be tackled all together at once. One of them is providing money to help the developing world transition to renewable, low carbon forms of energy. So mitigation.”
“Number two is how much money is going to be provided for adaptation because when we set finance goals in the past, it just said ‘money to respond to climate change.’ It didn’t say how much should go to mitigation, versus adaptation. If the developed world, Canada, the United States, et cetera, are largely responsible for the problem, we should be providing money not just to help people reduce emissions in the developing world. We should be providing money to help them adapt to the impacts of the climate change that we’re mostly the cause of.”
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
“So there’s those two things, mitigation and adaptation
“The third one is, what about this idea of compensation or reparations? Last year in Egypt, there was an agreement to try to come up with funding for what is called loss and damage. It’s this idea of reparations for past climate impacts and I think it’ll be really interesting to follow whether the world could come to some sort of an agreement on this. There’s some big players, including the United States, that are effectively saying ‘we will never pay reparations,’ but there’s a lot of countries around the world that are saying ‘we’re not going to agree on anything else unless you agree to that.’ So I think it’s going to be a real stumbling block.”
Links of Interest:
- A Climate Scientist talks about the good news that came out of COP 26 (previous interview with Dr Donner) – Cortes Currents
- The ‘elephant’ of fossil fuels is not even in the room at UN climate summit – repost about COP 26 from Canada’s National Observer
- COP 26 is a waste of time, says Weyler – (interview with one of Cortes Island’s best known advocates of the overshoot theory.) – Cortes Currents
- The Quadra Project: Overshoot
*Cortes Currents also asked this during the Question Period, but did not have permission to record everyone’s answers.
Top image credit: Dubai Creek Harbour – Photo by Hari K Kava, of HKavaPhotography, via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
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Roy, Donner is entirely wrong that the observations of overshoot comprise a “Malthusian argument,” since Malthus was talking specifically about population growth versus fixed land area, and in any case Malthus was not entirely wrong (but didn’t see fossil fuels coming). Secondly, Donner appears to think that greenhouse gases are the only significant symptom of overshoot, a huge mistake. Finally, he appears to think that 8 billion people can simply “consume differently,” which may be imaginable theoretically, but which has proven nearly impossible to implement on any significant scale. He sounds not at all like a serious biophysical scientist, but more like a typical climate change, single-issue sort of chap.
Overshoot is a well known ecological condition, common among successful species, and it is always a product of BOTH population and consumption. Nature teaches animals to reproduce and consume, but does not teach us when to stop, so overshoot is common. Humans have clearly — according to the published data — exceeded (overshot) 6 of the 9 significant planetary boundaries (nutrient flow disruption, fresh water loss, etc.). To confirm this, your readers may want to see “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries” by Katherine Richardson from University of Copenhagen, Johan Rockstrom from Potsdam Institute in Germany, and 17 other international bio-physical scientists, in Science Advances journal.
(https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458#:~:text=Abstract,loading%20regionally%20exceeds%20the%20boundary.)
I heard from another renowned ecology professor emeritus at UBC today, who read this and wrote to me that “I had difficulty in restraining my gag reflex after reading Donner’s recitation of the mainstream mantra.”
Donner is repeating pop pseudo-science. Sorry, but human overshoot is real, and denial is not going to help.
All the best, Rex Weyler.
Speaking as a non-scientist, I can only see generalities.
I am familiar enough with wood products to see the ‘overshoot’ in our forests as we continue to harvest younger and younger trees. I was working in a sawmill during the 1970s, and saw the sawyers reaction to the increased volume of second growth logs (which have a higher proportion of sapwood and wider rings). The sawyer I most often worked with used to push them off his table and storm out of the mill. That was almost 50 years ago. I look at some of the giant trees in historic photographs, knowing they have largely disappeared. I look at the satellite images that show the global devastation of our forests, which includes wide swathes of BC.
I know that our oil supplies are running out. The sweet spots of a century ago are gone. Areas like the oil sands, which were once considered too costly to develop, are now at the forefront of the industry.
As the population on Cortes continues to increase, I am concerned about our water table (a possible local overshoot). I am told that there has been a well on our property for decades and it has never run dry. In the past few years, it has run low every summer and we have switched over to rainwater for our toilets. This summer the well stopped recharging from early July until early September. We were okay because I installed a water cistern, which carried us through the drought.
I am aware there are ways to restore the natural water balance, to some extent anyway. https://cortescurrents.ca/environmental-design-learning-to-work-with-the-natural-water-balance/ But the examples I am aware of seem to be isolated, I do not know what is possible and I do not even hear this being discussed on a local level.
This reminds me of the debate about fracking in a more environmentally friendly manner. You can ensure that fracking wells are at least 2,000 feet back from private wells. You can monitor the groundwater for two years in advance of any drilling, so that it will be obvious if any future groundwater issues are related to fracking and then deal with the issue (rather than have endless arguments over the cause). https://cortescurrents.ca/the-strongest-fracking-rules-in-america/ You can reduce the number and scale of fracking quakes by using seismic imagery to look for faults in the earth prior to fracking https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/july/fracking-earthquakes-.html These things all seem theoretically possible, but where are they being done? And what about the methane emissions? The last time I checked carbon capture is an unproven technology.
You and Donner agree part of the problem is overconsumption.
I don’t know what his illustration about the average Canadian creating 9 times the emissions of the average person in India proves. According to the Hindustan Times, ‘only 1 in 12 Indian households have car.’ https://www.hindustantimes.com/car-bike/only-1-in-12-indian-households-have-car-mahindra-asks-netizens-for-conclusion-101672146176271.html According to the Hindu Businessline “Over 80 per cent of India’s young urban population in the age bracket of 22-29 years is living with parents” https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/real-estate/over-80-young-urban-indians-live-with-parents-survey/article9378537.ece Only 69% of India’s urban dwellers own their home https://indiahousingreport.in/outputs/data-tales/overview-of-urban-house-ownership-in-india/ We are obviously talking about a much lower standard of living than in Canada. Is that how we are supposed to address the problem of overconsumption? How long would that ‘fix’ work before a much poorer but also more numerously populated planet faced the same problems?
At the moment I find your argument about overshoot more convincing, but I only see the sweeping generalities and I want this debate to be in the open.