An Open Letter from Alan Kuper to 60 Minutes

Posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008

By ahedgehog

Alan Kuper is the head of CUSP 

60 Minutes

Your excellent program “The Age of Warming”, Jan. 20, made clear that Global Warming has been accelerating since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Your guests, like James Hanson, emphasized the urgency of taking action, the implication being that technological fixes were required.

I’m writing because of the serious omission in your program of human population growth as a causative factor.

The well-known Holdren-Ehrlich formula, I = PAT, states that Impact (I) on environment is due to population numbers (P) times Affluence (A) or consumption per capita times the harmfulness of the technologies (T) employed.

It has been called the “E =mc2 of the modern environmental movement” because of the destructive effect of the population explosion.

Taking the 18th Century as the start of the Industrial Revolution, when world population was considerably less than 1 billion, one finds that population, at over 6 billion, has indeed exploded , mostly during the 20th Century.

To slow Global Warming, both population and consumption will together have to be reduced to a sustainable level.

I hope in the near future 60 Minutes will devote a program to runaway human population growth. The focus should be the United States which is the largest contributor of greenhouse gases and whose population is growing at a far faster rate than that of any other large industrialized nation, a deadly combination. Yet the U.S. has no long-range population policy. Such a science-based policy is urgently needed.

Nothing is done about this in Washington because of the political difficulty of dealing with immigration and reproduction numbers.

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