Global warming and global poverty are two of the most important moral issues of the day. Writing in Newsweek, Robert J. Samuelson suggests that addressing one problem may exacerbate the other:

From 2003 to 2050, the world’s population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that’s too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world’s poor to their present poverty — and freeze everyone else’s living standards — we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

More than 20,000 people die every day of malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, diarrhea, and other diseases linked to extreme poverty, according to the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty. It’s unclear how many people have died because of global warming, though catastrophes linked to the rise in temperatures — tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes — have taken a dramatic toll in recent years.

China and India alone account for 40 percent of the world’s population. As their economies have swelled within the last decade or so, many of the world’s poor have been lifted out of poverty. Both countries still have large swaths of poverty and stark inequality, but their good economic fortune in recent years is good news — except when it comes to global warming. China, Samuelson points out, “builds about one coal-fired power plant a week.”

Before we blame China and India and other rapidly industrializing countries for our global warming problem, let’s put things in perspective: The richest nations — the United States, European Union, and Japan — produce the most greenhouse gases. The United States, in fact, is by far the worst culprit. It has just 5 percent of the world’s population, and yet produces a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. In a way, the rich nations have had freedom to pollute so much because the rest of the world can’t afford a carbon dioxide-heavy lifestyle of disposable products, single-person transportation, and comfortable indoor climates.

That is changing. Populous countries like China and India are rapidly industrializing, and their carbon dioxide emissions are growing. The world’s population as a whole has been exploding in the last few decades, with a frightening upward momentum that seems to track global warming. The world can’t sustain so many people using so much pollution-producing energy.

Ironically, one of the best ways to clamp down on population growth is by alleviating poverty. Poor countries tend not to educate their girls, and this, in turn, contributes to high fertility rates — in these countries, Sachs writes, “the woman’s role is seen mainly as child rearing, and her lack of education means that she has few options in the labor force.” It is no surprise that affluent countries with widespread education have low fertility rates (in fact, dangerously low in Japan and Western Europe), while the world’s poorest nations are the areas of greatest population growth.  

As I see it, the most sensible and moral solution would be to cut down global poverty — thus cutting down the global population explosion — and at the same time launch an international effort to reduce greenhouse emissions and develop mechanisms for cleaning the atmosphere of these heat-trapping gases. Samuelson argues that the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts by politicians to diminish pollution are nothing but “grandstanding” and that the real problem is an “engineering problem.” Yet, he doesn’t seem to appreciate that any serious attempt to deal with the engineering problem — the kind of environmental “Manhattan Project” that Thomas Friedman talks about to develop energy alternatives — will need public consciousness and political will to bring about. The Kyoto Protocol may be flawed, but it is a step in the direction of facing inconvenient truths and acting upon them.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen