Authors: Al Gore
Increased per capita consumption by a larger and larger global population is pressing against the limits of some resources. As both human population and the global economy grow in size, we are not only consuming more natural resources to make products, we are also producing larger and larger streams of waste. According to a recent report from the World Bank, the per capita production of garbage alone from urban residents in the world is now 2.6 pounds per person every day; and
the total volume is projected to increase by 70 percent in a dozen years.
The cost of managing the garbage will almost double over the same period to
$375 billion per year—with most of the increase in developing countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, each one percent increase in national income produces
a .69 percent increase in municipal solid waste in developed countries.
And that’s just the garbage. When the waste associated with energy production, the making of chemicals, manufacturing, electronic goods, agricultural waste, and waste from the paper products industries are apportioned on a per capita basis among the seven billion people who consume the results of all these processes, the actual amount of waste
produced each day is more than the body weight of all seven billion people.
There is a thriving black market in the illegal disposal of waste—particularly shipments from developed countries to poor countries. In the European Union, exports of plastic waste—almost 90 percent of it to China—
increased by more than 250 percent in the last decade. The news media has focused on the enormous “garbage patch” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—made up mostly of plastic—but
much larger volumes are on land in millions of waste dumps.
Although there have been some laudable efforts by many companies and cities to increase the recycling of waste, the total volumes are overwhelming the current capacity for responsible disposal practices. For example, organic waste can be used to produce valuable methane, but due to inertia and an absence of leadership, so much organic waste is simply dumped in unimproved landfills that it
decomposes to produce 4 percent of all the global warming pollution each year.
The growing volumes of e-waste (waste associated with electronic products) have been the focus of increasing attention because of the
presence of highly toxic materials in the waste stream. And once again, even though recycling efforts are under way, the problem is still growing faster than the solution.
Toxic chemical and biological waste poses a particular challenge. During the 1970s and 1980s, I chaired and participated in a large number of congressional hearings on the dangers of toxic chemical waste. The tough laws that were enacted in the wake of those and other hearings have since been severely weakened by chemical industry lobbying of the U.S. Congress and executive branch. A recent U.S. study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified traces of 212 chemical wastes in the average American,
including pesticides, arsenic, cadmium, and flame retardants.
Flame retardants? Their presence in the tissues of Americans has an interesting backstory that provides another example of the imbalance of power in U.S. decision making and the dominance of corporate interests over the public interest. An exhaustive examination by the
Chicago Tribune
in 2012 demonstrated in detail how the cigarette industry corruptly influenced policymakers to legally compel the addition of toxic flame retardants to the foam inside most furniture in order to save lives that were being lost in thousands of fires started each year by
smokers who fall asleep and drop their lit cigarettes on a couch or chair.
A far more logical and less dangerous solution—one that had been proposed since the early part of the twentieth century—would have been to require the cigarette manufacturers to
remove
the chemicals they routinely add to cigarettes to keep them burning even when they are not being puffed. But the tobacco industry did not want to be blamed for the fires, and they worried that any inconvenience for smokers might hurt sales. So they came up with a corrupt scheme to buy
enough influence to require the addition of dangerous chemicals to most all furniture instead.
When the companies manufacturing the flame retardant chemicals began to understand how they benefited from this ruse, they joined in providing more money to support the tobacco companies’ scheme. The same lobbyist represented state fire officials and the chemical manufacturers—and remained secretly on the payroll of the tobacco industry. Meanwhile, children continue to breathe in the dust from the decaying flame retardants and scientists continue to link their
exposure with evidence of cancer, reproductive disorders, and damage to fetuses. And, by the way, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently
found that the flame retardants
added to the foam in the furniture didn’t work to cut down on house fires.
A few particularly dangerous chemicals, such as Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates (which are chemically similar to flame retardants), have been singled out for special attention by health experts, but the law enacted in 1976 to deal with such chemicals, the
Toxic Substances Control Act, has never been truly implemented. An estimated 83,000 chemicals are listed in the inventory of substances that should be tested, but the Environmental Protection Agency has required testing for only 200 of them, and has restricted usage of only 5. The chemical manufacturers are allowed to withhold most of the medically
relevant information about these chemicals from regulators, by claiming they are trade secrets.
T
HE SURGE IN
the development of agricultural and industrial chemicals following World War II was based in significant part on leftover stockpiles of unused nerve gas and munitions. (The inventor of poison gas in World War I
was also the inventor of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.) These new kinds of chemical compounds introduced more toxic forms of water pollution than in the past. In prior periods, water pollution had been dominated by fecal contamination causing typhoid and cholera. Although the latter problems have been largely solved in developed countries, waterborne diseases are still among the leading causes of death in developing countries, especially in
South Asia, Africa, and portions of the Middle East.
Indeed, pollution of rivers, streams, and groundwater aquifers is a serious problem contributing to water shortages in many areas of the world. The World Commission on Water for the Twenty-First Century, in which multiple United Nations agencies participate, reported in 1999 that “More than
one-half of the world’s major rivers are being seriously depleted and polluted.” One of the reasons for this global tragedy is that neither depletion nor pollution is included in the world’s prevailing system for measuring national income and productivity—GDP. As economist Herman Daly points out, “We do not subtract the cost of pollution as a bad, yet we add the value of pollution cleanup as a good.
This is asymmetric accounting.” As a result, decisions to clean up the environment are routinely—and inaccurately—described as hurtful to prosperity. For example, in Guangzhou, China, the vice director of the city’s
planning agency felt forced to defend a decision to limit automobile traffic as a means of reducing dangerous levels of air pollution by saying, “
Of course from the government’s point of view, we give up some growth, but to achieve better health for all citizens, it’s worth it.”
Recently, an investigation by
The New York Times
collected hundreds of thousands of state and federal records of water pollution under the Freedom of Information Act that showed that approximately one out of every ten Americans has been
exposed to chemical waste or other health threats in their drinking water.
Since 1972, the United States has pioneered clean water protections and most of the developed world has followed suit. However, the progress in developing countries has fallen short of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (a blueprint for global development agreed to by all 193 member states of the United Nations and 23 international organizations). According to the World Health Organization, “over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources (defined as ‘likely to provide safe water’) and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation facilities between 1990 and 2010…[however] over 780 million people are still without access to improved sources of drinking water
and 2.5 billion lack improved sanitation.”
If current trends continue, these numbers will remain unacceptably high in 2015: according to the World Health Organization, “605 million people will be without an improved drinking water source and
2.4 billion people will lack access to improved sanitation facilities.” In China, where 90 percent of the shallow groundwater contains pollution, including chemical and industrial waste, 190 million Chinese become
ill each year due to their drinking water, and tens of thousands die.
Supplies of freshwater are unevenly distributed, with more than half of the total located in only six countries. The declining availability and deteriorating quality of freshwater in numerous countries and regions stands alongside the loss of topsoil as one of the two most serious limitations constraining the expansion of food production. Overconsumption and profligate waste of freshwater—new competition for water from cities and the growing demands of Earth Inc.—are threatening to create food crises in multiple areas of the world.
Just as urban sprawl has had an impact on the supply of agricultural land, “energy sprawl” is also having a harsh impact on the availability
of freshwater for food crops. The unwise decision to promote the rapid growth of first generation ethanol fuels and biodiesel from palm oil has reallocated both water and land resources from food crops. And the
growing craze for deep shale gas, which requires five million gallons of water per well, has put severe strain on
supplies in regions that were already experiencing shortages. Many cities and counties in Texas, for example, have now been forced to choose between allocating water to agriculture and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of gas and oil. On a global basis, the use of
water for energy production is projected to grow twice as fast as energy demand.
The expansion of oil and gas fracking is adding to the injection of toxic liquid waste into areas deep underground that have been thought to be safe repositories—until recently. In the United States, an estimated 30
trillion
gallons of toxic liquid waste have been injected into more than 680,000 wells for underground storage over the past few decades, even as the practice of fracking changes the underground geology,
opening new fissures and modifying underground flow patterns. Unfortunately, some of these deep repositories have
leaked waste upward into regions containing drinking water aquifers.
Groundwater resources represent approximately 30 percent of all the freshwater resources in the world, compared to
one percent represented by all of the surface freshwater. In the last half century, the
rate of shrinkage in groundwater aquifers has doubled. The rate at which groundwater withdrawals have been increasing has accelerated steadily over the last half century to double the rate in 1960, but in the last fifteen years (since the growth rates of China and other emerging economies have accelerated), the
increases have proceeded at a much faster pace.
The introduction of new water drilling and pumping technology has also been a significant factor. In India, for example, $12 billion has been invested in new wells and pumps; more than 21 million wells
have been drilled by the 100 million Indian farmers. Partly as a result, the aquifers in many communities have been completely dried up and drinking water has to be trucked in—while
farmers must rely on increasingly unpredictable rainfall.
Because of the growth in population and the increase in water consumption, the surface water from many of the world’s important rivers is now so overallocated that many of the rivers no longer reach the sea:
the Colorado, the Indus, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Murray-Darling in
Australia, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, and the Elbe in Germany.
Although population growth rates have slowed in most of the world over the past several decades, the overall size of the population is now so large that even a slower rate of growth will add billions more people before our numbers stabilize near the end of this century at a total that is now difficult to predict but is
estimated at between 10 and 15 billion. (There is also a low projection of 6.1 billion people, and a runaway projection of 27 billion people—that would occur if there are no further decreases in fertility. But the vast majority of experts assume
that the most likely range is slightly above 10 billion.)
In the next dozen years, India will surpass China for
at least the balance of the century as the most populous nation on Earth. In the next
two
dozen years, Africa will have more people than either China or India and by the
end of the century is projected to have more people than both combined. Half of the global growth in population over the next four decades is projected to take place in Africa, which is now on track to more than triple its present population,
to an astonishing 3.6 billion, by the end of this century. Given the dangerously low levels of soil fertility in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, shortages of freshwater, poor governance in many countries, and the projected impact of global warming, the limits to growth in Africa are likely to be a central focus of the world’s attention in the balance of the twenty-first century.
The reason it is so difficult to predict peak global population, and the reason that the range of estimates varies by five billion people—as many as all the people in the world at the end of the 1980s!—is that it is inherently difficult to predict how many children the average woman will prefer to have during the next several decades. An increase in that key variable by even a half a child (demographers have long since become numb to the discomfiture of that expression) can mean the difference in several billion people in world population in the course of the next eighty-seven years. The multiple factors that have an impact on women’s preferences are, in turn, also difficult to project over such a long period of time.