The Freakonomics of Climate Change

In a Reuters article 'China says one-child policy helps protect climate' eerily reminiscent of some of the controversial arguments propounded by Chicago economist and 'Freakonomics' author Stephen Levitt, China asserts that its one-child policy has contributed to the fight against global warming.

As the article states:
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"Population is clearly an important factor," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, at U.N. talks trying to plan a new deal to combat climate change after 2012.
China, which rejects criticism that it is doing too little to confront climate change, says that its population is now 1.3 billion against 1.6 billion if it had not imposed tough birth control measures in the late 1970s.
The number of births avoided equals the entire population of the United States. Beijing says that fewer people means less demand for energy and lower emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.
"This is only an illustration of the actions we have taken," said Su Wei, a senior Foreign Ministry official heading China's delegation to the 158-nation talks from Aug 27-31.
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Levitt in Freakonomics makes a similar argument with regards to a nationwide depression of violent crime in the early 1990s, asserting that abortion could have been a primary factor preventing thousands of unwanted births to predominantly poor, black, single mothers who may have become violent criminals later in life due to these circumstances. Of course, it may seem that Levitt jumps a few causal barriers in making this argument, relying on a lot of assumptions (e.g. most criminals come from single-mother, impoverished, black households); however, he does put forth some interesting statistics to support his contentious theory.

It is interesting logic that underlies the Chinese argument regarding the correlation between the country's one-child policy, which was enacted in the 1970s and has resulted in a substantial stabilization of China's policy, particularly after a turbulent era in which Mao proclaimed that China would succeed with a large popluation (“With Many People, Strength is Great” [Ren Duo, Liliang Da]). In a sense, China may have some morsel of legitimacy in this argument: population clearly has some impact when considering numbers alone. More people equals more people consuming fossil fuels and emitting more greenhouse gases; the converse should be true as well:

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... avoiding 300 million births "means we averted 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005" based on average world per capital emissions of 4.2 tonnes, he said.
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A report produced for Pew reported that China had mitigated 150 million tons of C per year during the 1980s and 1990s from "slowing population growth." However, the following statement made by Harlan Watson was probably the most ludicrous out of the entire article:

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Harlan Watson, the chief U.S. negotiator, said that high immigration to the United States makes it harder to slow its rising emissions.
"It's simple arithmetic," he said. "If you look at mid-century, Europe will be at 1990 levels of population while ours will be nearing 60 percent above 1990 levels. So population does matter," he said.
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However, Watson is clearly distorting the "simple arithmetic" by blaming the U.S.' level of GHGs on high immigration. Looking at per capita emissions by country, it is clear that population alone can't account for the U.S.' 19.92 metric tons CO2/person versus China's measely 2.93 (given, these are 2002 numbers, according to WRI's Earthtrends). At any rate, it's an interesting question of Freakonomics, and I'm looking more into this question. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Oops

Wow, I just realized I've been doing a terrible job of updating this blog.

Beijing temporarily bans cars to reduce air pollution

Found on today's Earthtrends, featuring an interesting map from the World Bank that compares air particulate matter in some of the world's major cities.

Verdict: the ban greatly reduced traffic, but air pollution effects are so far negligible.