Lucy Proctor
speaker
119 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Jul 2018
Lucy Proctor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, first of all, there's a split in the world of academics who look at climate change, roughly between those advocating for individual actions, like reducing family size, and those looking for a big technological fix, something that will free us from our addiction to fossil fuels.
Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus is in the latter camp.
I asked Seth Wins about that and he said, even if your child lives in what the IPCC thinks is a very optimistic account of what the world will be like by the end of the century, your carbon legacy goes down very significantly.
But having kids is still the biggest thing you're going to do to add to global warming.
Yeah.
Most famously, of course, was the idea of the population bomb that was espoused by Paul Ehrlich in the 70s.
He predicted mass famines due to overpopulation in the very near future.
Of course, that never came to pass.
And that was because of huge advances in food production, that big tech fix.
So we've got to be careful about predicting these disastrous consequences brought about by overpopulation.
The bigger problem, though, with using family size as a lever to curb global warming is that it's a very crude way to think about bringing consumption of fossil fuels down.
There has.
I spoke to ecologist Corey Bradshaw.
He's the person you mentioned at the start of the show, the academic who's received death threats.
That was mainly because he modelled what would happen to the global population if there was a mass extinction event equal to a third world war.
People took him for a promoter of human misery.
Of course, he's not that.
He's kindly done a calculation, especially for us.
He's modelled what would happen if the global fertility rate dropped from 2.4 children per woman to two tomorrow.
Because bringing the average fertility rate down actually has very little effect on people in industrialised countries.
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