climateandcapitalism.com
DEBATINGPOPULATION
Articles and Arguments onPopulation, Immigrationand Climate Change
2
Debating Population
CONTENTS
Should Climate Activists Support Limits on Immigration?
..............................3
by Ian Angus and Simon Butler
Responses .............................................................................................................6
“I=PAT Means Nothing, Proves Nothing”
..........................................................16
by Ben Courtice
Responses ............................................................................................................17
Do Individual Consumers Cause Climate Change?
..........................................19
by Ian Angus
Responses ............................................................................................................21
More debates on population at
climateandcapitalism.com
................................27These articles were published on
Climate and Capitalism
(
climateandcapitalism.com
) during the rst three months of 2010. The “Responses” have been selectedfrom comments posted by readers to illustrate the different views expressed, whileeliminating repetition. We have made some corrections to formatting, spelling andgrammar. We have used the names provided by the commenters: it was not possibleto conrm their accuracy.“Should Climate Activists Support Limits on Imnmigration” was also published in
Green Left Weekly
(
www.greenleft.org.au
). The version published on
Climate and Capitalism
includes footnotes that have been omitted from this pamphlet for reasonsof space.“I=PAT Means Nothing, Proves Nothing” was rst published in
Blind Carbon Copy
(
bccwords.blogspot.com/
)
Ian Angus
is the editor of
Climate and Capitalism
and co-editor of the Canadian journal
Socialist Voice
. His most recent book is
The Global Fight for Climate Justice
(Resistance Books and Fernwood Publishing.)
Simon Butler
is National Environment Working Group Convenor of the SocialistAlliance (Australia), and a staff writer for
Green Left Weekly.
Ben Courtice
, a member of the Socialist Alliance and an activist in the ClimateEmergency Network, writes regularly for
Blind Carbon Copy
and
Green Left Weekly
.
Copyright © 2010 by Climate and CapitalismPublished by South Branch PublicationsISBN: 978-1-897578-10-0
Debating Population
3
Immigrants to the developed world have frequently been blamed for unemployment, crime and other social ills.Attempts to reduce or block immigration have been jus-tied as necessary measures to protect “our way of life”from alien inuences.Today, some environmentalists go farther, arguing thatsharp cuts in immigration are needed to reduce green-house gas emissions and slow climate change. However sincere and well-meaning such activists may be, their arguments are wrong and dangerous, and should be re- jected by the climate emergency movement.
Lifeboat ethics and anti-immigrant bigots
“Environmental” arguments for reducing immigrationaren’t new. In a 1974 article, “Lifeboat Ethics: the CaseAgainst Helping the Poor,” US biologist Garrett Har-din argued that “a nation’s land has a limited capacityto support a population and as the current energy crisishas shown us, in some ways we have already exceededthe carrying capacity of our land.” Immigration, he said,was “speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries.”Elsewhere he wrote: “Overpopulation can be avoidedonly if borders are secure; otherwise poor and overpopu-lated nations will export their excess to richer and less populated nations.”Hardin’s ideas have been very inuential in the devel-opment of the right-wing, anti-immigration movementin the US and elsewhere. In 1979, he helped to found theFederation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),an anti-immigrant lobbying group that has been nameda “hate organization” by the Southern Poverty Law Cen-ter. In addition to the usual array of anti-immigrant ar-guments FAIR has made a particular point of linkingconcerns about the environment with opposition to im-migration.Virginia Abernethy, a Hardin collaborator who callsherself an “ethnic separatist,” argues that the ability tomigrate to rich countries gives people in poor countriesan incentive to have bigger families. “The U.S. wouldhelp, not harm, by encouraging an appreciation of limitssooner rather than later. A relatively-closed U.S. border would create most vividly an image of limits and be anincentive to restrict family size.”
Shifting gears
In the past, the “environmental” anti-immigration argu-ment was:
immigrants should be kept out because their way of life is a threat to our environment.
That argumentis still made by anti-immigrant groups and some conser-vationists.Recently, as concern about greenhouse gas emissionsand global warming increased, the anti-immigrant argu-ment has taken on a new form. Now the argument is:
im-migrants should be kept out because our way of life is athreat to the world’s environment
.That’s the argument made in a recent brieng fromthe US Centre for Immigration Studies, a “think tank”founded by FAIR: it says that immigration worsens CO2emissions “because it transfers population from lower- polluting parts of the world to the United States, which isa higher polluting country.” CIS calculated that the “av-erage immigrant” to the US contributed four times moreCO2 than in their country of origin.Otis Graham, a founder of FAIR, made the same argu-ment in his 2004 book
Unguarded Gates
:“Most immigrants … move from poor societies toricher ones, intending to do what they almost alwayssucceed in doing, take on a higher standard of livingthat carries a larger ecological footprint. This beingthe case, the logic of the relationship is straightfor-ward. Population growth in both poor and wealthysocieties, but especially in the latter, intensies en-vironmental problems. Where immigration shifts population numbers to wealthier societies, it doesnot leave global environmental damage the same, but intensies global as well as local environmentaldegradation.”A recent FAIR report claims that increased populationis the primary cause of the huge increase in U.S. green-house gas emissions between 1973 and 2007 — andthat the population increase was caused by immigration.“The United States will not be able to achieve any mean-
Should Climate ActivistsSupport Limits on Immigration?
by Ian Angus and Simon Butler
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