Forget about the age-old debate on Malthus' dismal claim regarding over-population. He says that if population grows at an exponential rate, there wouldn't be enough resources left to satiate the consumption of everyone. Modern growth economists would say "That's what technology is there for, Malthus old boy. So don't worry about it." Malthus' primary message is just simply for nations to control population growth, but people nowadays are simply not too concerned about it. Fortunately for Malthus, there's a new research that analyzed a new reason for people to take the old boy seriously.
From the Economist, according to Thomas Wire, a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, controlling the surge in population may benefit more than making sure everybody has still something to eat years from now--it will benefit the environment:
"Mr Wire totted up the cost of supplying contraception to women who wished either to delay their childbearing years or to end them artificially but who were not using contraception. He examined projections of population growth and of carbon-dioxide emissions made by the United Nations and concluded that reducing carbon emissions by one tonne would cost just $7 spent on family planning, as opposed to at least $32 spent on green technologies.
Mr Wire points out that if all women who wanted contraception were provided with it, it would prevent the release of 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2050."
Talk about hitting two birds with one stone (climate change and population growth). If you really think about it, it's really a no-brainer: population growth can influence the environment--and it's not just on the issue of contraception. Take for example the most common case of garbage control. The more people there is, the more trash is thrown to the garbage. But of course, that's just one of those that you can observe on the surface. Definitely the relationship between population and environmental degradation is more intricate to the point that you may arrive concluding that we should all then be self-sufficient enough so that there wouldn't be any industrial waste from companies that are selling us things that we need. But we don't need to get into that.
What Mr. Wire did is a good thing because he puts some hard facts on at least one aspect of the issue. Now what we need is more of these kinds of discoveries and laying-down-of-facts to finally put the age-long debate to rest.