Overpopulation and Climate Change – The Socially Unacceptable Solution
https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/population-climate-crisis.php
The article linked discusses the limitations reporters have had when covering climate change. In light of what is socially acceptable, reporters mainly associate the negative effects of climate change with carbon dioxide emissions from gas consuming cars and planes. They each respectively emit 2.4 tons of CO2 and 1.6 tons of CO2, per year. By reducing usage of both of these vehicles to none, one person can limit their carbon footprint by a significant amount. However, the greatest cause of climate change, emitting 58.6 tons of CO2 per year, is not any man-made technology but man itself. In having one fewer child, you can save more than 20x more carbon than any other option. Overpopulation is at the root of this problem yet the connotations with limiting population are often way too negative for any organization to get behind. In order for this to be addressed, people of influence have to address and propagate population limitation to reduce carbon emissions.
In order to view how overpopulation can be directly addressed, one can consider the following network:
Take the people of influence (politicians, entertainers, CEOs, etc) and model them in a network defining the nodes as the influencers and the edges as communication between the nodes. Each edge has either a strong tie or weak tie depending on their shared view of overpopulation as the ultimate problem.
What is tricky about this network is that most of the individuals are connected with strong ties under the belief limiting children is not the answer. The few that differ in this belief have weak ties with the majority and strong ties to the small set that also believe overpopulation is the problem. The larger component of this graph (individuals who don’t want to discuss overpopulation) will be very structurally embedded and it will be difficult to change their belief. However, as this is a network, a change in a single node and thus its edges can have paramount effects on the rest of the population. In redefining what is socially acceptable and thus altering social capital within a group, all it takes is for part of the network (where overpopulation is considered the crux of the issue) to broker a path through this structural hole and further embed with the rest of the network to spread an overpopulation-solution. In graphing the contrary opinions to how to combat climate change, one can see the divided components more easily and thus focus on that single group whose view is less socially acceptable.