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e New Brunswick Energy Commisport, the province’s demand for etajoules (PJ). erspective, 210 PJ is equivalent to ns of TNT. That was the amount ed by the Tsar Bomba, the largest ar explosion ever. uite a bit. household’s energy consumption gajoules (GJ). Six GJ is about the tial energy when a barrel of oil is
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00 years, our population has quaenergy consumption has increased Whitehead. per capita we are using four times n we were.” ters of the world’s population are uarter of the energy being pro-
be doing their part, Andreev said. “People should be worried about population growth and North Americans can be helping by thinking and improving their consumption.” The other thing people can be doing is encouraging decision makers to come up with long-term goals, said Whitehead. “We’re all living on the same planet and whether we like it or not, we’re all linked by the same atmosphere and the same oceans and we share the same responsibilities,” he said. Or as Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the UN’s Population Fund, puts it: “We are seven billion people What does this all mean? with seven bilAccording the UN, it means that there’s only room lion possibilifor improvement. ties.” Kirill Andreev, population affairs officer at the Population Division of the UN, says the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, was “perhaps the most important event over the last 20 years.” “The Population Division has served the UN’s Commission on Population and Development [molded by the ICPD],” Andreev said. “Our role is to carry out the work mandated by the commission.” This work, decided at the ICPD, includes four key areas: universal education, reduction of infant and child mortality, reduction of maternal mortality and access to reproductive and sexual health services, including family planning. The Earth Policy Institute agrees these areas need more help, said Reading. “There are 215 million women in just the developing world who need family planning resources...If every person had this very basic ability to plan how many children they want to have and when they want to have them...our population would not be growing at the rate that it is now,” Reading said. But while the UN’s focusing on those four areas, the world should
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of all the food that’s produced d goes to waste, according to the ture Organization of the UN. e alternative uses of basic food ain or corn, the UN projects food ave to double by 2025. atter of wastefulness, rather than
But there are so many places that don’t get access to this amount of energy. China has 26 new nuclear power stations under construction. “They want power because they don’t have the same access to power that we have traditionally,” said Whitehead. “There are ways of reducing the amount of energy and there needs to be policies instituted to prevent obscene uses of energy like we see in Las Vegas, for example.” Sometimes, the growth in numbers of actual households matters more than the number of just people, since most households include refrigerators, televisions and computers, and a car or two. The average energy consumed goes up as the average number of people in a household goes down. “It’s not really about the raw number of people but places where we are seeing a very fast population growth, sometimes that can be one of many stressers on the immediate environment,” said Reading.
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t in its food production. tion has grown very rapidly since evelopment has never been able e said. er a billion people face food inseourishment every day. More than ren in Africa and South Asia are wn growth because of it. of this is because green space is y development. is the best farming land that’s d. “So the question is why are we rld with increasing hunger?” , the world produced enough cebillion tons – to sustain nine to 11 bviously, not all the grain made it uths. t all go? mestic animals. Industrial uses like tics were fed 19 per cent. was grown for the purpose of feed-
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