Population, Poverty, and Ethics

Trevor Craig

Energy Science 110

Lecture Summary for Population, Poverty, and Ethics.

8/25/11           

This lecture was about population growth, poverty, hunger, and ethical techniques and solutions to these problems. Currently population has been growing rapidly and this trend looks to continue into the future. In 1950 there were only approximately 2 billion people, where today there is about 7 billion, and by 2050 the estimated population is between 9 and 10 billion people. That is a lot of people and with more people means that there needs to be more food and places for people to live. Obviously not everyone can live in the rural areas; people need to be able to access food, water, and their jobs which are now often times in urban settings.

Recently there has been a switch in how people of the world do their work and where they live, we have gone from mostly living in rural areas doing manual work to living in cities doing jobs that are often times inside office jobs. This can be seen by looking at the statistics, until 2008 more people lived in rural areas then in urban areas, but in 2008 there began a switch that more people were living in urban areas and less in rural areas, and this trend is supposed to continue till in 2050 there will be a little under 3 billion living in rural areas and 6.5 billion in urban areas.

With such an increase of people living in cities there needs to be enough food and jobs for people to live. Cities are often time large power users, so with an increase in people moving to cities there also needs to be power for these cities to provide for the people’s everyday needs, and with a decreasing amount of oil in our world and prices for these materials increasing, large cities may soon become a problem. The large power sources that are needed to run these future mega cities will increase the amount of greenhouse gasses and increase global warming, China primarily uses coal and oil for their means of energy with those totaling 1750 mtoe, oil and coal power plants often add to global warming and so these mega cities will greatly affect the world in just a matter of years. Africa and Asia are expected to have the largest urban growth in the years to come; in 2007 Africa had .97 billion people, and Asia had 4.03 billion, but by 2050 they are supposed to have 2 billion, 1 billion growth in urban areas and Asia is supposed to have 5.3 billion, 1.3 billion added to urban growth. This is actually a very big problem because Asia and Africa have the largest undernourished people in the world, Asia and the Pacific having 578 million people undernourished and Sub-Sahara Africa having 239 million undernourished, out of the 925 million undernourished people in the world. Nearly 1/7 of the world is malnourished, this malnourishment is because of poverty and it will just get worse as energy prices raise because people are moving to cities which require more energy and our resources are beginning to run out. And the global demand for energy is projected to grow 50% to 100% between the years of 2000 and 2030, this is just going to compound the already existing problems.

So we must ethically ask ourselves whether we should help these countries out with their poverty and hunger, or help ourselves. Many ethical questions must be asked to finally make an ethical suggestion to end this problem, and even then that will be debated whether that is an ethical solution depending on which ethical stance one takes. In the end you must decide for yourself what the ethical solution is to this problem.

Teleological- The doctrine that there is evidence of purpose or design in the universe, and esp that this provides proof of the existence of a Designer.

Categorical Imperative- the unconditional moral principle that one's behavior should accord with universalizable maxims which respect persons as ends in themselves; the obligation to do one's duty for its own sake and not in pursuit of further ends.

ENSC110 Craig Population, Poverty, Ethics