The Modern Growth of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The current human population on Earth is currently sitting at around 7.8 billion people. At the same time, this number is continuing to grow and at a rather staggering rate. Soon there will be 8 billion people.

Now you may be wondering why i bring up what the current world population is sitting at. It also is something that most people would not even care to worry about, a lot of people probably don’t even know what the population is, I didn’t even know. I had to google the number to know where exactly it was at this current time.

I say that this is something that we should have to worry about, and here is why. The Earth is a very large place and it is very plentiful in its resources. Yet we need to remember that the resources are finite. Along with this we need to remember that there is a cost of manufacturing these resources into something that can be used.

Now you may be thinking that of course there is a cost to manufacturing a good. You have to take into account the labor required and how much you had to pay for the raw resources and you need to also think about equipment needed, plus the cost of shipping the resources out into the market.

I am thinking about a non monetary cost instead. What I am thinking about is the cost that this will have on the environment. With the increased production that has been required to maintain the increasingly growing population, this has caused for an increase in the expulsion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

According to a brief article from Science Letter, “GHG emissions from material production increased by 120% in the period 1995–2015 to 11 Gt CO2e, rising from 15 to 23% of global emissions” (para. 2). Or in other words, as the production of manufactured goods has increased to keep up with a growing population in the last 25 years, the greenhouse gas emissions have increased at an exponential rate.

I believe that the correlation between greenhouse emissions and increased production of manufactured goods exists. As modern day medicine and agriculture have improved so drastically in the last 30 years or so, it has allowed for more people to survive and live in the world. This has caused for the population to grow, and thus will require more goods to maintain.

This greater demand required more production, and as a result there will be more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which would explain why the emissions in this period have increased by so much.

While this may have become an issue, there can be a positive side to this. In a strange way, since it has grown to 23% of all global emissions, it can more effectively decrease the overall emissions. What I mean by this is if there was a solution to be developed that could drop the emissions produced by production, then the overall global emissions would be even lower.

While production will need to remain high in order to maintain this large population, any solutions that are thought of can heavily reduce the worlds overall greenhouse emissions, which would be a good start. To find cleaner ways of making things in an industry which is constantly working, it would be a huge step forward going into the future.

Thank you for reading and I hope that this was informative and thought provoking.

The Carbon Footprint of Material Production Rises to 23% of Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Updated August 21, 2020). (2020, September 11). Science Letter, 2765. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634627501/AONE?u=sunybuff_main&sid=AONE&xid=d2eea0e9