Clean Tech and Human Overpopulation

I was asked to speak at the Cleantech Open Global Forum in San Francisco recently, due to my advocacy of electric vehicles. Several years ago, however, I decided to focus on human overpopulation and animal rights issues, since I felt that my work getting electric cars on the road was done. We still need more battery powered vehicles, but because they are now so much more mainstream I believe I am more useful working on less accepted issues. I did not want to discuss my past EV activism (as the Cleantech folks requested, although ironically they cut out any reference to me getting arrested for the EV1 in my bio, so I guess my brand of activism was not for them anyway), and since I am not involved with EVs much (except that Ian and I each drive one, which I guess counts as being involved), and because I had just finished Ozzie Zehner’s excellent book about our misguided optimism on green technology, I decided to talk about human overpopulation.

In my speech, I discussed how efficient technology was nice, but it was not going to mitigate the issues of 10 billion people trying to eke out a living on this finite planet. A bit of a bubble burster at a conference honouring the best ideas in environmental innovation, and it was received with what I thought was a thud. On the bright side, I did see a lot of cool ideas. A few were advances in health care (a crucial component to lower fertility rates), like the composting toilet, but unfortunately the conference as a whole ignored the importance of lowering fertility rates as a vital component of a greener, more liveable world.

Alexandra at CleanTech Global Forum, San Francisco, CA November 2014