Opinion: Population growth, public debt and sports betting: Catastrophes by the numbers

 I’m sure many of you read in the newspapers recently that the Earth’s population of humans has now reached 8 billion. To put this in perspective, human population reached 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960 and 4 billion in 1974. The UN projects there will be 9 billion by 2037, and then (hopefully) stop increasing at around 10 billion in the 2080s (data per Population Connection’s white paper). The planet’s human population has doubled since many of us first became aware of the existential threat of global warming due to excessive emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

In the early 1800s, carbon dioxide emissions were relatively small. But by 1950, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions totaled around 6 billion tons per year. By 1990, this had almost quadrupled, reaching more than 22 billion tons per year. Now, emissions are over 34 billion tons each year, according to Our World In Data. As a result, Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit (0.08 degrees Celsius) per decade since 1880, but the rate of warming since 1981 is more than twice that: 0.32 F (0.18 C) per decade, according to climate.gov.

Some scientists say we have passed the tipping point, when positive feedback loops, such as the melting of permafrost and its subsequent release of trapped CO2, will make warming accelerate even faster. The marginally good news is that per capita emissions have flattened in the last few years.

What’s unfortunate is that many of the easy fixes have not been fully implemented. How to make new buildings net zero for emissions is well known. (Even my own house, which I built almost 50 years ago, is now nearly net zero; it already had passive and active thermal solar, but photovoltaics, available now, made a huge difference.) Why we don’t require net zero nationwide in our building codes is beyond me. 

Reducing auto use, e.g. by charging for parking and using the proceeds to pay people to carpool, bike, etc., ought to be a no-brainer everywhere commuting is significant, but it’s just getting a foothold, even though it has huge benefits in reducing accidents, emissions and traffic. Farming, ranching and industry are becoming more emissions-sensitive, but we’re still way behind.

In another arena, I’ve been looking at our country’s financial situation. It’s very interesting — if you can step back from the shock. The Fed has lots of good graphs available at fred.stlouisfed.org. One of the most interesting is the chart of total public debt versus gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is a measure the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period (definition per Wikipedia). This is a simple way to compare what we produce against how much debt the government has taken on in our name. 

From 1965 to 1985, total public debt was under 40% of GDP. But our federal government ran budget deficits from 1970 on, except for surpluses 1998-2001. So around 1985 the debt/GDP percentage started going up and by the early 1990s, it reached around 60% of GDP. It stayed in that range until around 2008, when it began to climb rapidly again, reaching around 100% by around 2013. And it stayed around that percentage until the COVID pandemic; in 2020 it shot up to over 130% and then dropped back to around 120% of GDP. 

For the fiscal year 2022, around 22% of the total Federal budget of $6.27 trillion is paid for by increasing the debt, according to treasury.gov. The current total Federal debt is slightly over $30 trillion, per U.S. Treasury; that’s over $90,000 per capita. In simplistic terms, we would have to devote nearly all of one year of our GDP (our business, farming, manufacturing, etc., output) to paying off this debt to get back to where we were in the 1970s.

Locally, CU has almost $2 billion in long-term debt. According to a Nov. 23 New York Times article, “How colleges and sports-betting companies ‘Caesarized’ campus life,” CU is increasing its income by promoting sports betting with its students:  

“And when the University of Colorado Boulder in 2020 accepted $1.6 million to promote sports gambling on campus, a betting company sweetened the deal by offering the school an extra $30 every time someone downloaded the company’s app and used a promotional code to place a bet.”

The article also has a big photo of Folsom Field with a “POINTSBET” sportsbook advertisement prominently displayed. Maybe CU needs to study how gambling provides intermittent reinforcement (B.F. Skinner’s term) that quite effectively addicts humans.

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