Have you read theadvancedapes's piece on the subject: http://hubski.com/pub?id=78561

Monbiot is now and has been one of the most myopic writers on the left, though. Here's his basic premise:

- Poor people breed more

BUT

- Poor people use little energy compared to rich people

THEREFORE

- It doesn't matter how many poor people there are because the rich people are the ones fucking up CO2 levels.

What he misses - and it's a big miss - is that for a hundred years, we've been calling it "the developing world" for a reason. Incomes go up. Education goes up. Bill Gates has gone as far as saying there won't *be* any more "poor" countries in 20 years. So all of a sudden, those poor people sleeping on the streets of Calcutta are using AC, watching Plasma TVs and running their refrigerators 24/7 as if they were middle class or something.

We're not more fucked than we already are because China instituted positively draconian population control 35 years ago. It replaced the widespread famines and disease that had traditionally done the culling (infant mortality of 227/1000 - pretty fuckin' rugged). India's birth rate has been plummeting in line with its increase in social mobility and general economic prosperity. Yeah - there'd be a lot less worry about emissions from China if it were still full of the rural poor that had a 3 in 4 chance of seeing their babies live to their first birthday… but there hasn't been a regime in the history of the world to run on a "keep the poor impoverished" platform.

The really stupid thing is that "controlling population" is really fucking good for people. The two things that are the absolute best for improving quality of life in a country are sending girls to school and letting them choose when to have babies. Not surprisingly, these two factors also cause lower fertility rates - according to UNICEF,

An educated woman is, for example, likely to marry at a later age and have fewer children. Cross-country studies show that an extra year of schooling for girls reduces fertility rates by 5 to 10 per cent. And the children of an educated mother are more likely to survive. In India, for example, the infant mortality rate of babies whose mothers have received primary education is half that of children whose mothers are illiterate.

An educated woman will also be more productive at work -- and better paid. Indeed, the dividend for educational investment is often higher for women than men. Studies from a number of countries suggest that an extra year of schooling will increase a woman's future earnings by about 15 per cent, compared with 11 per cent for a man.

So yeah. Rich white men burn more carbon than poor brown women. But I'm not about to say "stay poor, brown woman, so I don't have to worry about your carbon emissions."