evidence: "Sometimes people try to use population as a way to let rich countries off the hook," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute in California, "whereas in reality, it's our consumption and our level of economic activity that drives emissions more than the number of people we have." [...] "We cannot tell [these] countries that, okay, we already have a lot of greenhouse gases, you should stop using energy," said Leiwen Jiang, a senior associate at the Population Council in New York and former IPCC lead author. "But we can help them improve their technology."