The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.
A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.
The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.
It has long been a staple, since Malthus in fact, that human population is a problem. It has likewise long been a fear that the hordes of the have-nots will conquer the haves. Birthrates are actually declining around the world. Apparently, not fast enough to suit some. Barring a famine, drought, massive tsunami, or some other natural beneficience to hasten the rate and “save the planet” from humans, we’ll just have to have “volunteers” stop their carbon emissions by ceasing respirations immediately, provided they have bought carbon-offsets to cover the CO2 costs of their decomposition. Alternatively, there is war and vast destruction of human life to accomodate the perceived need.
Falling fertility: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/26225
Rising fertility: http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/21223
Supply and demand on food:
http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/25368
[i] Slightly edited. [/i]
Ah, yes. Forced sterilization, an abortion clinic in every neighborhood, the birth police knocking on your door to take away your second child. But if we can’t have that, at least know that ObamaCare has taxpayer funded abrotions. Utopia. Just like China.
Yikes. I read this as I would Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and waited for the turn that never came. Is anyone else becoming alarmed by the plethora of anti-religious, pro-humanist, cold diatribes that seem to be published every day now?
Gee, Diane, don’t you think that the biggest problem is HOW we live and not THAT we live? Don’t you see that the Chinese family of 3 consumes and pollutes more than likely a whole village in Africa?
Chilling.
The birth rate in Taiwan has dropped to 1.0, and it’s turning into a slow motion disaster for the nation.
someone tell those “environmentalists” like Sting and his wife Trudie Styler (they of the eight or so kids)…..
This is a frightening attitude that is shared by more than a few wealthy and influential people whose influence is helped by the current administration.
What Malthus, and in turn Marx, failed to take account of in their predictions is the impact technological advance would have. That is not to say that there are not world-wide problems, but the considerable impact of future advances is never taken into account in these projections. If you want to see just how people can manage to live in an extremely confined landmass look no further than Hong Kong.
A friend suggested closing all Taco Bells to decrease global warming.
Of course, what the extreme population control people always assume is that it is the other people who will be having their births limited. Bright, articulate, liberal-minded professional people will not be limited. And indeed, I would expect that in such an Orwellian dystopia the bright, articulate, liberal-minded professional people would find a way round the law. This always sounds to me like a polite way for white upper middle class people to say that brown teeming hordes should not multiply. A hidden racism is at work here.
Terry Tee, I think what you are saying has been true. I’m not so sure it still is. Think of TEC’s illustrious leader essentially saying that Episcopalians are too smart to have babies. I think what we may be seeing now is affluent folks who enjoy having money to spend on themselves and do not want costly children themselves, so they don’t think that anyone else should be having them.
The fundamental demographic premise — that we are overpopulating — is drivel. First, you could take every person on the planet, distribute them evenly in Massachusetts with their arms outspread, and they could not touch each other.
Second through nearly the entire developed world raw fertility rates are [i]already[/i] below natural replacement rates, and in the case of places like Italy and Spain so far below replacement that each of those nations is likely to see population fall in half by mid-century. Russia’s population is declining by well over a million per year.
Now, for the nasty little secret of it all … unofficial figures from [b]Mexico[/b] indicate that their raw fertility is falling so rapidly that they, too, will soon drop below replacement rate, if it has not already done. Huge implications for the immigration discussion, eh, since in a quarter century it will no be a demographic issue.
Best estimates are that world population will top out around 9 billion somewhere near mid-century and fall gradually from there. The mental model used by the writer is a generation out of date.
Oh, and BTW, as population growth weakens and then goes negative, you can absolutely say good-bye to the welfare state in any form. It collapses as a result of demographic impetus, that, as the Italians, Greeks, Russians and others have shown is phenomenally difficult to reverse.
Why does this outdated theory keep recirculating? I bought a copy of “Population Bomb” when I was in the Bay Area in the 1980s. The boyfriend of the friend I was visiting snickered when he saw it – and he was quite liberal.
Speaking of the [i]Population Bomb[/i], does anyone remember the Simon-Ehrlich wager from 1980? And Julian Simon’s book, [i]The Ultimate Resource[/i] (which takes the point of view suggested by Pageantmaster in #8)?
More and more fear-mongering in order to heighten anxiety, which leads to people putting their trust in – and surrendering their liberties to (cf. de Toqueville’s [i]Democracy in America[/i]) – a government that nurses their fear-mongered infantilism and destroys any robust humanity they once had.
The anti-religious character of any of this fear-mongering has of course to do with destroying institutions (or more particularly, [i]an[/i] institution, the Church) which offer a counternarrative to that narrative of surrender and control being promoted. Getting rid of the competition, as it were. Don’t for a moment think that the apotheosis of emperors ended in the early 4th century.
A yes, Canada, the land of teeming hordes of people. Didn’t they pay people to have children at one point? If everyone stops having children at replacement rate, who will we be leaving the world to? Oh, I forgot, the endangered species.
Todd and others, I looked up the Simon-Ehrlich wager on Wikipedia to refresh my memory and found this:
according to an article in Wired:
All of [Ehrlich’s] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about “famines of unbelievable proportions” occurring by 1975, about “hundreds of millions of people starving to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, about the world “entering a genuine age of scarcity.” In 1990, for his having promoted “greater public understanding of environmental problems,” Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award.” [Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they’d been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days “experts” spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker
As the newsroom cynics used to say when I was a journalist: don’t let the facts spoil a good story. And given the Cassandras around us today, it sounds as if nothing has changed.
i don’t understand why you all are so down on this article, she makes sense to me. she isn’t asking people to stop having children, just limit the number. and yah, some europeans should be having more children otherwise they are wiping themselves into extinction but certainly in china and especially india – that is definitely not happening. and that charge about hidden racism is total bollocks.
really pageantmaster would you like to live like they do in hongkong? i know i wouldn’t wish to sleep in a tiny little pod. but on the other hand they are not wasteful at all, they recycle A LOT because they have to.
bart hall, really can you put 6,692,030,277 people in massachussetts? even if that were possible, do you think those 6 billion could build houses and work and live in those tiny plots in massachussetts? where would they put their garbage? imo the issue is mainly about consumption.
nature may take care of it in the end but it won’t be pretty and far more painful and brutal than if people had simply decided to have fewer children. her quote, ‘Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it.’ is half correct imo; i have not seen much evidence that humans are rational, far too many are ruled by emotion and ‘my world’ perception.
i am also the first to admit that too often i am ruled much by emotion, so i include myself when i say that few humans are rational.
#10. Terry Tee,
[blockquote]Of course, what the extreme population control people always assume is that it is the other people who will be having their births limited.[/blockquote]
Your comment has been confirmed. The article author Diane Francis according to Drudge has [b]two[/b] children.
Well, magnolia, if you’re not keen on a population density of the one suggested by Bart Hall, one could put the entire world’s population in Texas, and have a density no worse than NYC.
And, like it or not, the Chinese and Indian solutions to the so-called “population bomb” both involve forced sterilization and abortion–A LOT of abortion. When does the “choice” to have fewer children become no longer a choice? Who gets to make that decision? And what happens when these policies over-correct and you find yourself in the same demographic straits that Western Europe, Japan, Russia, and Canada are in or will be very soon? Who pays for the cradle-to-grave welfare state then??
magnolia (#17), may I suggest that you find her recommendation reasonable precisely because you have accepted her premises, those advanced from in a fairly benign and mostly descriptive form in Parson Malthus through their factually-discredited but still influential promulgation by Paul Ehrlich over three decades ago.
Several of us commenting don’t find her recommendation reasonable precisely because we [i]don’t[/i] accept the dire premises, and because, as #20 points out, in the fullness of time the imposition of tyranny will be attempted on the “emotional” by the “rational” in order to carry it out.
Which is as thoroughly specious a distinction between human beings (our all being both rational and emotional) as racialist ones.
” imo the issue is mainly about consumption. nature may take care of it in the end but it won’t be pretty and far more painful and brutal than if people had simply decided to have fewer children”
Relax Magnolia. We won’t be waiting for “nature” to take care of it. Your favorite politicians are right on top of the problem. Only it won’t be China’s discredited “one child policy”. That is obviously not working in Europe, and will kill the Oh-so-important-Welfare state (praises be unto it).
The preferred solution will be Obamas, no geezer policy. After 1990, the Russian life expectancy quietly fell to about 55. Losing the geezers will drop the population to about a third, and with it their “wasteful” consumption. And of course the rich will simply buy “carbon credits” to heat their homes in winter, to have as many kids as they feel works with their “lifestyle” and will jet off to India to get their cardiac caths, stents, and knee replacements.
Geriatrics has died as a specialty already. Pediatric subspecialties have died outside the academic centers (her former specialists now call themselves urgent care docs). I anticipate that neurology will die in 5 years (though it will stick around in academic centers and VAs for another 10-15).
So you don’t need to worry about overpopulation, Magnolia. You will not be permitted to overpopulate the world once you are no longer any use to it. (Which would seem to be what you want).