Global Warming on FreeRepublic
Posted on 04/18/2007 9:10:28 PM PDT by CutePuppy
Group Calls for Population Control to Stop Global Warming
By Monisha Bansal
April 18, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - Ahead of Earth Day on Sunday, an advocacy group warned that the United States is ignoring "the most crucial factor in reducing global warming" -- population control.
"Human population growth is the paramount environmental issue," Ric Oberlink, a spokesman for Californians for Population Stabilization, told Cybercast News Service.
"Global warming is a very serious problem, but it is a subset of the overpopulation problem," he said.
Oberlink argued that an increase in the emission of "greenhouse gases" -- carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for climate change -- is a result of human activity, "like most environmental problems."
Although one part of the equation is what people do, he said, the other part is how many there are.
"If we had half as many people, we wouldn't have much of a climatic warming problem," argued Oberlink.
"Many have noted the disproportionate impact of America on greenhouse emissions and rightly called for reduced emissions. But it's hypocritical to say that the problem is that Americans consume too much and then say it doesn't matter how many Americans there are."
According to the population group, Americans are "by far the most voracious consumers and the greatest producers of greenhouse gases per capita of any nation on earth."
And the U.S. population, it says, "has been doubling every 40 years and is headed for one billion before the end of this century."
"No matter how clever and inventive human technology can be, it will be overwhelmed by the explosive multiplication of unrelenting population growth," asserted Randy Alcorn, a senior writing fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization.
"While it may be beneficial to replace incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent light bulbs, it would be more effective towards salvaging the planet to turn on light bulbs in minds darkened by political expediency and religious dogma," he said.
"Those who surrender reason to religious and political doctrine and push the rubble of their misguided convictions into the path of prudent population reduction policies are complicit in condemning an entire planet to doom," said Alcorn.
Oberlink criticized environmental groups for not addressing population growth.
"Today, major environmental groups seldom discuss population growth," he said. "They have become increasingly politically correct and increasingly ineffective in protecting the environment.
"It's easier to single out targets like Big Oil and Big Detroit instead of calling for changes in personal behavior or taking on a tough issue like population growth with its concomitant connection to volatile issues like immigration or access to birth control," Oberlink said.
Environmental Defense, the World Resources Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists did not respond to invitations to react to the criticism of green campaign groups.
But pro-family organizations take issue with the population control arguments.
"While there is growing consensus that the earth is warming slightly, there is no consensus that humans are the main cause," the Family Research Council said in a statement.
"Those pushing global warming are proposing a radical agenda as the solution to a problem that is not yet fully understood," it said.
"In part, this solution calls for population control, which is code for abortions, condom distribution and mass sterilization," said the FRC.
Copyright 1998-2006 Cybercast News Service
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
As a matter of public policy, do we want to be a nation of 400 million by 2050, 1/4 of whom are Hispanic? Our current immigration policies pretty much guarantee that this will be the case. I have no doubt that we can support such a population with food, water, and shelter, but there are enormous resource implications if we want to maintain the same standard of living while becoming an aging country in much the same way as Europe.
Of course, the Dems need to counterbalance this trend by importing more people, but with the birthrate in places like Mexico and El Salvador plummetting, they will run out of people to import in about 20 years.
There will always be a supply of people who want to come to the US. Supply exceeds demand. Mexico's annual growth rate is 1.153% [compared to our 0.894%] and the median age is 25.6 years [compared to our 36.6 years]. The current fertility rate is 2.39. So the supply of Mexicans will still be available 20 years from now. El Salavador has an annual growth rate of 1.699% and its median age is 22 years. The current fertility rate is 3.09. So their future supply is even more plentiful. According to the 2000 Census, there are 9.2 million Mexican-born residents in the US and 825,000 from El Salvador.
I am not advocating global population controls. As countries become more developed and prosperous, their populations will decline and stabilize. Most of Europe is experiencing declining populations. My concern is the long term impact of our legal immigration policies and the lack of control over our borders. A sizeable portion of the world's population wants to come here. However, we can't absorb those kinds of numbers without suffering serious consequences.
Population growth rates in the developing world will continue to fall, the key factor being urbanization. To put it simply for others on this thread, in a rural society, more kids = more hands to work the farm. Add the fact that the main forms of social activity in rural societies involve either planting crops or "planting one's own seed" and you can see why agrarian societies have higher birthrates.
With the global movement toward urban areas, and steady employmet in service and industry, it should be expected that population growth will continue to fall (as it has throughout Latin America and Asia, and, to a lesser extent the Middle East).
Your concerns would be valid if population growth were static. Trends in the developing world indicate otherwise. There is a good reason why the Maquiladoras in Mexico can increasingly only find women from the South to work in unskilled occupations.
I am not a religious man, but a man who believes that rational choice ultimately wins over the irrational over the long run in all societies. As such, I will continue to take the "population control freaks", whether bourgeois Orange County/Fairfax County types, or Eurotrash, with a grain of salt. In 20-30 years, there will be no surplus labor from Mexico, so all of those who have sand in their vagina about seeing all of those Campesinos from Puebla at the local mall should chill out.
I never could completely understand exactly how the Law of Accelerating Returns obsoletes human death, but I will die trying.
VHEMT - yet another neo-Malthusian group that The Pack Knight brought to my attention the other day:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1812703/posts?page=48#48
If he had money, he would probably already be building them.
Crazy hippies.
They could all ‘off’ themselves to show us the way .....
As species, human race has done exactly that. However, some subspecies like homo liberalis, particularly in some geographical areas of North America, do concentrate in high density population areas and mostly expand population growth by infusion (importing population) instead of expanding by diffusion (by resettling and spreading out onto new territory).
The Sierra Club dust up over this several years ago immediately came to my mind also.
It’s a very small world, Sierra Club Director Anne Ehrlich was the one who was tarred and feathered after she attempted to have (rather extreme) population control included into the Sierra Clubs charter.
And yes, Anne Ehrlich is married to Paul Ehrlich. And she takes almost all her research money from large oil conglomerates.
http://www.counterpunch.org/ehrlich.html
This is a synthesis of anti-Western civilization extremisms that the less insane and less evil greenies have been trying to avoid for over a decade. If this gains momentum at the right time, the ‘green movement’ could implode before the 2008 elections.
These Berzerkly lawyers just crack me up.
“How about Illegal immigration control instead?”
ONE LOOK AT CAPS’ WEBSITE WILL CLEAR UP ANY CONFUSION
THEY ARE STAUNCHLY IN FAVOR OF IMMIGRATION CONTROL
IT’S THEIR PRIMARY FOCUS AND THEY DESERVE OUR SUPPORT
http://www.cap-s.org/main.html
I never could completely understand exactly how the Law of Accelerating Returns obsoletes human death, but I will die trying.
When a new paradigm of a technology, for example, when vacuum-tube computers were first invented nobody knew that the next computing paradigm would be transistors. And at that new paradigm it wasn't known that silicon chip micro-processors would be the next. Now, at the cusp of the next paradigm it's three dimensional CPUs and quantum computation.
With human longevity it can't yet be predicted which exact technologies will obsolete human death. When penicillin was invented gene therapy and DNA manipulation were unknown. In biotechnology they've learned that there's a fat gene that's purpose is to store fat. It was necessary for hunter gathers because it was uncertain when the next meals would come. It's one of nature's survival mechanism. By understanding that bit of nature, conscious man is able to control it. By turning the gene off in mice they can devour large amounts of food and retain the calories but not accumulate fat. And they live twenty percent longer.
As conscious humans increasingly understand nature man increasingly controls nature.
I was thinking of the guy that made the observation that illegal immigration in the Sierra Club’s own backyard, California, was having a detrimental effect on California’s environment and, hence, the Sierra Club should come out against illegal immigration. He was given the bum’s rush, too, but it’s amusing to see he wasn’t the only one.
Again, you miss the point. Calling for a rationale immigration policy and securing our broders is not a population control measure, but it does have population implications. Your use of such loaded terms as "population control freaks, whether bourgeois Orange County/Fairfax County types, or Eurotrash" and that "all of those who have sand in their vagina about seeing all of those Campesinos from Puebla at the local mall should chill out" is typical of the "open border" types who would rather demagog the issue than discuss unemotionally the impact of what is happening before our very eyes. It is unprecedented in our history.
The biggest issues facing this country are entitlement reform and immigration, legal and illegal. Unfortunately, most Americans are ill-informed about both and our political elites would rather not discuss them in an adult manner. The reason: Both represent a massive failure on their part to fulfill their responsibilities to this nation. The day of reckoning is not far off.
Your concerns would be valid if population growth were static. Trends in the developing world indicate otherwise. There is a good reason why the Maquiladoras in Mexico can increasingly only find women from the South to work in unskilled occupations.
The problem facing America is not directly related to population growth in Mexico, Latin America or the rest of the world. It is part economic and part the aspirations of the downtrodden to come to a free country that represents hope for them and their families. America is the world's lifeboat and the best hope of Man. The lifeboat is being swamped and will slowly sink beneath the waves like so many other great civilizations before us, if we don't recognize what is happening now.
Even if the world's population trends downward, America will still have to cope with large numbers of people who want to come here. And policies such as chain migration and "anchor babies" ensure that more and more can come legally. And a lack of secure border [including the failure to control visa overstays, which constitute one-third of the illegal alliens], is adding even more people. There have to be limits on how many we allow in. The issue is what are those limits and what are the long term implications in terms of our infrastructure [roads, water, energy, etc.], schools, hospitals, social welfare systems, culture, quality of life, etc.
The very trends you see working in the developing world in terms of natural population control are happening here. The wild card is that we are taking in more people annually than the rest of the world combined in terms of migration. Immigration, legal and illegal, is artificially changing the natural equation. The world's population can be declining and we, as a nation, could still be having a population problem.
Yes,
"Those who surrender reason to religious and political doctrine"do come up with stuff like that - he sounds exactly like "Conspiracy" (TV, 2001), only on the altar of Global Warming.
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