What he is advocating (and wrongly perhaps) is to reduce human, i.e. man made carbon emissions to zero. Here, I disagree with Gates, not that man made CO2 emissions is not a problem per se, but to the extent of the problem and on how CO2 emissions, (i.e. carbon fuel burning) actually contributes to “climate change”; climate change being something that man IMO has only a marginal effect on over the long haul, that “climate change”, the warming and cooling of our planet is part of a more natural cycle that we as humans have very little control over in the big picture.
And I disagree with him that human population growth is as big of a problem as he and others say it is. However, it is also a reality that in some parts of the world, the third world in particular, that population growth does tax the local ecological and economic and political systems as to be a very real problem not just for them, but for all of us.
He’s talking about lowering the projected growth—not depopulating the planet.
Exactly.
What Gates said in this TED Talk from 2010, which this video took only a short clip of and much was left out and taken out of and ignoring the greater context of what he said, whether I agree with him or not, was not that vaccinations and better health care would result in the “purposeful” deaths of millions of people, but that better health care, higher vaccination rates for vaccine preventable diseases, actually slows down population growth.
Why? Wouldn’t better health care and vaccinations contribute to population growth by meaning fewer children dying from preventable and treatable diseases and therefore more people living and therefore meaning more people?
Well both yes and no.
High mortality rates, especially among infants and very young children and otherwise healthy adults, puts added pressures for families to have more and more children in order to make up for the fact that mortality rates will mean a fair percentage of their off spring will die before reaching adulthood or in early adulthood.
But having a lot of children, even if a percentage of them will die before reaching adulthood, also means more and more people in general and an overall lower standard of living. And lower standards of living results in a never ending cycle of poverty and misery.
http://depletedcranium.com/if-vaccines-can-reduce-population-growth-that-must-mean-they-kill-people-right/
To say that vaccinations “kill” is to ignore the facts of how many lives have been saved by vaccinations.
Unless of course you like going back to the good old days of Small Pox and Polio and back to the early 1900’s when even here in America, Measles resulted in the deaths of thousands of children every year.
Yep.
“What he is advocating (and wrongly perhaps) is to reduce human, i.e. man made carbon emissions to zero.”
I agree with your interpretation of Gate’s remark about CO2 emissions. Reaching that goal would mean having to go back to the dark ages. Unfortunately the vast majority of even GW alarmists have NO IDEA that 0 emissions are required or what that would mean. For that reason I have argued for years that the best anti GW argument would be to inform people about what is required.
“But having a lot of children, even if a percentage of them will die before reaching adulthood, also means more and more people in general and an overall lower standard of living. “
Gates argues that vaccinations and better health care result in raised standards of living resulting in lower numbers of children. It is clear that more affluent people have less kids but it is not clear to me how vaccines would raise living standards. In fact the best way to raise living standards is capitalism, but notice how that is never encouraged.
In developed nations there is no population increase as reproduction levels are below replacement level of ~2 kids/ couple. In many western nations the rate is only 1.3-1.5 per couple resulting in population drops. That is why they have to import workers from poor countries.