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LifeNews.com Note: Austin Ruse is president of the New York and Washington DC-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. C-FAM is a leading pro-life group that lobbies at the United Nations.Nothing makes a Malthusian's heart beat faster than a good famine and so these are feast days for good Malthusian hearts. Parts of the world are now awash in water shortages and in food riots. Thomas Malthus was the 18th century preacher/mathematician who first postulated that overpopulation would inevitably lead to widespread starvation, galloping disease, war and other grisly large-scale die-offs. Using Malthusian arguments the eugenicists and the population controllers...

THOMAS MALTHUS has been dead for 170 years, but the Malthusian fallacy - the dread conviction that the growth of human population leads to hunger, shortages, and a ravaged environment - is unfortunately alive and well: America's congested highways are caused by "population growth wildly out of control," the group Californians for Population Stabilization laments in a new ad. So are "schools and emergency rooms . . . bursting at the seams." And with every additional American, immigrant or native-born, "comes further degradation of America's natural treasures." In a new documentary, Britain's Prince Philip blames the rising price of food...

The misanthropic movement known as environmentalism doesn't mind the military killing people, but God forbid if an instrument of warfare generates carbon dioxide! According to this LiveScience article, Environmentally Friendly Bombs Planned: TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks. To make...

The biofuels debate is not one about future scarcity of resources (land, water) or about a conflict between food and fuel. However, reactionary forces try to get a grip on the discussion by introducting neo-Malthusian perspectives. These forces typically think about human development in static terms and forget that all factors that drive it are instead highly dynamic in nature: population, agriculture, economics, scientific and technological progress. Scientists do not engage in neo-Malthusian mythical thinking. Instead, they do science. In the following interview Prof. Dr. Ir. Rudy Rabbinge, Chairman of the Science Council of the CGIAR (the leading body comprising...

Scientific truth struck back against Al Gore's genocidal global warming fraud this week, as record snows and cold weather blanketed much of the northern hemisphere. China, which last year was forced to close 553 coal-fired power stations to placate the carbon dioxide mafia, now finds itself suffering under blizzard conditions not seen in 50 years. Half a million soldiers from the People's Liberation Army have been mobilized to rescue freezing residents and clear transportation corridors in large parts of east, central, and southern China. As it turns out, a falsified record of Chinese temperature stations also plays a central role...

Malthus may have been right after all, though two centuries early and a crank. Mankind is outrunning its food supplies. Hunger - if not yet famine - is a looming danger for a long list of countries that are both poor and heavily reliant on farm imports, according to the Food Outlook of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The farm crunch has been creeping up on the world for 20 years. Food output has risen at 1.3pc a year: the number of mouths at 1.35pc. What has abruptly changed is the twin revolution of biofuel politics and Asia's...

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues. Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or...

A demographic spectre is haunting authoritative and influential circles in both the United States and the international community. This spectre is the supposed imperative to "stabilise human population." The quest to "stabilise human population" (or to "stabilise world population," or sometimes just "stabilise population") was formally launched on the global stage in 1994 by the United Nations at its Cairo Conference on Population and Development, whose "Programme of Action" intoned that "intensified efforts" to this end were "crucial" given the "contribution that early stabilisation of the world population would make towards the achievement of sustainable development." That objective is today...

This week's UN "State of World Population" report warns that by 2008, more than half the world's population will live in urban areas. Shock, horror! But there is a serious point to the UN report: it wants to slow down urbanization by reducing birth rates. The only problem is that it provides no compelling reason for so doing. For years, the UN Population Fund has been seeking to justify its existence by issuing reports claiming that we must reduce birth rates in poor countries in order to achieve "sustainable development." While intuitively appealing, these ideas are not supported by evidence....

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank. The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York. Full coverage: Climate change in-depth John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College...

Proving once again that foolish ideas don't die or fade away -- they walk the earth eternally, preying on the brains of the living -- scientists at a UK think tank have determined that the greatest threat to the planet is more human beings. "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights," explains Professor John Guillebaud, co-chairman of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). "The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would...

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

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...

Introduction to Eugenics The principal manifestations of eugenics are racism and abortion; eugenics is the basis for "scientific racism" and laid the foundation for legalizing abortion. It is the driving force behind euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, and embryo and fetal research. It is the driving force in global population policy, which is a key element in American foreign policy. It is the force driving much of the environmentalist movement, welfare policy, welfare reform, and health care. It is found in anthropology, sociology, psychology—all the social sciences. It is reflected in much American literature, especially science fiction. So it is worth...

MELLEN - "There are too many people in the world. It's not sustainable." That is what the chairman of the Backwoods Anti-Social Social Club said. We were sitting in a little bar working on hamburgers thick enough to make the cholesterol count jump just by looking at them. The chairman was saying something he wished he had said at a recent conference on sustainability, but he's not the type to stand up in front of a crowd. He likes to work the edges and lead from behind, so to speak. Not being the religious sort, he has never been admonished...

If six billion humans died, the world would be a better place. That's the message a professor from the University of Texas is proclaiming. An article in The Gazette-Enterprise details Professor Eric Pianka's doomsday beliefs. "In his estimation, 'We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable,' all the while leaving the planet parched. The solution? A 90 percent reduction." Can anyone say "Thomas Malthus wannabe" (high school flashback: Malthus was the guy who said the earth's population would outgrow its food supply). Pianka tells the Gazette, "[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse." The professor...

The aims of the World Summit on Sustainable Development are laudable. Cleaner air and water, better stewardship of global resources, the eradication of poverty and disease no one can argue with such objectives. The question is how to get there from here. Let me offer a prescription for sustainable development that begins with a simple and powerful idea - an idea which, unfortunately, will often be at odds with what delegates, journalists and other observers hear in Johannesburg. The idea is that economic growth leads to levels of wealth and income that, in turn, inevitably produce societies that are cleaner,...

Biology doesn’t explain why societies collapseCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, New York: Viking, 592 pages, $29.95 Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is neither “superb” (The New Statesman), “incisive” (The Washington Post), “magisterial” (BusinessWeek), nor “insightful and very important” (Boston Herald). It is, instead, a telling example of how a smart man can be terribly misled by a fixation on one big idea. In this case, Diamond, a biologist, is trying to apply biology’s master narrative to human societies. In 1838 the founding father of modern biology, Charles...

Tonight George Noory is interviewing John Taylor Gatto, once NYC Teacher of the Year, turned author History of Education in America and Dumbing Us Down. John Taylor Gatto has also been labelled "homeschooling guru" by many American homeschooling groups and families. From the Coast to Coast site: "Legendary teacher and reformer, John Taylor Gatto, looks at our classrooms and how they are evolving generations that may not contribute to a healthy society in the future." John Taylor GattoWFLA Live Streaming Audio Listen Here

In promoting its political agenda, one of the world’s largest philanthropic agencies has made itself the biggest single financial contributor to a self-described Roman Catholic group dedicated to vigorously fighting the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and birth control. For more than 20 years, the Ford Foundation and Catholics For A Free Choice (CFFC) have forged a strong political and financial alliance that sacrifices the lives of the unborn to a discredited view of international economic development.[1] Founded in 1973, CFFC has been led since 1982 by Frances Kissling, a feminist who has actively promoted abortion for more than...

Our man in science goes to Congress I am testifying at an oversight hearing before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy" today, Feb. 4, 2004. I was asked to submit testimony about how and why environmental predictions have gone wrong. What follows is the written version of my testimony. (I get a whole five minutes to speak.) My name is Ronald Bailey. I am the science correspondent for the public policy magazine Reason and I have written and reported on scientific and environmental policy for more than two decades for...