Free Republic

Earth: An environmental writer mainstreams an idea floating around the green fringe — save the earth by population control and give carbon credits to one-child families. Are we threatened by the patter of little carbon footprints? New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin participated in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on climate change with other media pundits titled "Covering Climate: What's Population Got To Do With It?" People who need people they are not. In a recently rediscovered book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with Malthus fans Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren wrote that families "contribute to general social deterioration...

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize...

Liberalism’s classic formulation came in The Age of Enlightenment. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government argued that legitimate authority depended on the consent of the governed, while Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations rejected mercantilism, which advocated state interventionism in the economy and protectionism, and developed modern free-market economics. Classical liberalism (also known as traditional liberalism, laissez-faire liberalism, and market liberalism or, outside Canada and the United States, sometimes simply liberalism is a form of liberalism stressing individual freedom, free markets, and limited government... From the time of the industrial revolution through the Great Depression liberalism in America saw its...

Obama's Science Czar Considered Forced Abortions, Sterilization as Population Growth Solutions John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, considered compulsory abortions and other Draconian measures to shrink the human population in a 1977 science textbook. By Joseph Abrams FOXNews.com Tuesday, July 21, 2009 President Obama's "science czar," Paul Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up...

Leadership: Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling. In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich,...

There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government. Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability". Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice. Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton. "We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to...

In the first half of the 19th century, the Malthusian Theory espoused the dire prediction that the growing population of the world, coupled with the decrease in farmland available to produce crops, would lead to a great shortage of food and eventually to mass starvation. Since the earth is limited in its arable land, the theory held that the only way to deal with this growing danger was to encourage worldwide population control. This would ensure a sufficient food supply for all the world's inhabitants. History has shown how utterly wrong the Malthusian Theory has proven to be. While about...

That phrase--surplus population--is what first tipped me off to Dickens' philosophical agenda. He's taking aim at the father of the zero-growth philosophy, Thomas Malthus. Malthus' ideas were still current in British intellectual life at the time A Christmas Carol was written. Malthus, himself, had joined the surplus generation only nine years before. But his ideas have proved more durable.~snip~Hitler's hard eugenics and Sanger's (founder of Planned Parenthood) softer one, both owed a great debt of gratitude to Thomas Malthus. So do the zero-growth, sustainable-growth, right-to-die, duty-to-die, life boat bio-ethicists who dominate so much of our intellectual discussion. Malthus turned...

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.