Free Republic

Our unsustainable population levels are depleting resources and denying a decent future to our descendants. We must stop the denial. A 2009 NPR story on U.S. pregnancies reported that half — yes, half — of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of unintended consumers adding to our future climate change. And that's what the right calls the "liberal" side of the mass media. The politically conservative U.S. mass media cover unsustainable population levels even less. That pretty much reflects the appalling state of U.S. public education today on population. The U.S. approach to population issues across all levels...

Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons. BY JONATHAN V. LAST Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance... (snip) In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. (snip) Yet today in India...

More than 40 years ago, American biologist Paul Ehrlich sketched a doomsday scenario for planet Earth in his book The Population Bomb. Adding more people to the planet would inevitably lead to mass starvation and ecological disaster. Since the publication of the book, the global population has nearly doubled but most of its gloomy predictions have not come true. However, this has not stopped its author from campaigning against further population growth, this time in Australia. As he prepared for a series of lectures to the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, Ehrlich warned that Australia was full. As...

(NaturalNews) Within a decade, a loaf of wheat bread may cost $23 in a grocery store in the United States, and a 32-oz package of sugar might run $62. A 64-oz container of Minute Maid Orange Juice, meanwhile, could set you back $45.71. This is all according to a new report released Friday by the National Inflation Association which warns consumers about the coming wave of food price inflation that's about to strike the western world. "For every economic problem the U.S. government tries to solve, it always creates two or three much larger catastrophes in the process," said Adams....

Predicted calamities are always the worst; until the future comes. Then, they don't show up, or they shrink to ordinary. Overpopulation is a prime example. Calamity resulting from too many of us has been the subject of countless prophecies, but those never came true. More humans are living on the planet now than ever and living better, rather than being starved and desperate.

It looks like president-elect Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor. Holdren is a professor of environmental policy at Harvard and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As Ron Bailey points out, he has been an activist on the ecological left and no friend of free markets. Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth. And he didn’t say all this in the...

Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it's only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant. Worse, the onslaught seems...

Hi, I’m scientist Paul Ehrlich. You might remember me from such failed predictions as “Everybody’s Going to Die by 1984!” and “Tin to Become More Precious than Water!” Today, I’m going to foretell you another story of coming calamity. This story is about our climate, and how if something isn’t done right now, or even yesterday, we will all, once more, be consigned to cataclysm. But this time we have a chance! Because this time, we know how to fight back. We know who are enemies are, and we know how to hit ‘em where it hurts. Paul Ehrlich Before...

Earlier this week, I criticized the American media for ignoring the rapidly-increasing number of scandals surrounding the IPCC, the University of East Anglia CRU, and the anthropogenic global-warming movement in general. Today, an American newspaper breaks news of yet another scandal involving AGW scientists and e-mail — but this time here in the US. The Washington Times obtained e-mails sent through the National Academy of Sciences that show AGW scientists conspiring to attack critics: Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs...

There’s a 2004 book by Victor Gold called Liberwocky: What Liberals Say and What They Really Mean. It’s a tongue-and-cheek (but not inaccurate) glossary of buzzwords used and abused by the liberati in all walks of life. E.g., “Obscene: Liberal pejorative applied to ‘outrageous’ corporate profits; not, however, applicable to pornographic magazines or motion pictures.”I think it’s time for a sequel. Consider this piece at the Washington Times about certain climate alarmists scientists hitting back at skeptics in light of the past several months AGW scandals and errors: Climate scientists plot to fight back at skepticsBy Stephen DinanUndaunted by a...

Warming Scandal: Despite the incriminating e-mails, administration science adviser John Holdren still thinks man causes global warming. And Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks it's the whistle-blowers who should be arrested. Time was when Barbara Boxer thought it was just fine for the New York Times and Washington Post to spill national military secrets and war plans on their front pages. The people had a right to know where and how they were being led. But we are not dealing here with the Pentagon Papers, the location of terrorist prisons or the surveillance of al-Qaida and its operatives. Boxer, top Democrat on...

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...

I enjoy my subscription to The New Scientist in large part for seeing to what lengths they are willing to go to support global warming orthodoxy. This week's issue, for example, describes a hitherto unobserved and completely unexplained phenomenon involving sudden changes in the temperature of the stratosphere associated with agitation of the wind speed and direction of the ionosphere: No process known to atmospheric physics would allow a specific local phenomenon like the stratwarm to propagate all the way from the stratosphere above the North Pole to the ionosphere above the equator...Some speculate that this trend is a product...

Get Green, Go Sterile? by: Bethany Stotts, August 24, 2009 Does going green mean humans should have fewer children? Two Oregon State University professors recently released a study which argued that parents are responsible for the carbon emissions of their offspring. The study is premised upon the concept that a mother and father each “inherit” responsibility for one half of their offspring’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, one quarter of each grandchild’s emissions, etc. Professors Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax conclude that, under current conditions, each U.S. “child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy...

President Obama’s top science adviser said in a book he co-authored in 1973 that a newborn child “will ultimately develop into a human being” if he or she is properly fed and socialized. “The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.” Holdren co-authored the book with Stanford professors Paul R. Ehrlich and...

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,...

"As United States taxpayers know, income tax laws have long implicitly encouraged marriage and childbearing...Such a pronatalist bias of course is no longer appropriate. In countries that are affluent enough for the majority of citizens to pay taxes, tax laws could be adjusted to favor (instead of penalize) single people, working wives, and small families. Other tax measures might also include high marriage fees, taxes on luxury baby goods and toys, and removal of family allowances where they exist. Other possibilities include the limitation of maternal or educational benefits to two children per family."

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both? These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States'...

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar....