Posted on 07/22/2007 6:32:07 AM PDT by liberallarry
The new head of the Science Museum has an uncompromising view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people. Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is not afraid of offending. 'I am not advocating genocide,' said Rapley. 'What I am saying is that if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion. That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants. However, everyone has decided, quietly, to ignore the issue.'
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
Oh NO, not this old saw again. Nothing new under the sun, indeed.
Denude the planet as well because plants give off carbon dioxide at night.
Oh, I don't know.
The movie "Logan's Run" raised the issue decades ago and didn't get much discussion either.
I agree. My first question to a blathering Watermelon is, "How many kids/'planet-killers' you got?"
This schtick is so... 1970’s, where is Paul Ehrlich when we need him ?
To paraphrase Mark Steyn :
According to the greenies the best thing you can do for your kids is not have any....
I have an Idea, cut our birth rate to zero growth and bring in workers from Mexico to pick up the slack in the labor market.
Tell it to the Muslims.
I’m all for a stable population but for America, cutting the birth rate isn’t the answer. Americans need to have enough children to keep a stable rate and we need to stop importing the 3rd world to drop babies.
Sadly the mindset of the greenies is that this would pave the way to Utopia for our kid's...
I actually don’t have a problem with stabilizing the population. At some point, too many people will have a detrimental effect. Unfortunately, you have unchecked population growth in the Third World. At the same time, you have negative population growth in the Industrialized world (not just the West).
The result is that the Third World is increasingly trying to come here instead of making their own countries better. Of course, business loves this cause they want new consumers to grow at any cost. For the rest of us, it just means degraded quality of life.
I also fault our consumerist culture for the failure of white people to adequately reproduce themselves. We have become so career focused, materialist, and self indulgent, that we have lost sight of what is really important.
We all died in the world wide food famine that came in the 1970's. Which was right before we all died in the Ice Age of the 1980's.
So chill out, we're really not here.
(btw Mr Rapley, I'm pretty sure someone laced your stash with LSD.)
I’ve got my five and I feel like having some more after reading the poop from the brains who think they have all the answers.
Chris would you be good enough to go to the nearest high bridge and kindly jump off. Then, we only need a few billion less one left.
You jackass.
The birth rate has declined in every country as that country has developed a modern economy.
Only parts of Africa and a few muslim countries have what would be considered a high birth rate today and even those are falling every year. Saudi Arabia, for example, is down to 4 children per woman versus 7 just a decade ago.
The world population is estimate to peak out at 8.6 billion (not 10) which is not much higher than today’s 6.6 billion.
Is that true? Can you cite your sources?
Cut back population in Africa and Arabic countries.
That’ll work.
The Sacrament of Abortion is a gift to Gaia.
HOW SICK A THOUGH. Too many MAD-scientist thinking they know it all. go to MYFOXNY.COM - organ donation controversy - and see how they are KILLING PEOPLE right now.
so this is why the Left wants to withdraw from iraq. everyone will kill each other and save the planet.
Overpopulation, except in very limited urban situations, is a myth. In any country, including the fourth world, when the average level of income reaches a plateau, which varies by country, the birthrate drops to between 2.1 and 2.3.
That is, people naturally have no more than two or three children except when their economic circumstances force them to. Unless they have to have more children to survive, they usually will not. And it is not just their current economic situation that matters. If they think that their economic situation might improve, they have fewer children.
So to have high population growth you need both poverty with economic and cultural stagnation. If the only way you can sustain yourself is by having a large family, you will. Otherwise you will not.
Even if you look at cities that are currently overpopulated, you will find that the vast majority of the “extra” people were not born there, they immigrated there, concentrated there from rural areas. When that immigration stops, the cities slowly return to a normal population with a typical growth rate.
Often those individuals who are obsessed with overpopulation, from kooks like Paul Ehrlich and Dave Foreman of Earth First!, to the current rash of pseudo scientists, who all proclaim that only forced population control can “save the planet”, speak from a philosophical socialist viewpoint, not from any scientific knowledge.
Their origins are not new, in fact even Ralph Waldo Emerson was a firm believer that mankind should be reduced to a few isolated villages, kept in perpetual darkness and prohibited from development or progress by their traveling masters, who he called “Orphic poets”.
Today, many such fools even believe that mankind should die off entirely, as the world is too valuable a place for them to destroy.
It is a facet of the socialists desire to return to “The State of Nature”, which is their secular version of The Garden of Eden. They crave some way in which people could spit out that piece of the fruit if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and return to what they imagine to be a thoughtless herd, like sheep, where all are equal and individuality does not exist.
Such intellectual perversity!
In a speech at my college in 1969, Paul Ehrlich warned that unless the American middle class birth-controlled itself out of existence, the earth was doomed.
Start with Africa, South America, and the Mideast.
Good for you. I wish I’d had five or seven. One of my bigger mistakes when I stopped at three.
Lead by example Mr Rapley. Kill yourself and show others the way.
The world has a billion muslims, so they say.
People-hater ping...
South Americans have been victimized enough by population control advocates.
The tactics that planned parenthood has used on poor people would make your hair stand on end.
Planned parenthood just wishes it could treat the middle class in this country the same way it has treated the poor people who live south of the border.
We need more people, not less. In most developed nations, population growth is at or slightly above zero.
Just the age old struggle between the people and the self styled “elite” over who should runs who’s life.
Sorry not interested in the hysteric demagoguery by this generations collection of closet fascists trying to scare people with fake “crises” into trading liberty for a fake notion of security.
Same song 80th verse. Since the 1950s the power made demagogues of the hysteric Left have been manufacturing one phony crises after another to bolster then demands for absolute power.
1st was overpopulation, then we were going to run out natural resources, then we were going to run out of food, then it was global cooling etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
Sorry NOT at all interested in hearing the latest nonsense being pesented from the "New Age" Baby Boomer religious dementia wrapped up in a pseudo scientific marketing package.
If you get rid of the people, where will you get the soylent green?
Too bad his parents didn’t take that advice.
A modest propoasl......
Boy, yours is one of the most interesting, intelligent posts on this subject Ive ever seen. I hope its correct. Can you substantiate your first paragraph?
Kill Liberals and save the universe!
I see we are cycling through the ‘crisis’ talking points.
population
mercury
lead
DDT or pesticides in general
ozone hole
global cooling
global warming
fresh water
bird flu
yada, yada, yada
There are lots more,.... yawn
Like the Dim’s playbook, the pages are getting pretty dogeared.
Interesting. What you say might be true. It's just that I've never seen such a detailed analysis in support of the claim that wealth is the best contraceptive.
If the population of the US had remained at 140 million
as it was in the 1940s, would the quality of life now
be better or worse...think about it.
Don’t forget Red Dye #2, Alar, Cyclamates, Killer Bees, Y2K, and AIDS.
OK, dickhead, you go first.
Lorraine Bobbit your privates.
Malthusian nonsense. Why not just kill off the 1.2 billion towelheads this year and cut the population growth rate by about 30%? Or is that too Malthusian/Hitlerian for this jerk?
A different picture emerges if you do the counting another way.
Gee...I seem to remember a book some 30 years ago, The Population Bomb, that predicted we’d all be dead from overpopulation by the year 2000. One result was the zero population growth movement that caused many couples in my generation to have no more than two children or even be childless by choice. That’s why Europe and soon the US will be overwhelmed by minorities with higher birth rates.
Amen to that.
Sorry. It’s no longer PC to say that.
ALLAH BE PRAISED.
Do what? Give me the population figures that proves that.
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