Posted on 11/26/2012 8:51:24 PM PST by Lorianne
It could be true, and our one mistake was not printing billions of cheap copies of Malthus and dropping them over the Third World.
The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Everybody just move one place over to a nice clean plate.
You’re more likely to be wiped out by Obamacare, JR. Don’t know how old you are but they’ll come for the Boomers first.
At first I didn't see the "f". Translation: "forced abortions".
Classic!!!
Actually, algae produces 80% of the world's oxygen.
A fallacy. It is not the planet that supports us, it is we who use the planet to support ourselves. But of course it is much easier to feed off the gullible with an anthropomorphised planet ("Gaia").
From the headline, I was hoping for a takedown of the completely irresponsible, reckless, criminal, unconstitutional and out of control government. But nooo, we get nonsense like this:
"Grantham believes the world has undergone a permanent "paradigm shift" in which the number of people on Earth has finally and permanently outstripped the planet's ability to support us."
There are no limits to the human mind to create.
"The phenomenon of ever-more humans using a finite supply of natural resources cannot continue forever, Grantham says--and the prices of metals, hydrocarbons (oil), and food are now beginning to reflect that."
Ah, Mr. Grantham, have you heard of ethanol subsidies, which take corn and turn it into fuel. There's no corn shortage outside of the Federal Government paying people to take it off the food market. And agricultural productivity is so high, zillions of acres have been taken out of production and could be returned to production if prices go high enough to make it worthwhile.
Second, Mr. Grantham, did you miss the last 2 years in a Rip Van Winkle sleep? Keystone pipeline, Obama closing off the Gulf for oil production and closing off federal lands for oil and gas production. There is so much oil under the US, it's amazing that the lubrication doesn't cause us to slide downhill to the equator.
What a disappointment.
The left is determined to create an artificial energy shortage in order to legitimize rationing and government control, but that is a different story.
That said, the attraction of Malthusian arguments has always been that Malthus must eventually be right, IF population growth is entirely unbounded. We cannot forever outwit geometric growth. We will sooner or later hit the wall on one or more essential commodities. I don't think it will be energy, or food. I would worry more about metals or rare earths. Or water; maybe water first, unless desalinization gets really cheap. We are nowhere near hitting such a limit now, but eventually we will ...
,,, IF population growth remains unbounded. That is the key. And the good news is, it seems increasingly likely that populations will stabilize and eventually decline due to cultural adaptation rather than the Malthusian triad of war, famine, and disease. This is already happening. Every advanced society is experiencing a levelling of population growth. Europe and Japan are already declining. The U.S. is still growing, but only because of immigration. And birthrates are declining in the developing world as societies climb the economic ladder.
The reasons seems to be straightforward. Improved health means that you don't need to have ten kids to ensure that two or three will survive to adulthood. Urban and industrial societies no longer view children as economic assets; they are very expensive to raise, and ever more expensive as living standards incresase, so we have fewer of them. An advanced society also requires a highly trained workforce, which entails many more years of schooling. Everywhere outside the Arab world, this has come to include the women as well. This translates into deferred family formation and, with a later start and higher costs to raise them, fewer kids over a lifetime.
To cut to the chase, it turns out that the cure for overpopulation is prosperity. The faster the third world can bootstrap its way up the ladder, the sooner global population will stabilize. The current FAO/WHO projections are that global population will probably stabilize somewhere around nine billion by mid-century and then begin to slowly decline. If that's correct, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Growth is the solution, not the problem. The Malthusian left has it backwards, and attempts to limit growth, perpetuate poverty, and enforce the pain through coercive government control and rationing. The strategic choice could hardly be clearer.
This guy has the same joke writers as Algore and his ilk.
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