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 ...
If this science chief checked...he’d find that German birth numbers are seriously decreasing...without any intentional efforts (in fact, the gov’t is desperate to increase them). You see some decreasing in other European countries although Muslim families are making up for the losses. One needs to ask why the Germans went this direction, without urging or forceful gov’t programs...and the answer is simply taxation. Enough tax increases over the past 30 years have made it silly to have more than one kid in a family. The money incentives offered in recent years to change the situation...have absolutely no effect...so that should tell you alot about the way people start thinking.
The good thing is, he probably will.
Maybe, just maybe, white people didn’t reproduce themselves because they bought into the overpopulation lie, but the turd world didn’t hold up their end.
To the extent that there is manmade global warming, I have no doubt its because the population has doubled in the last fifty years.
There are a lot of reasons why people aren’t reproducing, including the one you mentioned. In the end, however, most people perceive children as more of a liability than anything else. I’ll bet a typical child costs over $500K to raise (birth through college). Add that to the cost of not knowing if your kids will be superstars or duds. And there is no social cost for not having children. It explains the pattern ‘cause people will always act in their own self interest.
For those of us who have kids, its definitely worth it. However, for many thinking about making the leap, its a huge commitment in a society that rewards flexibility.
That wasn’t the case 100 years ago when most people still worked on farms and there was no social safety net. Back then, having kids was almost an economic necessity. After that, through the 60s, it was a social necessity (people looked at you funny if you were over 40 with no family). We’ve changed the objective function we were using for the last 8000+ years. Its definitely unexplored territory and could well result in a major civilizational transformation.
As far as overpopulation being a myth, P.J. O’Rourke did a good piece on that in one of his books, “All The Trouble In The World”, which points out that the critical assumption of overpopulation, famine, is dictated much less by population or food supply than local government and culture. His description of Bangladesh, especially, was almost painful, as their land is so fertile, if they but had good government and culture, they would be a wealthy nation.
The United States itself attained the economic plateau resulting in reduced population growth many years ago, as an old example, but one of the newest is Mexico. In an argument lost in the immigration debate, Mexico’s birthrate has dropped 36% since 1990 and is now 2.1 children per family.
It should also be mentioned that while this economic plateau seems to happen spontaneously, government and culture have considerable difficulty increasing it; but they can very effectively *lower* the birthrate even further.
That is, once at the economic plateau, it is typical for couples to have 2.1 to 2.3 children. But by adding extra burdens to the raising of children, the government or the culture can persuade couples to have even fewer children.
The most effective way of doing this is to encourage females to enter the workforce, instead of being homemakers, then raise taxes so that many feel that they have to work, or that they, as a couple, can’t “get by”. This deprives the couple of the time and energy they need to have and raise children.
On top of that, government and culture might dictate that children must have many expensive opportunities and material goods to be “properly raised”. This further dissuades potential parents from having children “they cannot afford.”
With each additional burden levied on potential parents, the birthrate continues to drop below sustainability. And if the government is positively grotesque, making the society a hellish one, like under communism, many people will swear off having children at all.
Finally, as far as the other argument of population, the lack of material resources, goes, while it is theoretically possible, as a practical matter it has never strongly impacted our society. For example, when we no longer had enough gold on which to base our currency, we stopped basing our currency on it without collapse.
Peak oil is another population argument, but that, too, is less than convincing. For even if we reach peak oil before alternatives to oil are developed, it won’t mean that the vast majority of oil is no longer available, only that new and marginal uses for oil will have to pay more. So even with peak oil, there is no real crisis.
As far as food production goes, many years ago we faced a serious potential crisis in food production. That was, that other than China, which fed itself, most of the rest of the world was fed by grain from the US, Canada and Argentina. And having such a limited number of suppliers was a problem in waiting.
So the USDA began a program to create grains that could live in marginal ground around the world. Soon there were many producers of grain, and the situation normalized.
But unlike radical environmentalists and overpopulation zealots, whose emphasis is always on having less, doing less, no further development and reduced prosperity; the intelligent approach to meeting such problems is by growing ourselves out of them, developing new technologies, so that we, and the rest of the world, can continue to have more and better in the future.
I agree, we don't need millions more people. It's kind of a no-brainer.
“get rid of a few billion people’
Well, now we know what war is good for.
“Hooh! Good gawd, y’all.”
It sounds good but...
...Los Angeles is a mess, California country-side is being gobbled out at a horrendous rate by development, friends and tourists tell me its the same everywhere.
and there’s no substitute for land, no way to make more of it.
so...
I don’t believe your rosy scenario.
What you describe is different from overpopulation. That is over-, or unwise development. Different causes, different solutions.
My grandfather, back when he was in college, wrote a graduate paper on the massive demographic shift the US was experiencing, as vast numbers of rural inhabitants moved to the cities. Starting after WWI, the big question was “How can Johnny return to the farm once he has seen Paris?”
In brief, he couldn’t, and didn’t want to. Then other big events, such as the dust bowl, added to the migration, as well as “the decline in family farms”, across the US.
Today, much of middle America is almost depopulated, except in the pinpoints of big cities in each State. This is why the cities seem crowded. No one has yet come up with any reason for people to return to rural America.
No jobs, few communities, boredom. In some States, they even now offer homesteaders tracts of land, low taxes, and cash bonuses just for moving there, but there are few takers.
You might even ask yourself if California is so dense, as it were, why not leave? For the price of a house there, you could afford a ranch elsewhere. But your motivations are much the same as other peoples.
Yeah, and we replaced them with 50 million immigrants and their posterity.
People move to urban centers like LA because population growth creates economic opportunity and greater wealth. Many parts of the American mid-west have towns that the only people left are older people because their children have moved to better opportunities. Forcastes are that when these older people die off these areas will experience massive population decline (unless Mexicans move in to take their place).
Strange, self-inflicted ethnic cleansing.
That’s like blowing out the pilot light and going out to get drunk because you don’t have money for groceries.
Tom Clancy already dealt with this in his novel, RaninBow Six.
Environmentalist whackos develop a virus to kill off most of the people on earth, designed to be unleashed during the Sydney Olympics.
Of course, the antiterrorist team RAINBOW foils their plans.
It was a definite economic necessity. You had kids, and they would work the farm from the time that they could walk (toddlers could pull up weeds) until they either struck out on their own (all but the eldest) or until their parents died (for the case of the eldest, who stood to inherit the farm)
For the eldest son, it was a simple deal: support your parents until they died, and you inherit the farm or business. Don't, and it goes to which ever child IS willing to. So it was in the economic interest of parents then to have as many children as they could feed
Now, much of the income of the middle class goes to support those on welfare on those in government (and for many of those, a govt job is just another form of welfare), so that the underclass can have more kids while the middle class can no longer afford to
Soylent Green is people!
You don't mention that the plan was to kill off everybody BUT members of their environmentalist group, for whom they had the only vaccine
Population has doubled, more likely tripled, since your grandfather's day. The California coast, from the Mexican border almost to San Francisco and inland 80 or so miles is one big unban-suburban center, most of it too pricey for young families. So they're moving inland - just as de Tocqueville predicted 180 years ago. The western deserts are harsh and largely waterless but they're trying in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Pahrump, Albuquerque, and a lot of places no one ever heard of. Another 50 or 100 years and the American heartland will be resettled far more densely than before.
Then what?
Let him be first. We’ll do a little snip-snip on him and that’ll be where we start.
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