Facing up to the sustainable consumption conundrum (ready, Malthusians?)

EurActiv ^ | 02 July 2012

[Olog-hai]

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle.

Those chilling figures come from a famous World Wildlife Fund ‘Living Planet’ report in 2008, but what exactly can we do to reduce our environmental impact—which has got worse since then—and how should we go about doing it?

People “desperately” need a means of putting the environmental impact of their products into context, according to Martin Barrow, a senior consultant at the UK’s Carbon Trust, which provides companies with certification for their labeling schemes.

“By giving them more and more information they [can] know what the impact of their decisions are,” he said after a workshop on sustainable consumption organised by EurActiv on 13 June. “Then we’re into the area of behavior change,” he added.

Studies undertaken by the Carbon Trust showed that consumers would change their behavior if they were given simple information about a product’s environmental impact on a packet.

With numbers and colors, the Trust found that people could build a “mental map” in a short period of time and establish rules for their consumption.

Such an increased and improved information flow is “the basic way” of addressing sustainable consumption issues, said Ulrike Sapiro, the environmental sustainability director for Coca-Cola Europe, after the same meeting. …

[Pollster1]

Speaking of sustainability, perhaps it’s time to co-opt some of the liberal buzz words. We need sustainable government spending and in particular medical care (it’s NOT “health” care!) laws that allow insurance at a sustainable level. Prepaid unlimited medical care is not sustainable because it creates an irresistible incentive to overuse medical services. It’s time to restore sustainability to our federal budget and to medical spending.

[piasa]

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals

If this is true there must be gigantic glob of the earth's water and minerals hiding somewhere else in the universe, and surely there is a recently created man made moon composed of this "lost land." How did we manage to launch all of it off this world when no one was looking and thus "run out?" How much mass has the earth lost at human hands?

[piasa]

Studies undertaken by the Carbon Trust showed that consumers would change their behavior if they were given simple information about a product’s environmental impact on a packet

Wonder how donors to the "Carbon Trust" and World Wildlife Fund would change their behavior if they knew how much fine dining, parties, indulgent lobbyist saleries and other non-charitable wasteful spending went on at these places using their well-meant charitable donations?

[knarf]

The first sentence induced suicidal thoughts.

[MCF]

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s and 1980’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
- Paul Ehrlich - the first sentence of his 1968 ``The Population Bomb’’

Yep same crap different day.

[SECURE AMERICA]

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle.

UNMITIGATED BULLSHIT.........

[AZLiberty]

And the last sentence reveals their true purpose:

“We have learned that we are moving towards [economic] collapse,” he explained. “It will happen in the second half of the 21st century. So we need drastic change and that means that we cannot leave this to the market.”

[knarf]

Great ...

I shot myself in the first sentence.

What good is the last one if I'm dead?

(Oh yeah ... I can still vote democrat)

[Carriage Hill]

World Wildlife Fund and Carbon Trust.

There’s two left-wing wacko groups I really trust for predictions of any kind. Uh-huh.

[Alberta's Child]

What you're saying is that it's not the number of people that is the issue here, it's their political attitudes.

I could agree with that. In fact, I've long said that urbanization is the biggest threat to liberty in the modern world. It does two things to people that eventually makes them Marxists whether they realize it or not: (1) it makes them increasingly dependent on government in their everyday lives, and (2) it makes them so far removed from the processes of agriculture and production necessary for human existence that it breeds ignorance and idiocy in them.

[SumProVita]

There is NO runaway population growth. The attack on human beings via the old population control mentality has been debunked numerous times.

Did you know this:

Fertility Decline May Unhinge Asian Security, Expert Panel Says

NEW YORK, April 6 (C-FAM) The global fertility freefall is about to cause geopolitical upheaval in Asia, a panel of experts said this week. The experts, all contributors to the new book Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, spoke at the world’s largest gathering of international relations specialists meeting in San Diego, California.

“For years scholars have said that if fewer people were born, the world would be a safer place. It turns out the opposite is true,” Dr. Susan Yoshihara told conferees at the 53rd annual convention of the International Studies Association, which drew more than 5000 scholars from around the world. Yoshihara is director of the International Organizations Research Group at C-FAM and coeditor of the new book with C-FAM Senior Fellow Douglas Sylva.

[SumProVita]

“Groups like Optimum Population Trust play on fear and ignorance. Over-population is based on a long-discredited 1960s paradigm and Paul Ehrlich book, The Population Bomb. The world’s population may be temporarily on the rise, but, worldwide, birthrates have fallen by 50% since the 1960s. Today, almost half the world’s population lives in countries with below-replacement birthrates - in many cases, well below replacement. In Europe, the number of children under 6 has fallen by 36% since 1960. According to the United Nations Population Division, if current trends continue, by 2050 there will be 248 million fewer children in the world under 6 than there are today....

Optimum Population Trust won’t have to worry about so-called carbon footprints when there aren’t enough people (what economists refer to as human capital) to keep modern, industrialized societies functioning.”

Source: Larry Jacobs, World Congress of Families

[Conservative Vermont Vet]

Not to worry, for as soon as Dear Leader's Death Care kicks into high gear and the "Death Panels" start "allocating medical resources," the population (especially for we Seasoned Citizens) will be thinned out quickly.

Let us not forget that B. Hussein's personally recruited "Health Czar" (Dr. Ezekiel "MENGELE" Emanuel) advocates just such a system, as outlined in his "Complete Lives System."

Emanuel: ”Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles: youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. As such, it prioritises (sic) younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid. Many thinkers have accepted complete lives as the appropriate focus of distributive justice: “individual human lives, rather than individual experiences, [are] the units over which any distributive principle should operate.”

Although there are important differences between these thinkers, they share a core commitment to consider entire lives rather than events or episodes, which is also the defining feature of the complete lives system.” “The complete lives system also considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable. Some small benefits, such as a few weeks of life, might also be intrinsically insignificant when compared with large benefits.”

Throw in the other Certifiable, Environmental Nutjobs, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren and we have the makings for an all out effort at reducing our population through "Extraordinary Measures" which go way beyond, simple abortions and will make Nazi Germany's efforts to rid their population of "Undesirables" pale in comparison.

Be afraid, be very afraid!!!

[1010RD]

Soylent Green will feed them.

[nathanbedford]

I do not mean to diminish the importance of understanding the central meaning of civil liberties but I do wish instead to emphasize the danger to those civil liberties from absolute numbers. We conservatives are well aware of the problem of political attitudes but I think we too often reflexively turn a blind eye to dangers inherent in overpopulation because we are intent to reject the political exploitation of an demagoguery of the environmental issues by the left.

I propose discontinuing government incentives to procreation including tax deductions merely for having children; discontinuing the practice of putting unwed mothers in business with welfare; shutting the gates on immigration except for the very wealthy, the very intelligent, and the very skilled.

Above all we must lose our fear of the reduction in population. The arguments we hear that Social Security will crash only tell us that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme which must be continuously supported by increasing population. The music will stop someday. Eventually we will have to reckon wealth not by figuring efficiency per man-hour costs but on capital investment, on the deployment of robots, for example.

For the record, I am opposed to abortion and opposed to population control. I support the withdrawal of incentives to procreate and closing the borders which are entirely different matters.

[muir_redwoods]

Good idea. How does sustainable immigration sound?

[reformedliberal]

I could agree, except that my area is a magnet for high-income urban professionals who come here, set up housekeeping in a pole building to avoid taxes, outfit the inside of that building as though it was a high-end loft in NYC, hire managers, legally import ag workers via government programs,hire trained chefs to provide the workers with gourmet meals and then they spend their day on the phone as they flit around to every large city within 250 miles, selling their organic produce to high-end restaurants. Every weekend, they send the English-speaking workers to Farmers Markets where they also sign up other urban professionals for the CSAs. They can gross $1.5M a year on under 100 acres. Somehow, they manage to survive blight, drought, heat waves and floods. They gloss over having to use diesel and electricity. It isn’t destructive when they do it.

They are extreme liberals who condescend to the knuckle dragging real farmers who produce corn, beans, dairy and hogs. They bash Christians without even trying to discover the faith of those with whom they are speaking and they love all taxes as long as they don’t have to pay them. Eventually, they build mansions, complete with walk-in freezers for their heirloom pigs and cattle. They run for County Board and are experts on grant facilitation. Few even have children and if they do, those kids leave as soon as they can, although they will be back in 30 years to claim the land as inheritance.

Perhaps it is their origin in the cities that makes them complete idiots. However, returning to agriculture doesn’t change them. They are, first and foremost, bosses, without ever having done any of the essential manual labor. That’s what the government-supported imported farm workers are for.

[nathanbedford]

“There is NO runaway population growth.”

The population of America has more than doubled in my lifetime.

[Soul of the South]

The progressives have won the battle for nationalized health insurance in the US. Obamacare will not be overturned even with a Republican President, House, and Senate. McConnell essentially proclaimed this fact yesterday. Now that the architecture is in place, over the next 3-5 years we will slowly “evolve” to a single payer government system. Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling the leftists received an added bonus from the Supreme Court giving the state the power to tax anything in any amount. No doubt they will find many creative ways to use this unlimited taxing power as time progresses and the insatiable appetite of the state demands more resources.

On to the next fight. Global warming and resource depletion are already being set up to justify population control. State run health care enshrines the slaughter of the unborn. It will also provide the mechanism to move into forced euthanasia.

Add an economic depression to the mix, as well as government policies deliberately preventing recovery, and you have economic limitations on what government can spend on health care. Economic constraints, and the addition of 30 million new recipients, means rationing. Once we have single payer controlled by the state, the state will decide who gets medical care, when, and how much just as it does in the UK and Canada.

For most of us it will not matter if we have the economic resources (accumulated life savings) to pay for needed care, if the government bureaucrat decides you are too old or too feeble for the heart transplant or hip replacement, you won’t get it. This will be done in the name of “fairness”. When you are 75 it won’t be “fair” for the society to spend resources on providing you a procedure, even if you pay for it, when the 75 year old fourth generation welfare lifelong welfare recipient doesn’t have the resources to pay. There will be arbitrary age cut offs for certain procedures. In the name of fairness average citizens will be told when you hit age 75 you won’t be eligible for a transplant of any kind.

There will of course be exceptions but most of us won’t be eligible. The President and Congress have exempted themselves from the system. No doubt there will soon be politically defined exceptions for prominent citizens deemed special by the elites controlling the state. When Oprah needs a transplant at 78 she will get one no matter how obese she is at the time because she is a cultural icon. By politicizing the availability life prolonging medical care for senior citizens, the state will ensure agreement with its other policies. No doubt the 60 year old county commissioner or state senator isn’t going to make many waves against the established order if he or she knows the bureaucrats are monitoring her behavior. She is going to be ingratiating herself to the established order so when it becomes time to ask for the exception to the rule she has a fighting chance.

Within 3-5 years I expect to see the retirement age extended to 70 in order to save Social Security and Medicare. I also expect the single payer state to set arbitrary limitations on life extending healthcare procedures for people in their 70’s. After all for the progressive state, once you are no longer productive and paying into the tax system, you immediately become a burden on society.

Citizens who have been extremely productive and thrifty over a lifetime may accumulate wealth despite increasingly onerous taxation. A leviathan state will covet these accumulated resources once the individual is no longer producing tax revenue. One way to do this is to confiscate these resources through high inheritance taxes (coming in 2013 with Taxmaggedon). State controlled healthcare will be used to accelerate end of life so the state can harvest these assets. As mentioned previously seniors above a certain age will be arbitrarily denied certain procedures. While Obama famously said you may have to take a pill instead of get an operation, there will come a time when the pain reducing pill will be denied. Hence, “end of life counseling”.

Imagine you are 82, have been denied the hip replacement, and have lived 3 or four years with pain killers to have some quality of life. At 82 the state decides not to provide the pain killer. Now your day is lived with excruciating pain and you are confined to a wheelchair for limited mobility. You have other ailments that make life difficult, perhaps arthritis in the hands for which you are denied painkillers. No doubt the health care advisors will advise you to take the final pill to end your life. You will end your suffering and do society good by eliminating the burden on your family, friends, and state. Your children, having been indoctrinated in state run schools and fearing being labeled resisters by the bureaucrats in the shadows, will also encourage you to do the right thing instead of fighting the system.

China already limits couples to one child. Some of the progressives are already writing about the need to reduce the global human population to the hundreds of millions from the billions today. To accomplish this goal it will be necessary to arbitrarily sterilize young females as well as force mass euthanasia.

The elites of today condemn religion (except Islam) and promote an “anything goes” amorality. It isn’t hard to foresee a future where they justify mass genocide for the benefit of Gaia and the greater good as they define it. The signs are already there.

[SumProVita]

So what?