Links tagged “ehrlich”

UK Guardian: "Census data from the US released last week showed the number of babies born in the country in 2020 dropped to the lowest level in more than four decades. The same day, Japan marked Children’s Day by announcing that the number of under-14s in the country had fallen for the 40th consecutive year to a record low." ... "It is not just in the rich world that the appetite for having children is falling. Also in 2020, China may have recorded its first overall population decline since a catastrophic famine in the late 1950s, the Financial Times has reported." ... 

"Last century, the global demographic panic was about an overpopulated world running out of food. Those fears have long looked out of date, but it is only recently that we have understood how soon much of the world may be grappling with shrinking populations. ... An end to global population growth could have advantages, including relieving pressure on our battered environment, particularly if the decline is centred in carbon-intensive wealthier economies."

Such a fall would remove some of the projected strain on natural resources but would present governments with stark policy choices over migration and the economy. The world’s population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064 and decline to 8.8 billion by the end of the century, according to research led by the University of Washington in the US and published in the Lancet. It says some countries, including Japan, Spain and Italy, will see their populations halve, while sub-Saharan Africa’s population will triple in the next 80 years. ...

The number of older people will overtake the young, with 2.4 billion people over the age of 65 forecast by 2100, compared with 1.7 billion under the age of 20. The major factors in shrinking the population are widening access to contraception and improvements in educating women and girls. If those trends are curtailed, higher growth will ensue.

Federal figures released Wednesday show that women in the U.S. had babies record-low rates in 2019, causing the number of U.S. births to reach the smallest number in 35 years. The data demonstrates that birth rates in the U.S. have not rebounded since the 2007-2009 recession when childbearing began declining. U.S. women gave birth to about 3.75 million babies in 2019, a number which is down 1% from 2018, the WSJ reports from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics figures. CDC data show that fertility rates fell 2% — 58.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 — reaching the lowest levels since the government began tracking this data in 1909, the publication reports.

Paul Ehrlich: "I don't know a single person, virologist, epidemiologist on -- I know a lot of them -- I trust them all. Everybody says the same thing. We desperately need a national shutdown, and ordered from the top."

Ehrlich on his book: "The worst mistake we made was to put in scenarios. which are little stories to help you think about the future. But every reviewer treated them as if they were predictions. And I would not do that again."

 Ehrlich: "Even people as smart as Obama won't say we have too many people, we are growing too fast."

"I don't think there is a chance in hell that we will get the changes we need to keep civilization going. I hate to tell you that. But I don't see any sign. I can't be optimistic." -  "I had great hopes I would die before the collapse really got going, but I missed. The smartest thing I ever did was to be born in 1932."

"If you think the health problems of this virus pandemic are serious. They are nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the health threat of climate change. There is no chance as far as we can tell that this particular coronavirus will kill everybody, but climate disruption can kill everybody. And we have very little time to act. And instead of acting in the right direction, this moronic imbecile (Trump) is working very hard to kill Americans and other human beings in the future for his personal gain and profit." 

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Overpopulation guru Paul Ehrlich still ginning up fear at age 87: ‘It’s insane to have so many people alive at the same time’ – Claims: ‘Trump’s got a lot of blood on his hands’

Monbiot nails the root of the overpopulation fears: "So why do so many people in the rich world (the great majority of whom, in my experience, are male, white and quite affluent) insist, often furiously, that the 'real' global issue, the 'elephant in the room', is population growth?"

Monbiot's answer: "What we see is white people pointing the finger at black and brown people, saying “It’s not us. It’s Them”... The answer to my question - 'why do so many people in rich nations claim that the biggest environmental problem is population growth?' - is…Racism."

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Morano responds to Monbiot. "Spot on George! It is important to note that it is not conservatives who espouse this, it is typically white liberals who worry about "overpopulation" in countries with people of color. One of the loudest cheerleaders of reducing African nations' population has been Al Gore. Below is what Gore said at a Bill Gates event in 2014."

Flashback 2014: Gore: ‘Fertility management’ is needed to reduce the number of Africans to help ‘control the proliferation of unusual weather’ -  Gore: 'Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available so women can choose how many children and the spacing of children -- is crucial to the future shape of human civilization. Africa is projected to have more people than China and India by mid-century. More than China and India combined by the end of the century. And this is one of the causal factors that must be addressed'

Michael Shellenberger on Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion Green New Deal: "Rather than being progressive, in the sense of redistributing wealth, or labor-saving, and growth-encouraging, the proposal is regressive. It would disproportionately hurt the poor by making them pay more for basic goods like food and energy. And it would slow economic growth by reducing labor-productivity.

Sanders may deny that his Green New Deal would increase energy prices, but in boasting that it will create 20 million more jobs, he is pointing to the reason why energy prices would rise. Making anything more labor-intensive makes it more expensive. 

And making energy, the master resource of the economy, more expensive, Sanders’ plan would slow growth, which would in turn reduce wage growth, and reduce the societal wealth needed for Sanders’ social programs, home-building, and more liberal social attitudes toward minorities, women, and children."

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Environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth,” complained civil rights legend, Bayard Rustin, to Time Magazine in 1979. The Malthusians, he said, “would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.” The Malthusians knew they needed a way to rationalize their agenda as moral. They did so by adopting the progressive language of wealth redistribution. The unholy alliance between Marxists and Malthusians was partly inspired by an argument between Ehrlich and the ostensibly socialist New Yorker writer, Barry Commoner, over the issue of population control and poverty. Commoner blamed poverty for food crises, where Ehrlich blamed overpopulation.

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In the early 2000s, my colleagues and I dusted off the Green New Deal created by Commoner and called it a “New Apollo Project.” All of the basic elements were the same: massive taxpayer investments in renewables, organics, efficiency, mass transit, and much else in the progressive agenda that can be justified as somehow reducing emissions. Twenty-five billion was wasted on biofuels. Tens of billions more were wasted on energy efficiency programs that cost more than they were worth. Well-connected venture capitalists got rich. Wealth was distributed upwards. And the renewables it subsidized contributed to rising electricity costs.