Links tagged “overpopulation”

WaPo's Ishaan Tharoor: "Two years ago, the U.N. IPCC warned that without huge, unprecedented cuts to carbon emissions over the next decade, the world would place itself on the brink of climate disaster. Subsequent studies suggested that, even if the demands of climate activists were met, it would take decades to measure any discernible effects.

There are reasons for hope. Myriad governments have embraced ambitious plans to transition their economies toward being carbon neutral....The World Economic Forum - a bastion of optimism - foresees a future in 2030 in which urban centers are transformed into zones shaped by pedestrian activity, technology increasingly obviates the need to own cars, fewer people eat meat, people breathe cleaner air and renewable, clean energy dominates the energy sector."

"But new research inspired by the famous wager between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Erhlich has found just the opposite. Consider the amount of time it takes a typical worker to earn enough money to buy commodities — the “time price” of those items, so to speak.

The recently published “Simon Abundance Index” found that for each 1 percent increase in the world’s population, the average time price of 50 commonly used commodities declined by 0.934 percent. In other words, for each 1 percent increase in population, the cost of commodities has fallen by almost 1 percent. Each child born today eventually grows up to make resources less scarce, on average, by contributing to innovation and the global economy.

So, worrying about overpopulation makes little sense."

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.

"More rapid growth in educational attainment, on the other hand, is likely to produce increased economic activity and an eventual net increase in emissions of around 5% to 25% by 2100, depending on the region."

George Monbiot vs. Michael Moore: 

Monbiot: “The only concrete proposal in your film was that there should be a mass die-off”

“Population growth is what people reach for when they don’t want to face structural and systemic problems, problems such as capitalism. Population growth is what people reach for when they want to kick down, not kick up.”

“What we see is a phenomenon of comparatively wealthy white people saying we’re not the problem, our consumption growth isn’t the issue, its those people breeding, they are the problem. This claim is inherently racist, rich white people blaming poor brown people for an environmental problem which is mainly created by rich white people. This emerges from a very long standing discourse, a discourse which really arose from colonialism, and was used as one of the justifications for colonialism. …”

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Morano responds to Monbiot. "Spot on! It is important to note that it is not conservatives who espouse this, it is typically white male 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’ -