As the world looks to Copenhagen for solutions to a changing climate, China's vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission has expressed a viewpoint that has generally been overlooked or ignored - that it may be more effective to limit world population growth than to limit CO2 emissions per se.
Research at the London School of Economics has suggested that money expended on family planning reduces CO2 emissions more efficiently than money expended on hybrid vehicles or solar and wind power.
Link.
As a result of the family planning policy, China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year, Zhao said.
The UN report projected that if the global population would remain 8 billion by the year 2050 instead of a little more than 9 billion according to medium-growth scenario, "it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions".
Research at the London School of Economics has suggested that money expended on family planning reduces CO2 emissions more efficiently than money expended on hybrid vehicles or solar and wind power.
Link.
this is a basic tenet of global control by a one-world government.
read Revelations and become educated...prepare thyself.
seven horns on seven heads.
i disagree
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Hopefully. It only takes four days for the global population to rise by a million people. Any way we can voluntarily reduce population growth on our own will be much less brutal than nature's way of thinning the herd.
Fewer people = less pollution, no matter how you look at it.
It sounds so good, let's get that one-world government in place right now with no questions asked. I'm sure this will be fine.
How's one-child-per family working in China these days? Popular policy, no?
If I wanted to hear advice on ruthless tyranny on a scale the world has rarely ever witnessed, I'll make sure to talk to the nice folks in Beijing.
Funny how the same people who have spent the last few generations enforcing some of the most dystopian, centrally planned reproductive policies ever invented are now advocating, wait for it, some of the most dystopian, centrally planned reproductive policies ever invented.
Why is it that every "solution" our masters propose to solve every goddamn problem in the world involves giving *more* control to the people that already wield it? And we're supposed to ignore the fact that this advice is coming from some of the worst monsters ever to wield it, and that it shores up their power?
Is that just a coincidence? And everyone should just go with the flow? Or am I just being an f*ing idiot troll?
The FRAUD of Anthropogenic Global Warming is a tool for EUGENICS!!!
Btw, the fraudmeisters have "made" man-made global warming by the improper dismissal of Urban Heat Island and the false signal these impose upon stations during "homoginization".
FWIW, I used to believe in ManBearPig. But then the Earth stopped warming and I looked into the "science". The short of it is figures don't lie, but liars do figure... then they run out anyone telling the truth and lie about them being funded by big oil (who supports the cap n trade scam)
Can't believe a normally moral blog like neatorama would support EUGENICS, which any form of government population control will always become. How many millions will die in the next decade?
They are talking about providing funding for family planning- access to and education about birth control methods. And they're right- this is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. It is also an effective way to promote development, education, and economic growth in impoverished areas, while empowering women to have more say in the course of their lives and more control over their bodies.
That statistic though- that China saved 18 million tons of CO2 by preventing 400 million birhts- has to be a gross underestimate, since China's average CO2 emissions are ~5 tons per person per year.
As a feminist and a progressive, I whole heartedly endorse family planning, but not legal guidelines for reproduction. China is not a role model for the rest of the world. Although, Rocky, their program had more to do with slowing growth than stopping it completely, the real issue that China faces is the imbalance of the sexes.
Anyway, I'm not really worried about it, because unlike some of the loons here, I know that the Western world would not seriously consider that level of infringement on personal liberty. We simply wouldn't tolerate it and any government that adopted it would be committing political suicide.
By 2100, the population of the USA will be nearly a billion due to unlawful immigration. At CURRENT rates of fertility, by 2250, the world population would theoretically be 230 trillion, an impossible number; there is not enough carbon in this galaxy. And yet, people like Pat Robertson say that Texas alone can easily and comfortably accommodate 14-20 billion people, so what is the problem? A radio preacher said the other day that people need no more than a few square yards of living space, and the world can support therefore hundreds of billions easily.
If we are not willing to control population growth now, in reasonable and decent ways, then by sheer necessity, totalitarian governments will replace all other forms of governing if a nation wishes to survive the nightmare that the Earth will become. And they will make China's current policy look benign in comparison. Maybe even the Nazi's approach will inspire nostalgia.
But seriously, this is such a complicated issue. The solution is evidently to move on to other planets when this one's too dirty. Tickets for a ride in the spaceship will be 1 billion euros and you might have to share room with an elephant and a giraffe, so start saving up now.
Or, once we send the first manned spaceship to Mars the astronauts will discover some ancient alien technology that once activated transforms the planet's atmosphere to be Earth-like in a few seconds. Tickets for a flight to Mars should be significantly lower than one to go to an actual other inhabitable planet far away somewhere in the neighbor galaxies. Start saving up now, nonetheless.
Actually, might not have to save up, if half the world's population leaves Earth, then Earth will heal, should be fine a few years later I guess. The remaining population will just have to plant a few tree's and drink their own filtered urine for while.
Another idea would be if farting was against the law and punishable by death, a law adopted in every country (expect for some personal islands, where rich people could go to fart all day long).
So this was my contribution to this topic.
Take care & fart less.
Currently in the USA, a "child free" person still pays taxes for all school related needs even without kids. The argument may be that people in general need to grow up to be educated (ie this person will wipe your ass in the nursing home), however, that dosn't change the fact that there are people (with kids) who benefit from these Taxes DIRECTLY, whereas those without kids get ...a better future of people? Uh YAY?
Meanwhile, single parent welfare mom is being directly rewarded for popping out 5-6 kids. Yay for the system.
When countries become more prosperous, the birth rate declines. Japan, right now, has a crisis because there are not enough babies being born to replace the aging population.
Critical resources are replaced long before they run out. We didn't stop using whale oil to light our homes because we ran out of whales. We didn't stop using horse drawn carriages because we ran out of oats and hay. We changed our behavior because we invented something cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient to replace them.
Modern famines and shortages of water are not caused by overpopulation. They're created by politics. Insane leaders who plunder the wealth of their countries, who substitute politics and ideology for sound scientific principles, or who actively interfere with people's ability to feed themselves in order to eliminate undesirables. See Norman Borlaug's agricultural breakthroughs for an example what can happen when people are allowed to do things right.
People without kids should get a tax break, imo.
And:
we need to stop throwing money at irrisponsible people that pop out kids for government freebies.
Thank you! Exactly what I'm talking about. My husband and I pay more taxes than a family with kids, we get no earned income credit or any of the benefits people who reproduce get, plus- if we lose our jobs, we get no help from any agency. If you don't have kids and you're unemployed, you starve. I've supported welfare moms, head start and other services for parents with my tax dollars all my working life, yet could not get any help whatsoever when I was unemployed a few years ago.
This "population control is a tool of the one world government" theory is total crap. I voluntarily chose with my own free will to remain childless and be permanently sterilized. People in China and most everywhere else can do that too, but they often don't. Letting go of the mindset that "we *HAVE* to have kids" is something more people need to start doing. We're not an endangered species, for crying out loud!
Clearly you don't fully understand what eugenics is. Population control is not eugenics. Secective breeding for certain traits is in humans is.
Also, Neatorama is not suppporting this particular argument, it is merely presenting it.
You may also be interested to know that eugenics is not spelled in all capitals.
But because they are blind to population growth, there's one obstacle they haven't considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.
If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.
Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"
1. do you force abortions on those who become pregnant with one too many? Do you fine them? Do these unwanted kids become socially stigmatized?
2. Europe's 'indigenous' population is already committing demographic suicide - less 'europeans' are born than are dying every year. The most popular newborn name in many of Europe's and England's major cities is Mohammed, in one iteration or another. What's that continent going to look like in a couple generations? What does it mean for it's (and our) traditional liberal values?
Meanwhile, Japan is freaking out over its demographic suicide as well. They are facing the import of millions of foreign workers or face economic collapse. Either way, Japan, its people and its culture as we know is in its twilight, and many think it can't pull out of its nose dive either.
3. there is an underlying racism to the pop-control agenda - America's population is not exploding (though not as low as Europe's replacement levels). So we're really talking about controlling the populations of Latin America, Arabia, Africa, parts of Asia. How do we force the populations of other countries to limit pregnancies? Is Indonesia, for instance, likely to follow "our" rules? Probably not. Do we pressure them in some fashion? Wouldn't that be imperialistic, not to mention racist, somehow?
Finally, doesn't any of this pop-control talk smack of totalitarianism to any of you?
Btw, China, despite their talk, is in the process of reversing its one child policy:
"Experts have warned that China is steadily moving toward a demographic crisis with too many old people in need of expensive services and too few young workers paying taxes to meet those bills. " - NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/world/asia/29china.html) as they face their own demographic nightmare.
Actually:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXWeOa-FuyM
money quote at 2:00.
Enjoy a fresh taste of reality.
Bye!
And as alfalfa in #35 points out, if a country with socialism or communism (in other words a country that needs a lot of taxes to run) has a population decline, their social programs will have to be cut because there are not enough tax payers to pay for the programs.
As it stands, look at how ineffectual a body like the UN proves to be. Member nations use its influence and money to serve their own needs and screw over their rivals routinely. Look at how the American government manipulated them to get the political clout to invade Iraq for just a minor example.
Like it or not, nations have to work together, but none of them like each other enough to want to actually give up their sovereignty to merge. Nations are more likely to split, a la Pakistan and India or Chekoslavakia (sp?) in spite of crap like the UN or the League of Nations.
There's your freaking "fresh taste of reality." Could you sound more like a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy crank?
1) We're not going to go out and kill 40% of the population, so this would have to be a long-term (multiple generations) "solution." We don't have that much time to solve the problem.
2) 68% of the world's electricity is consumed by 36% of the world's people. From just that, it's clear that population control isn't a solution at all.
3) Efficiency and consumption control are the solutions. If the US and China implemented California's efficiency standards, we'd gain some 50 years on the problem instead of having less than 10 years.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/25/alex-renton-population-control-climate-change
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438
There's a good chance this thinking will slither away as it did after the 70's, but the outcome is never certain and it's still shocking how stupid ideas like this can take hold of seemingly intelligent people.
Anyway, toodaloo - I'm off to buy more tinfoil.
The problem here is that even those scientists who agree in climate change are divided between two camps: 1) those who say we are entering into a new Ice Age, and 2) those who say we will be entering into an era of climate warming. This is therefore not a settled issue.
If you listen to the new Ice Age advocates, the action to bring down CO2 levels will even hasten the coming of this ice age. So we should not be surprised if the public is divided because the scientists are not unanimous on this matter.
Personally, I think both groups are wrong, and I suspect that the lack of agreement on the conclusions is due to the flow of money which is the real subject matter in Copenhagen. Scientists should forget Copenhagen because politics and finance is going to distort scientific conclusions. Take note that Copenhagen is not talking about the forests. It is talking about control and redirection of industrial development via limits to CO2 emissions.
There is not yet enough scientific data for the arrival of a proper conclusion. For example, without a determination in terms of the aggregate capacity of the biosphere to absorb CO2, then the worry about increase in CO2 levels may be unfounded.
Then there is the fact that carbon related emissions are heavier than air, and therefore we should not expect CO2 to increase its levels in the atmosphere because it will eventually precipitate. And there is the matter of thermodynamics which make improbable that 400 ppm of CO2 will have any impact on the 999,600 ppm of nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor in the atmosphere. A direct association in terms of heat transfer and association is not possible given the percentages.
While it is true that deforestation has diminished the ability of the biosphere to absorb CO2, there has yet been no determination as to how much human and microbial activity contribute to absorption (NASA have said that 50% is absorb by plankton and other ocean plantlife). The activity of people to store food, clothing, build homes, and increase its population including livestock (all of these being carbon related materials) has not been given numbers or included in the discussion. The symbiosis between the flora and bacteria in the production of Oxygen, CO2, methane and water has not been quantified.
And then there is the wobble of the Earth which definitely will change the climate patterns of the planet, this has not also been factored in or that its contribution has been isolated. Definitely, the change in surface positions relative to the sun is expected to shift the occurrence of seasons in the different places.
And back to deforestation, the dynamics here involve hydrologic activity (the release of vapor and the retention + deposition of water in aquifers and forests lands), the release of oxygen, and the deposition of CO2 into the soils in the form of wood and leaf decay residuals. Scientist are not even talking about this in terms of being able to give specific quantities of the total production mix, and how each element produce will impact on one to the other and vice versa. For example, how much more heat will water vapor absorb from the sun if its quantity will go up to 5%. Without factoring water into the equation, considering that there are more clouds in the sky than CO2, any attempt to make a conclusion will be automatically false.
And finally, no scientist is talking about the increase of moisture in the atmosphere, and the constancy of the saltiness of the oceans as indicators of where the waters from the ice caps are going. If the oceans have not been diluted by the melting ice, it means that the waters did not stay in the oceans. If the waters do not stay in the oceans because of evaporation, two things are false about the Gore predictions: 1) the ocean waters will increase its levels, 2) increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Also, Sarah Palin is likewise wrong. Both Palin and Gore are in error together with the polarized scientists who are behind each.
In conclusion, it is not CO2 that is changing the weather; it is the water that is moving its locus from the ice caps to the atmosphere plus the Earth's wobble.