Climate Change and Abortions
September 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm by David FarrarReaders recall my satirical post about the Green Party advocating compulsory abortions, to fight climate change.
Well again sometimes fiction gets close to truth.
John Holdren is President Obama’s Science Czar. In 1977 he co-authored a textbook which has some views which are, well … read for yourself. Now to be fair to him he says today he does not advocate compulsory population control, but it shows that such extremism is not as far away as we like to think.
So what did he say:
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
That compulsory abortions could be constitutional to save the planet!
One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
1977 was not that long ago. Now again to be fair to Hodren he doesn’t quite endorse forcing solo mothers to marry or abort, but he describes the possibility without disapproval.
Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
Mass sterilisation so long as it doesn’t affect pets ro livestock. Today the Greens might argue it is a bonus if it sterilises the cows also!
Involuntary fertility control
…
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
…
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.
Maybe he once consulted to China? Who need toasters when you can use a sterilizing capsule.
If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.
This could be a private members bill for ACT – the reproductive responsibility act 
In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?
Well if you have too many wives, you are forced to divorce all but one of them. So what do you do if you have too many children?
Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
Now from my reading of this he wants the UNEP, now probably part of the UNDP, to control planetary population and resources. I’d say Helen Clark is liking her new job more and more.
Thank God this fruitcake doesn’t have any influence, such as being chief science advisor to the President of the United States of America. Oh wait a second ….
Related posts:
- Contraception to stop climate change
- Fracking good for climate change
- Coddington on climate change and population
- Lomborg on Climate Change
September 28th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
DPF
You are very busy today. You have done 20 posts but you do not have enough time to moderate the posts for real humans as you announced last week. And you had time to complete a long detailed post on electoral law review proposals.
You seem to have plenty of time. Do you not have time to do the moderation or are you hoping to bury the blinglish story, although to be fair one of your posts is on this.
Your “compulsory abortion” post is designed to set the dogs loose.
Shall I add a bit. Do we agree to abortion or do we acknowledge a world wide population policy that allows sufficient growth that may cause the environment to collapse?
[DPF: Off topic early comments 10 demerits. Use general debate]
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Textbook?
It reads like a cheap science fiction novel!
DPF I was thinking the same thing, 1997 was not that long ago.
I loved this bit…
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
A chauvinistic nutbar what’s more.
Vote:And what was that saying about judging people by the company they keep?
September 28th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Micky
The abortion of Greens and all other lefties should be compulsory if they advocate that crap.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
DPF I was thinking the same thing, 1997 was not that long ago.
According to Holdren’s wikipedia page the book DPF was talking about was written in 1977, not 1997. That is a pretty long time ago. The wiki article elaborates:
In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls,including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended “the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences” such as access to birth control and abortion.
[DPF: 1997 was a typo. I said 1977 later down also]
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
After Sue Bradford’s shameful misuse of taxpayers money and parliamentary time over the smacking debate
I DO NOT want to hear ONE grizzling greenie tell me that they support abortion as a means to looking after the planet.
Because you cannot on the one hand make it illegal for parents to smack a child
Vote:and in the same hypocritical breath – require that babies be slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs as a form of population control.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
1977, not 1997 is the correct date for this. This also reads to me more like an exploration of possibilities, something that many academics do, rather than recommending particular actions. It’s extreme explorations like this that often throw up the odd gem of genius, in amongst the radical and rather scary stuff. While he may not have disavowed the book, he certainly appears to be making no claims that the world should follow these steps at this point in time.
To me, this seems to be less dangerous than it really is – unless of course some nutjob decides these ideas are good and decides to put them in action. After all freedom of thought and speech means we must entertain the few wild ideas, that are hopefully drowned out by the valid arguments against them.
Don’t discount that Hadron may have also been playing somewhat of a Devil’s advocate. The ideas are worth condemning, but the scientist, not necessarily.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Trying to justify this on the basis of merely discussing possibilities is pretty weak. Such extreme stuff should never be in textbooks.
It is the equivalent of having a chapter in an economic textbook on how slavery can help an economy, but saying overall we think there are better ways.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
zombietime.com looks like a right wing crazy site. i’m always suspicous if you have to trawl thru endless links to get to what people actually have said.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
” democracymum
Because you cannot on the one hand make it illegal for parents to smack a child
and in the same hypocritical breath – require that babies be slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs as a form of population control.”
Fetus’ not babies, HTH.
Meh, I don’t see what the big deal is, I’ve seen righties on here advocating for half of that stuff before, for maaaris anyway at least.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
God knows I haven’t changed the views I had in 1977.
Three years before I was born.
Hands up who here agrees with their 1977 selves on just about anything.
What are his views now?
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
It is the equivalent of having a chapter in an economic textbook on how slavery can help an economy, but saying overall we think there are better ways.
I think the analogy is closer to an economist writing about different models – slavery, mercantilism, communism and capitalism and recommending capitalism, and thirty years later someone comes along and quotes selected excerpts out of context while ommitting the conclusion.
[DPF: This is a textbook, not an essay. I was at school in 1977. No economics textbook talked about slavery as an economic model.
The stuff he talks about is so deranged it should never have been in a textbook. The 1970s were not a culture of forced abortions and sterilisations.
Again some more analogies. A social studies textbook that discusses eugenics to wipe out Jews and Blacks. And nowhere does it condemn eugenics, merely conclude there are better ways to improve the genetic stock of mankind.]
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Danyl says:
What a racist guy.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I love watching the loony left spin about the Czars, especially after Van Jones resigned.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
I love watching the loony right lie about the Czars, shows how desperate they are.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I love that racehurr needs another user name to post here. What’s wrong? Forgot your password? Too thick to use the recovery system?
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Yeah racer – you forgot to add that any criticism of Obama and his czars is racist.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Another OTT czar is exposed. Like Obambi said pre-election, judge him by the people he surrounds himself with.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32472
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
No such thing as racism (certainly not from you anyway), its a made up word and all that (hurr hurr hurr), but don’t worry I get it, you hate each individual black or brown person, rather than every black or brown person, and that makes it ok! (and you own a color tv, how could you possibly be racist?)
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
It just plain stopped working, no idea why that would be, firefox remembers it, i’ve got it written down, but for some reason it all just stopped going, never mind, its fairly self explanatory, DPF is welcome to put me back to racer.
[DPF: Nope you're banned for vandalising Wikipedia. The IP address is one you were using at the time]
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Many years ago, I attended a seminar in which a serious economist, using empirical data and a mix of quantitative methods caclulated the price-against sex calculations made by men, as in, what is the return to the investment in a meal, or a drink, or a film etc. with a potential. Tasteless, but serious all the same. From equally distant memory, there is work somewhere (from the early ’70s?) on the viability of slave economies at a given level of production and consumption. It was also tasteless, You might want to look at the cost-benefit analyses of health and safety, in which the ‘cost’ of an injury or death is calculated. Equally abhorrent. Dr Holdren was part of a far wider, semi-Malthusian debate about the finite limits of population in societies faced with production and resource constraints. China’s one-child was one off-shoot; forced sterilisations in India another; a global planned parenthood strategy yet another; debates about stopping ‘lower orders’ breeding one more. Whilst I don’t have much time for his thinking then, he was not that extreme in his day, and clearly no longer adheres to that view. Not a big deal.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
It is a big deal, Paul Ehrlich inparticular who co-wrote this paper with him, was the leading scientific voice of the ‘population bomb’ theory at the time. It parallels the climate change hysteria of today as a serious scientific prediction and it was proven to be grossly wrong. Have a look at Hans Roslings’ TED talks and Michael Crichton’s complexity theory speeches for why and how they got it wrong.
This guy has got the serious science wrong in the past and if his line of reasoning was followed could have resulted in some abhorrent outcomes. We face similar scientific issues today so why use a failed scientist as your advisor. Much like James Hansen will eventually face after his period of attention wanes, Ehrlich is no longer taken seriously.
The Simon-Ehrlich wager:
“Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.
The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with — Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.” You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted — copper, tin, whatever — and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager… Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon… Between 1980 and 1990, the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich’s selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor. Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.
As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon’s favor.”
Ehrlichs predictions:
“Ehrlich wrote an article that appeared in New Scientist in December 1967. In that article, Ehrlich predicted that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Ehrlich wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also stated, “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” and “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” These specific predictions did not actually come to pass, and his later book The Population Explosion is much more cautious in its predictions.
The article led to the publication of The Population Bomb in 1968, advocating stringent population control policies. His central argument on population is as follows:
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies – often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparent brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance to survive.”
In his concluding chapter, Ehrlich offered a partial solution to the “population problem”:
“(We need) compulsory birth regulation… (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size”.
Ehrlich’s views came to be accepted by many population control advocates in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Check out the Regulatory Czar – Cass Sunstein. Oh-bambi, who are you surrounding yourself with?
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/09/cass-sunsteins-greatest-hits-hes-poised.html
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
“Thank God this fruitcake doesn’t have any influence, such as being chief science advisor to the President of the United States of America. Oh wait a second ….”
Shame on you Mr Farrar. I realise that you are probably still trying to live down your lame attempt at satire regarding the Greens and compulsory abortion, but you only embarrass yourself more with this nonsense.
According to his Wikipedia article Holdren’s main field of interest is physics (aeronautics, astronautics and plasma physics) with an interest in population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren
No doubt Holdren has published many papers over his long career, producing a few out of context quotes taken from a single text book of which he was a co-author can hardly be viewed as representative of his overall opinions. Given that he was a co-author you would also have to ask the question of just how much of these particular quotes are down to Holdren or to his co-authors.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
If the population gets to the point where we suffer repeated famines (for example), what should we do? To say we wouldn’t consider population control, is like saying we wouldn’t consider shooting people during a war. Of course we would.
If we get to the point where the population needs controlling, and we don’t do it, then it will do the job for us. The old-fashioned way: famine, disease and war. Plenty of nice places in Africa to visit if you don’t believe this can happen.
The Chinese aren’t naive about population and famine. They can remember it. They’re busy buying up farmland in Africa and coincidently enough Crafar Farms have said they’ve been approached by a Chinese company re buying their dairy farms. Given that the world population could double in the next 40 years, it’s naive to think we’ll be OK in NZ if push comes to shove. If another country can pay more for the food; they’ll get it and people will starve in NZ. Just like Ireland during the potato famine. Ireland exported plenty of beef and mutton to England while people were starving to death.
David Farrar wrote:
A bit naive.
Vote:September 28th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
I think 30 years is a very long time for things to change and positions to be reconsidered – Swedish eugenics programmes only ended in the mid-1970s, after all. Western civilisation isn’t so civilised up to many points, on the other side China already had the one child per couple policy, there’s killings of female children, etc. And to be fair to Holdren et al, they very much framed the discussion in terms of worst case scenarios and options considered by others.
But. It’s not fair, or I think appropriate, after reading all the pages independent of the zombietime commentary, to say that this is what Holdren believed should happen or still believes. A lot of the information is taken out of context, and it’s twisted by the commentary to make suppositions in a textbook (with several authors) to be indicative of Holdren’s mind, or the way he thinks. It’s funny he mentions Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ at one point, because when she published her book on the Eichmann trial people used exactly the same kind of arguments about relations between her work and her suppositions and applied them to her personality to target her.
Nor is it really fair of you, DPF, to say that this kind of thing shouldn’t be in a textbook. Much worse propositions, events and theories appear in textbooks. If it excluded ideas on forced population control, or discussions around them because it might upset either sensibilities or future careers, they wouldn’t be very good textbooks.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:02 am
You don’t get co-authorship of a textbook or scientific paper without making a significant contribution and without vetoing the contents. The mere technicians, editors, advisors, and financers also involved do not get their name included as one of the authors.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 1:03 am
The Simon-Ehrlich wager in my previous post might lead to the question. Why not ask the guy, Julian Simon, who got it right to be your advisor? Where is he now?
Well, his work inspired Bjorn Lomberg to research and write ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ which is ignored and vilified by the idiots on the left, while they hire one of the guys who lost the bet (Holdren was one of the colleagues who helped Ehrlich pick the commodities)
“The total supply in none of these metals increased during this time, but prices declined for a variety of reasons:
* The price of tin went down because of an increased use of aluminium, a much more abundant, useful and inexpensive material.
* Better mining technologies allowed for the discovery of vast nickel lodes, which ended the near monopoly that was enjoyed on the market.
* Tungsten fell due to the rise of the use of ceramics in cookware.
* The price of chromium fell due to better smelting techniques.
* The price of copper began to fall due to the invention of fiber optic cable (which is derived from sand), which serves a number of the functions once reserved only for copper wire.
In all of these cases, better technology allowed for either more efficient use of existing resources, or substitution with a more abundant and less expensive resource, as Simon predicted.”
A quote from Julian Simon:
“This is my long-run forecast in brief,” says Simon. “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 5:36 am
Population vs environment comes down to a value judgement. There’s little doubt that population and consumption pressures are putting ecosystems under a lot of pressure, leading to extinctions. If you don’t care about that then it’s probably OK to have continually increasing population and consumption.
The global ecosystem is a web. For example migratory birds, which travel annually between Siberia and NZ stop off en route at various wetlands and river deltas. As these become drained and polluted, bird numbers fall. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I think it does, hence it’s a value judgement.
It is absoultely inevitable that surging world population is going to lead to more extinctions, loss of habitat, over-fishing, loss of tropical rain forests etc.
If the majority of humanity does not care about this then we will end up with 9 billion people living in a depleted world, at least in an environmental sense.
How you limit the impact of humans on the natural world is the big issue for the 21st century and beyond. We are right to think about ways of getting human populations to a sustainable level so that in the year 2500 the planet is not completely destroyed from an ecosystem perspective.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 6:43 am
The textbook reference is of slight historical interest. Isn’t it more important to be considering the options? Now? Or is it too hard, are we in a moral straightjacket? Are we destined to keep breeding ourselves into ecological armageddon?
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 8:28 am
It is true that human population has the biggest effect on the ecosystem.
The world is with out a doubt over populated.
Us westerner’s already have stopped maintaining our population’s and that currently world population is being maintained by africa, asia and south america generally speaking. Even in the western countries it is these it is people of these national descent that maintain our populations. To avoid further population is with out a doubt in the interest of the human race and all other spicies. But to create any system of limitation is almost definatly immoral on a person by persons rights.
Ity is radical for someone to right such things as in the quote’s. But it is the radical that change the world as only the people crazy enough to thinkthey can change the world are the people who change it.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 8:45 am
In saying that it, the world is only over populated as a result of the consumptive nature in which humans live. It probably would be possible for us to have an acceptable impact on the planet if we were less cunsumptive. In saying that though, we are humans and this is probably impossible.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Why, DPF, do you persist in associating such ideas with the Greens? This isn’t happy mischief, but a deliberate smear. You should be ashamed of yourself. Is it becasue the Greens are the only party with the balls to even have a population policy?
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:10 am
For a brief moment, I thought that this might be a civilised, even informed, thread, but Mr Blount has to attack the Left as he promotes Lomberg. His choice, but it would be pleasant to have a blog conversation without that degeneration into caricature. Anyway, I too remember the Simon-Erhlich arrangement, and I remain unconvinced that the argument that Mr Blount appears to take from its outcome – that a combination of changing technologies and comsumption behaviours will resolve challenges posed by resource and climate constraints in the future as they have in the past – will out. It is not just a question of real and permanent material constraints that exist and will one day be met, but also because the political economy that sustains ‘progress’ is unsustainable. That two-thirds or more of humanity who do not enjoy our standards of living are not going to sit passively in their poverty. If capital and goods are free to move globally, the third factor of production – labour – will (and already does) demand a similar freedom, and with that will come a serious challenge to our current standard of living. Mr Bush’s fence, or the EU’s patrol boats across the Mediterranean make Canute look effective!
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Obama, the Messiah, has surrounded himself with a number of socialists, former communists and radicals, which are now being unmasked by some sectors of the U.S. media. Van Jones resigned and Holdren could be next.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:27 am
People who think the world is overpopulated ALWAYS think it is other people causing the overpopulation.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:31 am
So to disagreee with your position is ‘uncivilised’ is it? What a spurious and unnecesssary comment to make about the information I included in my posts.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Frog is correct in saying,
“This isn’t happy mischief, but a deliberate smear. You should be ashamed of yourself”,
but forgot to add,
” on-going” to smear and “deeply” to ashamed.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Mr Blount: it is a question about the manner of the disagreement, not the substance thereof. To disagree is normal. But it is you who referred to the ‘idiots of the Left’, not I. I don’t find such exchanges to be particularly civilised, but, perhaps, you do.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Greenfly/village idiot – for you to be outraged over supposed smears is rather ironic, given your past contributions to Kiwiblog
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Outraged?
Hardly.
Can’t recall any smearing either, only a little fomenting, as advocated by His Grace.
I won’t have smeared you Good Sir.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:10 am
There are extremists on both sides, doesnt mean there arguments should be given the time of day, further the population stresses caused on the earth are not coming from developed countries, with 3/4 of births coming from “3rd world” countries.
With respect to John Holdren exploring the possibility of something does not give rise to agreeing with it. For example if one got given the situation of doing the normal / nothing letting the population of Africa double over the next 20 years and then watch as they die from starvation / lack of resources or alternatively encouraging the reduction of birth rate. Both have negative side effects, but which is preferable?
It is also not conspriacy that the population spiral has to be tackled in those places, however education, economic growth and an understanding of contraception is generally the place to start that. The alternative is condemning the third world to eternal poverty as their resources can not substain the growth their populations are experiencing. Not that any of this is relevant to organisations like the Catholic Church.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I consider the fraud and consequences of climate change policies pushed by the left especially the rhetoric of the Green Party as abhorent and destructive.
What they are advocating will destroy the jobs and livelihoods of hard working people offering useful solutions. The decisions involved in the tradeoffs will inevitably result in avoidable reductions of living standards and deaths.
A portion of the 2 to 10 trillion dollars expected to be spent on carbon trading will come out of food, health, education, housing, and police spending. The people whose jobs involved producing incandescant lightbulbs did not deserve to have their livelihoods removed, these are not trivial matters.
The ignorant and disasterous policies pushed under the climate change banner are deeply uncivilised and I will not politetly and quietly sit by whilst they still have any political traction. You are deeply naive if you think this issue will play out quietly and politely, anyone labeled a ‘denier’ already realises this.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:48 am
It was when they were banned from getting jobs producing other kinds of lightbulbs that I got really angry.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Kiwigreg. Your statement is not correct.
I know for a fact the world is over populated, and i DO realize i am a part of the problem as i am alive.
Obviously i have choice’s to help which i enact with having no children, i shall let other ethnicities to be the future dominating races as of course they already are.
Actually doing something about population growth is not so easy. The cultures that are birthing at large rates need to do so, as it is there pension and super annuation plans rolled into one.
To say that they cannot do this is is the equivelant to abolish the pension and ban all super anuation sceme’s here in NZ.
So in reality it is a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps the west could actually stimulate the second and third world through ecomonic’s and create equality. Perhaps this could be the only fix.
I don’t know how this will be fixed, it certainly is a tough problem to asses.
I suspect anybody who thinks they have an easy answer to these issue’s is nothing but arrogant.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Well david. Since you have clearly advocated on-demand abortion, I am not sure you ate in a position to fisk this idiot. Adhes to ashes, fool to fool. Maybe you need to rethink your morals, should any exist.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 10:53 am
“Perhaps the west could actually stimulate the second and third world through ecomonic’s and create equality. ”
That isn’t simple either. Reduce birth rates and increase per capita consumption. Most of the pollution and overuse of resources happens in developed countries.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am
We could at least start funding third world heath. Pay for them to always have clean water and free medicine.
Vote:This for a start would take a huge load of there current “pention” sceme.
September 29th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Also, I for one would be more than happy to have and extra 1 percent tax taken from my wage’s to be put directly into abolishing poverty.
Abolishing poverty = evolution to the current form of the third would pension sceme.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Since Paul Ehrlich was a co-author, Ockham’s Razor says Ehrlich wrote all that nonsense and Holdren had nothing to do with it. Maybe Holdren could have insisted on it being cut or could have had him name taken off the book, but I don’t think he should be criticised too much for not doing so.
I do think people should not be able to keep their children if they are incapable of providing them with an adequate minimum standard of care. And the state doesn’t have a duty to keep giving cash to parents who fail to meet that minimum standard. If people won’t choose to act responsibly, forced adoption is better than children living in abject poverty or a massive welfare state which isn’t sustainable anyway.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
The idea that population growth could lead to famine was only really valid before capitalism became the preferred economic model of rational, caring human beings.
Now it is population decline that is likely to lead to famine. Think about it.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I don’t see any issue to putting some sort of birth control in water providing it is only temporary. That way if someone wants to get pregnant then they can buy or get bottled water from somewhere. It would be even better if it worked on both males and females. At least this would stop all the accidents being born into families that abuse their children. If a child is wanted then I would guess that they are more likely to be loved and less likely to be abused and more likely to be brought up in a family that can actually afford to have them.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
@ Menace you can already make voluntary payments of tax to IRD go right ahead dont bother dragging the rest of us along.
I have 4 kids, probably should have had more, given my superior genetic stock, but there you go, we all make choices.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
“The idea that population growth could lead to famine was only really valid before capitalism became the preferred economic model of rational, caring human beings.”
Yep, it’s great we are all so rational and caring and sharing now, isn’t it. The tobacco capitalists tried to stem population growth, they managed to stem a lot of fetal growth but couldn’t knock off enough adults before the do-gooders started interfering. The over processed food capitalists (the value adders) have stepped in with a more cunning approach but it will be a generation or two before we will see if they have been effective enough. But there could be a problem if they get start fattening up the under developed population segments, will there be enough food to feed the growth before the hearts give out?
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Nevertheless. Currently, the population worldwide is growing at around 2,000,000 a week. This growth is compounding. I think large elephant, small room.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
If any of you want some basic information about what is really happening with population issues and dynamics rather than regurgitating ignorant cliches, I again urge viewing Hans Roslings TED talks.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
This is just pathetic. His involvement with Ehrlich went beyond co-authorship of the one text book. He was also a key player in the losing wager with Julian Simon about resource prices.
Again, people don’t get coerced into including their name on text-books and papers they had nothing to do with or disagree with. He has a clear and indisputable record of being wrong on significant issues. He has a record of publishing material on the topic of overpopulation and forced birth control from 1969 through to at least 1977.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
democracymum [September 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm],
To the “grizzling greenie[s]“, the socialist utopians, and all others who don’t recognise the hypocracy as you’ve outlined above the solution is actually quite simple.
They just reassign ‘babies in the womb’ as genetic waste, or rename them ‘fetuses’ thus getting around the fact that these are indeed unborn human infants. Changing labels is a convenient way to salve the conscience and justify to the greater, unthinking public what is nothing short of murder. Eugenics by any other name.
I believe that abortion, eugenics, lesser races, people of ‘diminshed capacity’, etc will all be put forward as examples of means of population control. As I have mentioned before, without an objective moral foundation all of these things will be promoted, and will eventually be implemented, likely by the UN, as ‘policy’.
Vote:Watch this space.
September 29th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
@kiwigreg
superior genetic stock.
thats the sort of bullshit wars are made of bro.
Not trying to drag anybody along with me, i would never presume to demand others to adhere to my ideals.
Just speaking my mind is all.
Vote:September 29th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
John Holdren (President Obama’s Science Czar):
While I think there is serious merit in putting up for adoption illegitimate babies (especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone), and giving preference to married couples when selecting suitable adoptive parents, I have a major problem with his suggestion to abort these same children.
As a loving society, which prioritises the wellbeing of our children, the adopting out of illegitimate children, and ‘encouraging’ young single women who find themselves pregnant to carry their infant to full term and then offer him/her up for adoption, would be in the best interests of the children concerned. It would also address many/most of societal problems which today plagues the front pages of many of our daily papers. IMHO.
The fact that our society has removed any negative stigma associated with pregnancy outside of marriage, we promote promiscuity by the ‘safe sex’ lie, abortion is just another means of contraception, we pay single mothers to become ‘baby factories’, and we have removed men form their responsiblities as fathers and role models, causes me to think that my above suggestions are unlikely to come to fruition.
A bleak, dark future with the moral fabric ripped out of it looms ahead of us all.
Vote: