Fuck neutral?
The Optimum Population Trust is working to introduce population trading. We can produce more environmental damage but buy a credit.
The credit pays people in Madagascar to have fewer children. Neat, I don’t think.
Ian Angus takes up the story here.
There are ways of ‘fighting’ climate change that are going to lead to a lot of oppression, you don’t have to be a conspiracy crank to be worried
And you might want to listen to the new OPT song, being downloaded by the thousand, listen here for free, worrying.
OPT wants to slash the UK population by 30 million by means of ending immigration and the usual anti-natalist policies. Normal people are rightly disgusted by such misanthropy. What they don’t realise, however, is that they’re already subsidising coercive population-control policies overseas. British taxpayers gives the repulsive UNFPA roughly £20m per annum, money which is then funnelled into China’s one-child policy. Anti immigration laws in the UK are quite barmy enough as it is. The inmates have taken over the asylum etc.
Comment by Red Maria — 29 December, 2009 @ 2:33 am
cheers for the link to the bodega brothers, those guys are brilliant.
check out their other ones .. green party get sexy,mc middle class and hey little hoodie
that said, i agree with your point derek cheers x
Comment by graham — 29 December, 2009 @ 5:58 am
Even more ill concieved than carbon trading. Appauling malthusian rubbish.
Comment by ecolefty — 29 December, 2009 @ 8:47 am
Derek- I am pretty sure the Bodega brothers are taking the piss.
Comment by ben — 29 December, 2009 @ 9:36 am
Really?
Comment by Derek Wall — 29 December, 2009 @ 10:48 am
Yeah I think it is. They have one called Green Party get sext as well.
Comment by ben — 29 December, 2009 @ 11:53 am
Just as a query, would everyone here agree that population control has no part at all to play in the reduction of emissions and in helping tackle climate change?
I will admit I used to firmly believe this myself, but recently a few things have begun to change my mind. Firstly it seems naive to me to imagine we will in future be able to use green technology maintain a carbon-neutral existance for however many people the planet happens to hold. People will almost always begin to impact the environment, especially in large numbers. Sewage, damage to the environment from construction & infrastructure, the continually gorwing human need for water, these problems will still exist in the future I believe. There won’t be a magic solution that allows us to instantly remove all human waste from the planet.
I also don’t understand arguments that the planet can never become overcrowded. This doesn’t make sense to me, obviously an optimum population is a fallacy as it would be a highly subjective figure. However, the idea that our planet has an upper limit which if passed will make it extremely difficult to control environmental damage does not to me seem impractical.
Lastly, what really began to awaken me to the importance population control can have was in studying China (I am a bit of a sinophile I admit). The one child policy was in my opinion one of the most successfull pieces of social engineering ever carried out. A country that was headed for disastrous famine was able to curtail uncontrollable population growth and avert what would likely have been one of the deadliest famines of history let alone the 20th century. This obviously is more the use of population control to meet agriculutral limits not environmental ones, but I believe if it works here for agriculture, then it could be of help with containing environmental damage too.
Just a few of my thoughts on the matter anyway.
Comment by Sammy — 29 December, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
Environmentalists routinely champion the “needs” of nature (some scarce butterfly, or swampland) over the needs of human beings. For example, consider how the energy needs of the USA are considered secondary to the preservation of the Alaskan wilderness. Is it therefore at all surprising that groups like the OPT are thriving, with their vile misanthropic view that human beings are some kind of vermin whose numbers must be controlled?
Comment by Tommy — 29 December, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
Those Bodega Brothers are funny. I have lots of issues with “population control” not just the obvious ones like immigration controls but lets really talk about what we mean is taking control over women’s fertility. There are lots of reasons why women choose or don’t choose to have large families or families “they can’t afford”. The most obvious is free access to contraception and abortion but also being free to use contraception and abortion when they need and want to. Addressing poverty particularly in the developing world would address large families that many women and their partners cannot afford to care for.
of course the world is becoming over populated, our species has become too popular and sucessful and there will be a price to pay but please do not kid ourselves on that it will be the developing world that will cause any catastrophe it will the countries dependent on oil and commodities.
It does not take a rocket scientist to work out those with the most resources use the most resources and those with the least resources use the least.
Comment by Cat — 29 December, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
I don’t know if you can get this magazine over there but the International Socialist Review has a great article by Chris Williams ‘Are there too many people’
http://isreview.org
Unfortunately this article asn’t on line but it completely destroys the overpopulation nonsense, and places the blame where it belongs- on the capitalist class.
Comment by Peter Hine — 29 December, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
I am lucky enough to have been given a copy of International Socialist Review yesterday, looks worth subscribing to and I will try and write about the good work of the ISO at some point, nice informal network of eco socialists around the globe which includes ISO people.
Climate and Capitalism blogs and Socialist Resistance run some good articles on why the population bombers are wrong.
Comment by Derek Wall — 29 December, 2009 @ 11:23 pm
Reply to Sammy (#7):
There is no way of telling whether the one-child policy in China has “worked” (in terms of reducing the rate of population growth), as there hasn’t been a “control” China in the same period (during which capitalist relations of production were restored) where the one-child policy was not enforced. However, there are indications that China’s rate of population growth would have fallen anyhow, without coercive measures and all the suffering and corruption that accompanied them. There may not then have been an “excess” of 28 million young men, and the potential social problems that brings. Below is the China section of an article on population control I wrote a couple of years ago. Also see Matthew Connelly’s book “Fatal Misconception”, Chapter 9:
“….the “one child” policy in China, [which] commenced in 1979. This policy is mired in controversy, with competing national and local bureaucratic interests making the statistics untrustworthy and there are disputes about whether the policy has “worked” – i.e. reduced population growth.
“What follows is some information from sources that seem reliable. “One child” is only strictly enforced in cities, but there are still many coercive policies applied to the 70% of the population that is rural. These include: a five-year wait for the second child (and sometimes only allowing a second if the first is a girl), up to 2002 no choice about contraceptive method (37% of Chinese married women have been sterilised and 46% use IUDs). There is also illegal sex-selective abortion and less aggressive treatment of ill girls. Child kidnapping and trading seems very common, so it is likely that there is also significant infanticide of girls.
“Under the policy, the average number of children born per woman fell from 2.9 in 1979 to 1.7 in 2004. But the biggest fall, from 5.9 to 2.9, was in the 9 years up to 1979, under a voluntary policy of later childbearing, greater spacing between children and fewer children. It is well-known that urbanisation and economic development reduce population growth rates, and the number of children born per woman worldwide fell from 4.9 to 2.7 between the late 1960s and 1999.
“While it is possible that China’s policies have led to a population lower than it would have been without coercion, this is in the context of growing capitalist disruption of social life. An environmental, democratic, non-capitalist path of development could have had more stable, lasting effects, without the gross abuses that have occurred since 1979.”
Comment by PhilW — 30 December, 2009 @ 12:21 pm