Green Movement: Kick the loons out

Yep, China's doin' great.

Errr, are you making the case that abortion is the exact same as murder? Cause that's probably an argument for another post

China's never been that tough on the one child enforcement, and it recently loosened up the restrictions even more. And the M/F is skewed, but not by that much

I was not -- that is why I specifically used both the word abortion and the word murder, under the auspices that I considered them two seperate actions.

...for the purposes of this discourse, at least.

Or, perhaps, it's better voluntarily curb population growth now, so we don't reach a point where we have no choice but to impose rules, like China.

"One-child" policies are just a quick route to war. There are a few studies that link a high male-to-female ratio to more unstable violent societies. If the males have no resources to marry inside their society they will look elsewhere. Like their neighbors.

All of the First World countries have SHRINKING populations, not growing ones... the only reason their population numbers are climbing is because of immigration. Once you educate women past a certain point, they stop having children, even to the point of not replacing the existing population. Education is the best birth control in the world. Very specifically, it is the education OF WOMEN that matters, not men. Each year of female education drops their lifetime birth rate, to the point of being under 2 sometime in college.

Focus on that, on getting the women of the world educated, and nothing more needs to be done. That draconian Chinese policy is going to bite them in the ass HARD in another thirty to fifty years. The population balance is all out of whack, and they're going to have a severe young-labor deficit.

Note that all three of the former correlate with the last bit.

Education is the single most important thing. You can look at the rising US birth rate as a direct consequence of our failing education system; the other three symptoms are the direct result, and the birth rate is the indirect outcome.

Does Ms. Francis know how many of those births make it to adulthood? In Africa, for example, it is rare for even half of a family's kids to make it to child bearing age. A woman who has 8-9 births in her life will probably see 2 or three of them go on to have children of their own. .

It's like saying salmon will take over the oceans and lakes because a mother will spawn several hundred in a single year.

With humans, sadly, if starvation, disease, or war do not kill most of your kids, you are an anomaly in many nations of this world.

Malthus isn't wrong, he just failed to accommodate for technology. India would have starved it's ass off, just like it did in the early 60s, had hybrid dwarf rice not been developed in the late 60s. That improved yields by up to 500%. You can increase population quite a bit if you're harvesting five times as much food as before.

Is there another hybrid dwarf rice on the horizon? Nope. We're back to moderate, linear increases in food production and high population growth. At a certain point in the future we'll be back to starvation unless someone can figure out the next Green Revolution (good luck with GMOs).

And, at the end of the day, it's not about the sheer number of people. It's about their consumption level. The Earth cannot support everyone having a western lifestyle. We simply consume too much: energy, food, materials, etc.

China is a perfect example. More Chinese are buying cars than Americans now as their middle class grows. The production and consumption of meat has skyrocketed, with more and more agricultural land being dedicated to growing the corn and whatnot that is fed to pigs instead of feeding people directly. Pollution has gotten out of control as well, with 16 out of the 20 most polluted cities being Chinese.

We only have "room" on the planet for 12 billion people if they live a very low impact lifestyle. They certainly aren't going to be driving SUVs, living in McMansions, and eating steak every night.

That's all well and good but you still didn't answer my question. How can more people be as good or better for the environment than fewer?

Welcome back, Baredil. Now then, to your point, that is an ad hominen attack in its purest form. Just because she's a hypocrite doesn't mean she's wrong, regardless of the Bible's implication.

I don't think that anyone here is dismissing the environmental concerns outright. What I hear Ulairi saying is that we can deal with the problem of ever increasing population in the same way we've always dealt with it: Through better and more efficient technologies. Throughout human history, our crop yields have increased to support larger numbers of people on fewer acres; architecture evolved to accommodate denser urban populations; water purification systems and medicine have become ever more efficient to prevent disease, and so on. Those trends are still occuring today -- and we don't have to stop having kids to do it.

I'm not advocating a worldwide copulation spree, so that every human on Earth becomes an Octomom. But in my opinion, failing to account for our ability to create newer and better tools to sustain our species is failing to account for mankind's greatest strength: its technological ingenuity. We can create tools to facilitate our survival, something few other species have the anatomy to do, and it is that ability that gave us the chance to thrive in the way we have today.

I hesitate to say that a large species population is inherently environmentally detrimental, which seems to be the crux of Ms. Francis's argument here. After all, nobody thinks that ants, bacteria or trees are destroying the planet, and their population numbers vastly outweigh our own.

If you want to make the argument that humans harming the environment, point to our behaviors, as TAOS did, not our numbers. Why shouldn't 10 or 20 billion humans be able to live on this Earth, as long as they were behaving sustainably and intelligently in regards to their environmental resources? Numbers alone do not doom a planet.

I don't believe pointing out hypocrisy is an ad hom, necessarily. If one is proposing to tell other people how they should live, one should be willing to make the same sacrifices. Otherwise it's just elitist BS - You common folk should stop breeding. Once again, someone stating what "people" should do really means "people other than me". Because some of us are more equal than others, after all.

Of course this doesn't even get into the complete naivety of her argument. China's one-child policy has pretty much turned into a forced abortion policy, with baby girls being slaughtered or dumped in alleys because of a cultural preference for boys. In the US abortion is a hotly contested debate; in China it's government policy.

As an added bonus, anyone talking about limiting the families of the world to one child hasn't thought through the consequences. Most of the west is already at or below the replacement birth rate of 2.1. All of our taxation and social spending plans are based on the idea of population growth. How exactly is the US going to pay back the trillions of dollars it has borrowed with a decreasing tax base?

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/11/fear-depopulation-not-overpopulation.aspx

One child per family, like the 100-mile diet, and a number of other 'green' ideas, looks good on the surface. But once you look past the surface, the real costs become apparent. So many of the problems before us today are due to short-sighted thinking; it's time we started thinking before we act.