Overpopulation and the Guardian
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Today's Guardian gave an endorsement to Paul Ehrlich and overpopulation with a totally uncritical article that failed to question much less challenge a man whose predictions have kept on failing…but you wouldn't have thought so if you read the article
Some of his stuff is interesting. He is more likely to get attention for this,
Quote:….and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.than we do for a solution.
Oh, i do think he has changed his narrative a bit…he is talking the talk for getting the liberal/left on his side but he never walks the walk.He claimed there was no better than a 50 per chance of anyone remaining alive in Great Britain by the year 2000. “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”Did he humbly admit he was mistaken…no, instead he shifted the goal posts, "If you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems." He also claimed that by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989. He made much of his experience of India but India’s total fertility rate is down from 5.9 in 1951 to 2.3 in 2011. India is expected to reach replacement level fertility of 2.1 by 2020. The fertility rate in urban India is already below that at 1.8. So, India is actually stabilising its population and far from explodingBut my post wasn't really aimed at someone i believe to be an academic charlatan but that it suits the Guardian to promote his views…point the finger at everything except the real culprit – capitalism. The problem isn’t population but they cannot concede that.If there is any progress in reducing family sizes, it isn't the NGOs or the philanthropists but poor women in the developing countries empowering themselves and as i reported in the other thread it is they who are taking control of their own bodies via abortion.It maybe free-market think-tank but this is worth a long readhttps://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/ExplodingPopulationMyths.pdf
Yes it is good read and as dismissive of Ehrlich's main contention as we are, but flawed in equating socialism with planned statist systems to make a pro-capitalism point. Interesting here also,
Quote:Now, we can measure price in several ways. We can either take the price of a good in terms of dol-lars, rands, pounds, yen, etc., or we can use the amount of labour necessary to obtain the good. Both methods have merits.Noting the price of things, using the LTV, and not the value. Typical of a pro-capitlist outlook.It doesn't however, deal with the 'latest' current problem, a bandwagon Ehrlich has leapt onto,which is the depletion of the oceans and elsewhere, through plastic polution. This is a problem specific to capitalism's short term, 'throw away', built in obsolence model for maintaining economic growth and it has bit them in the ass.
Unfortunately, Matt our other ally in combatting the over-population myth isn't just some free-marketeers but the Roman Catholic Church and a few conspiracists who think the Illumanti-types have a policy of race genocide (albeit there is an undertone of racism in the eugenic social engineering of population control policies that gives rise to that belief)Matt, i will grant Ehrlich that we have an urbanisation problem, an ageing population problem, a consumer society problem, a globally skewed consumption problem ….but never that we have a problem of too many people or a problem that the planet cannot potentially sustain many more extra people if it was planned properly for those peoples needs. As you say we live in a throw away system….and the thing Ehrlich most wants to be thrown away is people.On my cyber travels i encounter numerus otherwise well-informed commentators who ascribe fully to the over-population myth and it shows the truth in the statement — tell a lie often enough and it will be accepted as true
Another of our unwelcomed bed-fellows from the right on over-population mythhttps://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/the-lefts-prophet-of-doom-is-still-wrong/
Quote:just what would have had to have happened in order for Ehrlich to announce that he had been wrong? There is really nothing. Ehrlich is one of a long line of failed Malthusians who will never accept they are wrong, just that their prediction has been put off for a few more years…It is a shame that Ehrlich can’t see his original thesis as the failure it is and learn from it.Germany in 2016 recorded its highest fertility rate since 197 but women in Germany are still not having enough babies to ensure the total population stays constant. http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-fertility-rate-hits-43-year-high/a-43163756
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