Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

[tazmic]

From the veritable wiki (cherry picked and edited):

"In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's population was growing at the rate of 1.14%.

Globally, the population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak of 2.19% in 1963

In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition.

If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050.

The UN has issued multiple projections of future world population, based on different assumptions. Over the last ten years, the UN has consistently revised these projections downward..."

It kinda messes with Bartlett's magic number 70 a little.

The entry on Demographic Transition is interesting, and I did a dumb double take when I read:

"The major (relative) exceptions [to falling population growth] are some poor countries, ..., notably Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Yemen and Afghanistan."

[JackRiddler]

So, the Easter Islanders became extinct because of their exponential population growth, did they?

SNIP

FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE OF RAPA NUI

Published in: Energy & Environment, 16:3&4 (2005), pp. 513-539
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/E ... Peiser.pdf
Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science
Liverpool L3 2ET, UK. b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk B.J.Peiser@ljmu.ac.uk

The 'decline and fall' of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.' According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island's self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui's indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond's environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

Just more pr and marketing from the Malthusian Masters of Disaster, I guess. It's all over the place.

SNIP

ps I approve of offering (non-coercive/non-manipulative) birth control options to every human on the planet.

So given your PS, just what are we disagreeing about on the proscriptive side?!

It's time to end the false dichotomizing here. To acknowledge population as a legitimate concern to address does not mean you're a Malthusian. let alone a supporter of genocide, eugenics, or forced sterilization, any more than critics of Israel should be called "anti-Semitic" or Nazis. It's true that a lot of those who focus on population do tend to eugenic views; I daresay that is no reason to ignore it.

The key distinction to me is whether one acknowledges overconsumption as the bigger problem, given that North Americans on average eat 30 times more energy than, say, Africans, and produce correspondingly more garbage and poison of every kind (much of which is created and left in, say, Africa in the course of producing product destined for the West, or exported to Africa). Another important distinction is whether one understands that overconsumption is very much the product of collective consumption (like war) and the production system, i.e. how capital is invested in the energy sector. It's not a consumer decision that can be fixed by buying the right brand and piously blaming everyone but the corporations and the ruling class.

People who frame overpopulation as the greatest and most immediate ecological problem while ignoring overconsumption, the energy system and the production cycle are indeed very suspicious to me, and they often sit in influential positions and espouse dangerous doctrines. I think of how Africa's problems are always posed in media like NPR as self-inflicted and due to ignorance and disease, by "experts" who usually fail to mention trade relations, debt, history and the continuing military actions and covert interventions by the imperialist powers.

Which is apropos to the following:

Hammer, I want to thank you for posting a link to the article by Benny Peiser on Rapa Nui.

As I've used the Rapa Nui example myself, I was compelled to read it.

In short, I find Peiser very persuasive as a reply to Diamond's case for Easter Island as a clear-cut example of a civilization's self-destruction by means of eco-cide.

Peiser argues that the Rapa Nui legends were first recorded long after the Europeans had discovered the island and begun to conduct slave and plunder raids, and are therefore unreliable. These legends are more likely to be products of the troubling period in which they were recorded, rather than accurate reflections of stories from earlier times.

His strongest argument is in pointing out the contrast of Europeans like Thor Heyerdahl searching for an explanation to the "mystery" of Rapa Nui's presumed decline prior to European discovery -- even as many of the same European scholars simultaneously ignore the well-documented genocide of the indigenes by the Europeans after discovery. The earlier accounts by Metraux and Lavacherry (as Peiser describes them) would seem to be far more reliable than Heyerdahl's suspiciously racialized and over-detailed reconstruction of an endogenous civil war culminating in 1680, forty years before there were any Europeans. Peiser argues convincingly that the Rapa Nui legends of tribal conflicts are more likely to refer to raids by European whalers and devastation from plagues leading to civil conflicts after the European discovery in 1722, and before the full European takeover of the island (and beginning of reliable recorded history) in the second half of the 1800s.

However, while the evidence for Heyerdahl's civil war of 1680 is too thin to allow that it happened at all, by no means does Peiser (as he seems to think) render impossible Diamond's thesis of self-inflicted deforestation. (Now I'll have to at least go find and thumb through Diamond to see if he also ignores the indisputable European genocide.) The evidence for ecocide is sparse and mixed (there were for example palm trees into the 20th century, though it's altogether unclear how many were left in either 1722 or 1864). We should rightly suspend judgement, because what Peiser does best is demonstrate how incomplete the record is.

Therefore Rapa Nui should not be used as a parable of self-inflicted ecocide, as in Diamond. (Also as repeated uncritically in David Christian, Maps of Time. This was a book I read and loved last year, but one which shows the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the "Big History" approach: Too much necessary reliance on secondary sources, too many disciplines that can't all be mastered, too much need for broad summary in the effort to encompass millennia.)

Peiser isn't content to challenge certainty about the Rapa Nui legend. That's only the battle he's fighting, and he shows at least as much of an agenda as he attributes to Diamond. Peiser's language tells that his war is against the ecologists, to whom he attaches derogatory labels familiar from the rhetorical arsenal of the pro-corporate growthists. Diamond is relegated to the community of "pessimists," anti-progressives, and "leftists" who adopted environmentalism as their new attack on capitalism because Marxism "failed." At the end Peiser has presented an argument to cease using Rapa Nui as a parable (and to acknowledge the reality of the European genocide on Easter Island!) but it's nothing like a death-blow to Diamond or environmentalism.

So I looked him up, and guess what? His record confirms the feeling I developed when reading the last part of his text. Turns out he's active as a "climate change skeptic" and has been accused of very shoddy work in meeting his own confirmation bias. ("Confirmation bias" seems most often to be invoked by those who are themselves providing a living example of it. As with claims about who started a war, the rule seems to be that the first to call out "confirmation bias" becomes immune to it.)

Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist and climate change skeptic. Peiser frequently cites a study performed by Dennis Bray which and claims “a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes.”1,2,3 However, further analysis shows that was an anonymous online survey that had no way of confirming who or even what was filling out the questions.1, 2 The real consensus is quoted and sourced here. In 2004 Naomi Oreskes published a study claiming that not a single peer-review journal containing the words "global climate change" from 1993 to 2003 disagreed with the consensus. Benny Peiser retaliated by performing a study of his own. A study which the peer review journals Science and Nature refused to publish. He had read 1,247 peer-review journals/abstracts on climate change and claimed that there were 34 that refuted climate change. After being rejected, Peiser complained to the press. He said there was a conspiracy against his work because he was a global warming skeptic. When Tim Lambert and William M. Connolley reviewed the 34 abstracts Peiser provided, they found the following results:

Follow the link to see...
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/BPeiser.html

Oh, and guess what, Peiser is with the...

Heartland Institute, according to the Institute's web site, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is "to discover and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems".[1] The Institute campaigns in support of:
"Common-sense environmentalism", such as opposition to the the Kyoto Protocol aimed at countering global warming
Genetically engineered crops and products;
The privatization of public services;
The introduction of school vouchers;
The deregulation of health care insurance;

and against:
What it refers to as "junk science" (science that that could indicate a need for regulation);
Tobacco control measures such as tobacco tax increases (the Institute denies the health effects of second-hand smoke);

The institute was founded in 1984 by David H. Padden, now the President of Padco Lease Corporation and Joseph L. Bast, Heartland's President and CEO.[2] In 2007 it spent over $5.8 million on its activities.[3]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _Institute

Ouch. Makes me wonder about whether Peiser's article was fair to Diamond. As it was well-argued, I shall suspend judgement on that, and, pending further reading, I'll make sure not to use Rapa Nui as a parable for modern civilization. Which, again, is the only upshot of Peiser's article. And I have rarely done that, because I prefer to point to the great Pacific garbage patch, or the levels of the Colorado River, or fishery depletion, or the advancing deserts, or the Niger Delta oil spill; not as parables, but as very big, concrete examples of how badly imperialism and the corporate growth-paradigm of industrialism in general, and the hydro-carbon energy system in particular, are fucking up everything.

Which is not a "pessimistic" thing to say at all, as diagnosis cannot be pessimistic or optimistic, merely right or wrong.

It may be that we are projecting our own civilization's undeniable self-inflicted disasters on the Easter Islanders, but these present disasters remain just as real. Benny Peiser isn't helping.

[TVC15]

I agree with your reasoning. It would be naive of a "Them" to think the deluge is controllable, and that they will be able to maintain whatever strongholds they imagine they'll have in a Mad Max scenario -- or that these strongholds won't be taken over from within by warlords.

You are greatly underestimating "Them".

"They" have access to secret knowledge and thus know the mechanics and periods of the cataclysmic cycles.

"They" have all the resources money can buy.

"They" have a military that has been planning CoG strategies and doomsday scenarios, Mad Max-type and many more, for decades:

"All these potential effects from asteroid impact are currently within the DoD charter of responsibilities, as contained in the National Military and Joint Doctrine for Contingency Operations (Joint Pub 3-00.1)"

http://csat.au.af.mil/2020/papers/app-r.pdf


While the deluge may not be controllable, "They" have increased their odds of survival by building massive underground facilities all around the world, using wars, hot and Cold, as cover.

"They" have satellites keeping an eye out for signs of something they know is coming soon. Thus "They" will have a heads up as to when to duck and cover.

"They" have a plan.

"They" have the resources.

"They" know whats coming.

"They" know when.

"They" know whats gone down before.

"They" have been busy, busy, busy.

Some of "Them" just might get through.

[Sounder]

That was awesome Jack. Tell you what. If anyone is going to convert me to the active AGW camp, it will be you.

Keep working on it, thanks.

[Elvis]

Thanks for this discussion, tempering my thinking on this. BTW, I goofed and the 2-column "Table of Options" is in Part 2 (not after 3) and that's the 'what we can do' part to which I referred... so... never mind.

What I got from the Bartlett lecture is, 'In a world of rising consumption, if we're not careful, a serious and sudden hydrocarbon shortage is going to kick our ass. Not only that, but this reality is being covered up with misleading and inflated reserve estimates.'

The way things are in the world, I'm okay with putting the brakes on a little, by encouraging later marriage, more education, and more contraceptives available far and wide. We should be starting now (and we are, good) because it takes a long time to put things into effect, thanks partly to impediments like the Population Research Institute.

here are a couple of less alarming but more informative clips:

I watched the three videos, and the first one, especially, seems loaded with corporate-agenda subtext, and glosses over things like the petroleum requirements of all the "infrastructure development" and big agribiz the video implies will save the day. (More on that below.)

The videos were made by the Population Research Institute (http://www.pop.org), their number one concern is abortion---though it's been said that PRI "is best known for its mission to stop family planning in the poorest regions of the world."
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cristina- ... 42299.html)

I get the feeling that PRI doesn't actually care all that much about population numbers per se. And why should they?---the Rapture will be along soon...

Our Founder

Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B. was a pioneer in the worldwide pro-life movement....
After nearly two decades on the faculty of St. Johns University, he was permitted by his order to work on pro-life issues full time.

http://www.pop.org/20090117804/our-founder


Along with abortion, PRI also doesn't like feminists, gays or Communists (especially China), or any kind of artificial birth control. They like Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck. (http://www.pop.org/press-releases/) In fact, Steven Mosher, PRI's president, has guested on the Glenn Beck show and other FOX Noise programs. (http://video.foxnews.com/v/3926103/)

Mosher was paid $104,090 in 2008, out of over $900,000 PRI spent that year, so they have a goodly income. (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.c ... rgid=10080) We can skip over the issue of Mosher's expulsion from Stanford for "illegal and unethical conduct," in connection with his anthropological work in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_W._Mosher), because it's a little sketchy; China claims Mosher was a spy. (http://www.claremont.org/publications/c ... detail.asp)

PRI gets almost all its funding from charitable contributions, and its biggest funder seems to be The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc. (http://mediamattersaction.org/transpare ... te/funders)

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc.

ein: 39-6037928

355 institutional roles for $30,396,079

1241 North Franklin Place
Milwaukee, WI 53202

http://www.bradleyfdn.org/

With $706 million in assets (2005), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin is the country's largest and most influential right-wing foundation. As of the end of 2005, it was giving away more than $34 million a year [Bradley Foundation 2005 IRS 99-PF].

... Its financial resources, its clear political agenda, and its extensive national network of contacts and collaborators in political, academic and media circles has allowed it to exert an important influence on key issues of public policy. While its targets range from affirmative action to social security, it has seen its greatest successes in the areas of welfare "reform" and attempts to privatize public education

... The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation, however, is to return the U.S. - and the world- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off.

... the list of Bradley grant recipients reads like a Who's Who of the U.S.Right.
...such major right-wing groups as the Heritage Foundation, ...the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, literary home for such racist authors as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and Dinesh D'Souza (The End of Racism), former conservative officeholders Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp and William Bennett, and arch-conservative jurists Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.

... In 1903,Lynde and Harry founded a business that would become the Allen-Bradley Company, a major manufacturer of electronic and radio components. Harry was the more politically active of the two. A man with extreme right-wing views, he was an early financial supporter of the John Birch Society...

Robert Welsh, who founded the Society in 1958, was a regular speaker at Allen-Bradley sales meetings. Harry distributed Birchite literature, as did Fred Loock, another key figure at the company.

... Allen-Bradley was one of the last major Milwaukee employers to racially integrate, and then only through public and legal pressure.

... Things changed dramatically in 1985, when the Allen-Bradley Company was sold to Rockwell International, a leading defense and aerospace conglomerate, for a whopping $1.651 billion. The Foundation benefited heavily from the sale, seeing its assets shoot up overnight from less than $14 million to more than $290 million, catapulting it into the ranks of the country's largest foundations. At that point its name was changed to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to publicly separate it from the company.

(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funder ... funderID=1) 2005

The list of 2005 directors and 'notable members' rounds out with defense contractors, industrialists, corporate lawyers, bankers, a CIA-funded propagandist and William Bennett to boot.

I was struck by the corporate-aligned solutions in the videos the first time I watched them, and after learning they're made by a right-wing pro-life organization funded by a hard-right megafoundation founded by Birchers, I'm even more leery. The videos have some 'information' but they strike me as misleading, if only by omission.

Here's how I saw the videos:

The first video, "Food: There's Lots Of It," says that according to the UN, "There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have a healthy and productive life." Sounds like the UN want to put us on a diet? But where is all that extra food not getting to the hungry people? I suppose much of it passes through the drive-up windows of McDonald's---although there's not a word in the video about overconsumption of fuel and food in the 'developed' nations.

It says today we're "growing more food on less land" thanks to modern agricultural technology. We see a petroleum-powered tractor whizzing by, and a petroleum-powered airplane spraying what we have to assume are "technology"-laden Monsanto GM crops grown from terminator seeds, with toxic, petroleum-derived pesticides.

Bartlett asks, 'how, as population grows and petroleum wanes, are we going to produce all that petroleum-intensive food?'

We have so much food in the States, the narrator coos, that "the government can afford to pay farmers not to grow food, but instead, return their farmlands to the wild." Aww. But "returning to the wild" only happens when growers take their land out of production altogether and sell it to a conservation organization. (http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs ... /801130356) Most farm subsidies today go to large corporate conglomerate farms and investors who use the money to buy more small farms, further locking their stranglehold on food. (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01606.pdf)

Then, "Africa, if cultivated using modern farming methods, could eventually feed the whole world!" We see a video wipe spread across the continent of Africa, symbolically blanketing it with, we safely guess, petroleum-intensive GM terminator-seed crops, cultivated with petroleum-powered machines and treated with a good shower of agribiz petrochemicals.

The video shows a chart listing the "Key Causes of Hunger" cited by the UN World Food Program: 1. Poverty; 2. Conflict; 3. Natural Disasters; 4. Exploitation of the Environment; and 5. Poor Agricultural Infrastructure. Let's look at how these are explained in the video:

First of all (after pointing out that "overpopulation is not on the list!"), they address the Key Causes of Hunger out of order (2., 1., 5.), so you won't notice that they skip over and say nothing about (4.) environmental exploitation.

So, first, Conflict: wars interfere with food production. Nice epiphany but aren't most wars lately fought for the hydrocarbons on which the "modern farming methods" (and war-making power itself) depend?

We see some rebels terrorizing hungry natives and doing a "wheelie" in their petroleum-powered Jeep as they laugh and roar away with all the food. Rebels bad!

One epiphany after another: next we found out that a Key Cause of Hunger is---poverty. Makes sense; the reason those people are poor is, well, they're poor. I realize that a short video like this doesn't have time to get into more causes of hunger like corporate greed, contractor corruption, IMF swindles, theft of resources and so on.

Poor Agricultural Infrastructure is symbolized by a petroleum-powered truck crossing a rickety Third World bridge, which collapses. Quick, call Bechtel and the "infrastructure development" gang, set IMF "austerity measures" for the poor, displace locals and wreck their habitat.

"4. - Exploitation of the Environment" is ignored. They also skip over 3. - Natural Disasters, but those pretty much explain themselves, whereas facing the issue of environmental exploitation would take some explaining.

"This is why," the narrator says in closing, "reducing the number of hungry people will not make the remaining people less hungry," a pretty fuzzy claim.

"So blaming overpopulation for everything does nothing but distract us from the real problems that we actually have."

I can agree with that---but isn't there at least a potential for real overpopulation that we need to be aware of?

The second video, "Kids: Stable Population," it laudably advocates (or appears to advocate) zero population growth (eventually...not right now of course), with one generation's numbers replaced by the next. They don't say how that will be accomplished---certainly not with contraceptives!

The video ominously informs us that China and Indonesia are in grave danger of extinction because their replacement rates are falling. As far as I can see, this is completely specious. As for small indigenous groups facing extinction, isn't that usually caused by colonialization and "infrastructure development"?

In the third video, "Overpopulation: The Making of a Myth," Malthus walks up to a drinking derelict, bludgeons him with his cane and pokes the body to make sure it's dead. (That little touch did make me laugh.) That Malthus "recommended killing off the 'have-nots' of society, lest the 'haves' starve to death" might be a stretch, but I won't nitpick it because yes, Malthus was a cold-hearted elitist cocksucker and it's unfortunate that Bartlett associates himself with the name.

The video ends with the curious assertion, "The population of the Earth will peak in thirty years and then start to go back down." I looked all over PRI's website for how they arrived at that conclusion but I couldn't find it.

I think my gut feeling, that there was something dodgy about the videos, is confirmed. PRI isn't so much concerned about population; they're concerned about population control, opposing all contraceptives and abortion, in a context of right-wing politics, Big Money interests and Christian fundamentalism. These videos reflect that, and I think that's partly why their inferences and conclusions don't hold up well.

(Sorry this is so long)

[barracuda]

Thanks for the great breakdown and information on the bullshit motivations of the PRI gang, Elvis. I have some comments on your comments.

The first video, "Food: There's Lots Of It," says that according to the UN, "There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have a healthy and productive life." Sounds like the UN want to put us on a diet? But where is all that extra food not getting to the hungry people? I suppose much of it passes through the drive-up windows of McDonald's---although there's not a word in the video about overconsumption of fuel and food in the 'developed' nations.

The fact of the matter, though, is that we should be put on a diet. There's considerable evidence that caloric restriction may be a route to greatly increased longevity and highly beneficial health effects under the proper circumstances. Please keep in mind that I am looking for an optimisation of the balance between the enjoyment of human life and available resources on earth here. Fairly drastically lowering the amount of food intake by reassessing what is necessary and healthy is one aspect of my utopia. However, this may just lead to a world filled with very old, kinda hungry and crabby individuals, but at least they'll be healthy and energetic.

Bartlett asks, 'how, as population grows and petroleum wanes, are we going to produce all that petroleum-intensive food?'

One way to approach this is a re-assessment of the value of petroleum generally. If food production is the most valuable use of oil, the other uses may have to be sublimated to the greater good. Sorry, that may mean fewer individual autonomous petroleum-based automotive transport vehicles, and plastic bags. These kinds of restrictions might as well be faced sooner rather than later. The age of the automobile has to end soon, or there will be no oil left to make bicycle tires. Without prioritizing resource allocation soon, you can basically forget about a "future" involving even rudimentary transportation systems on the order of bikes, roads or trains, much less big rigs, Harley Electra Glides, and jet planes.

We have so much food in the States, the narrator coos, that "the government can afford to pay farmers not to grow food, but instead, return their farmlands to the wild." Aww. But "returning to the wild" only happens when growers take their land out of production altogether and sell it to a conservation organization. (http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs ... /801130356) Most farm subsidies today go to large corporate conglomerate farms and investors who use the money to buy more small farms, further locking their stranglehold on food. (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01606.pdf)

But the fact remains that there is a tremendous amount of food. The science of agriculture has made vast leaps in the last hundred years, and not all of them are based upon pouring oil on the problem, though, as I said above, this may be a more valid use of a prescious substance than driving to 7-11 for an all-beef doughnut.

So, first, Conflict: wars interfere with food production. Nice epiphany but aren't most wars lately fought for the hydrocarbons on which the "modern farming methods" (and war-making power itself) depend?

Not really. Vastly larger numbers of people have died in the last decade in wars fought for the minerals used to make your cellular telephone. Seven million people have died in the congo since 1998 over the ability to control coltan mining. The subject of conflict minerals is a complex blend of the highest and lowest technologies on earth meeting to produce bloodshed and unlimited texting. And a great part of the reason we can have this conversation involves the use of petroleum all the way down the line. The network is part of the cause of war too. The only certainty is that the price of these wars is paid over and over again so that the most wealthy individuals on earth can remain ensconsed in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, while the rest of the world from which we are divorced foots the alimony bill in blood and accompanying impoverishment.

"This is why," the narrator says in closing, "reducing the number of hungry people will not make the remaining people less hungry," a pretty fuzzy claim.

But historically quite accurate, I'd say. That is, was there a time in the past, when there were significantly less people, when privation can easily be seen to be significantly less than it is today?

...isn't there at least a potential for real overpopulation that we need to be aware of?

We certainly need to live on this planet with an attitude consisting of several parts more awareness in general.

As for small indigenous groups facing extinction, isn't that usually caused by colonialization and "infrastructure development"?

If by "colonisation" you mean genocide, then yes.

The video ends with the curious assertion, "The population of the Earth will peak in thirty years and then start to go back down." I looked all over PRI's website for how they arrived at that conclusion but I couldn't find it.

The leveling off of the population in 2050 or so at niine billion is a widely reported figure based upon current trend projections modeled by the United Nations Population Division.

[Elvis]

I have some comments on your comments.

Thanks Barracuda, and I'm down with all your comments, especially this:

One way to approach this is a re-assessment of the value of petroleum generally. If food production is the most valuable use of oil, the other uses may have to be sublimated to the greater good. Sorry, that may mean fewer individual autonomous petroleum-based automotive transport vehicles, and plastic bags. These kinds of restrictions might as well be faced sooner rather than later. The age of the automobile has to end soon, or there will be no oil left to make bicycle tires. Without prioritizing resource allocation soon, you can basically forget about a "future" involving even rudimentary transportation systems

Worth repeating, well put. And that's what I took away from Bartlett's videos. I've thought the days of casual car trips should be over for quite awhile now, but Bartlett's talk gives it new urgency for me. Back in 2004 I'd tell my friends, "every time you start your car to go pick up a gallon of milk, an Iraqi child is killed." It bugged some people but it was sorta true. I haven't had a car for a few years and don't want another one.

Overall, I didn't necessarily mean to dismiss PRI's data, just the way they packaged and addressed it. To the war prizes I should have added other resources, other minerals, to the hydrocarbons (which I take to mean oil, gas & coal).
I was on thin ice in a few places, you got me... but I was on a roll...

Thanks for the nine billion number and source; quite honestly, I'm not up on the numbers & growth rates these days.

And oops, "colonization" ...you know, genocidization.

But seriously,

caloric restriction

Just tell me we can still have stinky cheeses and alfredo sauce.

[lupercal]

hmm.. Elvis I commend you for watching the clips but it doesn't seem you watched them very carefully. You're spending a lot of effort shooting the messenger and inventing strawmen but ignoring the message. When you do engage with it, you make a lot of assumptions that simply aren't supported by the clips or the website they link to, which, cursory though it is, goes far beyond any print info Bartlett offers (none) and is, as far as I can tell, correct.

As always Barracuda does a much better job of point-by-point analysis than I can so I'll defer to his impressive break-down above (Another tip of the hat to Mr B), except to add that the clips say nothing about McDonalds, Monsanto, or any other private corporation or organization, conservative or otherwise, that I saw, so your claims about a hidden corporate agenda seem quite ridiculous.

Anyway, what I said was, as you quoted, "here are a couple of less alarming but more informative clips." That they are. I didn't say I agreed with every item on every agenda of every director of every foundation that gave the organization a grant, or the organization itself, which I'd frankly never heard of before I googled up the clips. And I happen to object to the idea of turning Africa into a breadbasket, but the fact is, they do a very good job of blowing a hole in the Malthusian con job pitched by Bartlett.

[Elvis]

the clips say nothing about McDonalds, Monsanto, or any other private corporation or organization, conservative or otherwise

Right, I was saying that McDonald's and Monsanto are in the subtext; they come up in my objections to PRI's claim that we have nothing to worry about when it comes to population. In the food video there's a disconnect when it comes to population's relationship to the availability and mismanagement of resources.

Your points are all well taken, really, with a clarification here,

your claims about a hidden corporate agenda seem quite ridiculous

To be clear, I'm not saying that PRI consciously injected a 'corporate agenda' undercurrent, or has hidden it---it's just there, a natural consequence of PRI's pro-corporate leanings.

My critiques of PRI and the videos might be overkill, and admittedly involved a bit of arm-waving (I really need to cut back to just one pot of coffee a day), but I stand by the general gist of it.

When I tell Barracuda that I accept his comments, I don't mean that I reject my comments and replace my understanding with his; I try to fold Barracuda's comments---and your comments---into a synthesis.

The strongest metals are alloys.
(...right?...can I get the Analogy of the Day award now?)

[lupercal]

It's all good Elvis, beware the demon bean, and in any event you turned up some interesting stuff. Still, I think it's fair to point out that your objections to the PRI clips are based on incidentals -- your interpretations of the graphics and the motives of the sponsor -- and not on the population information actually presented, which is clearly summarized and fully sourced in FAQ files at the link displayed at the start of each clip ( http://overpopulationisamyth.com/ ), and listed below in the order they're posted on the preceding page:

1. "Food: There's Lots of It" - http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-of-it

2. "2.1 Kids: A Stable Population" - http://overpopulationisamyth.com/2-poin ... population

3. "Overpopulation: The Making of a Myth" - http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpo ... -of-a-myth

Incidentally, that last FAQ ends with this Q and A:

The world's population will peak in 30 years? Prove it.

According to the U.N. Population Database, using the historically accurate low variant projection, the Earth's population will only add another billion people or so over the next thirty years, peaking around 8.02 billion people in the year 2040, and then it will begin to decline. Check their online database. http://esa.un.org/unpp/

So whatever you think of the motives, the claims and conclusions presented in the clips are clearly identified, fully sourced and easily verifiable.

The Bartlett clips, on the other hand, are exercises in obfuscation, literally from the get go: the subject of the clips is not clarified in either the title, "The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See," or the accompanying YouTube description:

1.4 million views for an old codger giving a lecture about arithmetic? What's going on? You'll just have to watch to see what's so damn amazing about what he (Albert Bartlett) has to say.

I introduce this video to my students as "Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important." But then again, after watching it most said that if you followed along with what the presenter (a professor emeritus of Physics at Univ of Colorado-Boulder) is saying, it's quite easy to pay attention, because it is so damn compelling.

Entire playlist for the lecture: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...

The point of the presentation is not explicitly stated in the lecture, either, as can be seen from the discussion above. Bartlett is clearly railing about overpopulation, but he doesn't offer any actual population data to support such a claim, just nonsense and distractions.

Nevertheless, the conclusion viewers are clearly intended to draw (see below for example) is that overpopulation is "The Most IMPORTANT" problem we presently face. Factually, however, it isn't. Any resort to facts, documentation, links, or other data would be inconvenient in creating this impression, so Bartlett supplies none, but if he's really a physics prof, he must have figured out that his argument is crap. So what is he really pushing?

Well, this is what he offers after scaring us about the overpopulation menace:



In case the message isn't clear, the YouTube playlist description spells it out: "If we don't choose from that right-hand column, nature will choose for us. I for one, would rather we be the ones making the choice."

In other words, Bartlett, or the unidentified organization that produced and posted these clips, is using a false issue -- overpopulation -- to manipulate viewers into supporting a right wing agenda that boils down to cutting taxes by gutting social programs like public health, social security, and aid to families with dependent children (that one's already gone), terrorizing immigrants to more easily steal their labor, and expanding the national security apparatus ("war").

So one big difference between the clips I posted and Bartlett's is that PRI uses verifiable facts to support plainly stated conclusions, while Bartlett uses obfuscation and manipulation to support an insidious agenda that isn't clearly owned to anywhere.

PS: Just in case there's any doubt as to what Bartlett is actually pushing, he shows this slide in his last clip (#8):



He then says "we have the authority to deal with the problem here," and invites his audience to "check the facts." But the facts do not support his claims, and in any case, he provides no documentation. So I think it's safe to say that his arguments are specious and his "lecture" is a vicious and disturbing form of reactionary propaganda.

[Elvis]

Thanks for your response, Lupercal. Not to beat this thing to death, I'll try to quickly reply to a couple of things and make a stab at synthesizing useful points made by both PRI and Bartlett...

I prefaced my critique of PRI and its videos by saying, "What I got from the Bartlett lecture is, 'In a world of rising consumption, if we're not careful, a serious and sudden hydrocarbon shortage is going to kick our ass...'"

So we're probably not in disagreement about overpopulation by itself. I focused my preface on consumption, didn't mention population, because I think over-consumption is the real problem, and overpopulation only becomes a factor if we don't reduce hydrocarbon consumption, among other things.

In that sense I do take issue with Bartlett, more so after figuring in your input (thanks). I might rewrite that slide in clip #8 to say, "the United States' enormous and gluttonous per capita consumption of resources is one of the biggest problems we face."

Bartlett's discussion on oil and coal is what I found most interesting and useful in the lecture. I didn't get that he's reactionary or right-wing, or that he's saying 'continue over-consuming, just reduce population.'

Bartlett, or the unidentified organization that produced and posted these clips, is using a false issue -- overpopulation -- to manipulate viewers into supporting a right wing agenda that boils down to cutting taxes by gutting social programs like public health, social security, and aid to families with dependent children (that one's already gone), terrorizing immigrants to more easily steal their labor, and expanding the national security apparatus ("war").

Nor did I get that Bartlett is necessarily calling for gutting social programs, or any right-wing agenda. In fact, he makes plain his distaste for war and "killing people" as an answer to meeting ongoing hydrocarbon demand. I got the impression that's he an anti-war 'liberal' type who favors humane policies and regards Big Oil (e.g.) with suspicion.

So while Bartlett's lecture didn't imply a right-wing agenda to me (in the 'subtext' as it were), PRI's Food video does imply a right-wing agenda with its subtle reliance on corporate solutions and using even more petroleum to accommodate population.

But---as you say, that's really neither here nor there when it comes to the simple question of 'is the world overpopulated'. The broader issues are obviously not so simple, and I think both "sides" can be reconciled somewhat by considering useful aspects of each. I'm all for re-valuing the uses of petroleum, but (rhetorical question), is that going to happen any time soon? The US military is the single biggest consumer of petroleum (as they seek to 'secure' energy supplies), and I think 'Murkin drivers are close behind.

Meanwhile, I hope the UN's figures are correct and the leveling-off does occur.

[lupercal]

So while Bartlett's lecture didn't imply a right-wing agenda to me (in the 'subtext' as it were), PRI's Food video does imply a right-wing agenda with its subtle reliance on corporate solutions and using even more petroleum to accommodate population.

I just don't see where you're getting that. This is what the two sets of clips boil down to: Bartlett uses specious claims (5% annual growth for 70 years etc) and irrelevant "arithmetic" (exponential growth, doubling) to make the false claim that overpopulation is a catastrophic problem calling for drastic measures -- "we have the authority to deal with the problem" -- summarized in the "table of options" in clip #2, which I'll post again for a closer look:



Notice that his "options" include "stopping immigration," "disease," "war," "famine," and "polution." I would not call this a progressive agenda. And while your thoughts about resource conservation are laudable, the focus of his lecture is on population.

Likewise the PRI clips, which use verifiable documentation to point out that "overpopulation" is not, in fact, the serious threat Malthusians and eugenicists would have us believe. As to "corporate solutions," the PRI clips simply point out that an increase in population doesn't necessarily require more land to support it, based on the fact that yields have been increasing in recent decades:

What do you mean when you say we are producing more food on less land?

Exactly that. Thanks to continuing increases in crop yields, the world's farmers are harvesting hundreds of millions of tons more grain each year on tens of millions acres less land than they did in the 1970s and '80s. For instance, according to USDA figures, the world was producing 1.9 million metric tons of grain from 579.1 hectares of land (a hectare is 2.47 acres) in 1976. In 2004, we got 3.1 million metric tons of grain from only 517.9 hectares of land. This is quite a jump.

This is not to say that we won't possibly need to dedicate more land to farming in the future. The point is, a rise in population is not always matched by a rise in the amount of land required to feed that population.

Download the data on world grain production from the FAO website: http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/ ... st_tbl.xls

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-of-it

There is no mention of petroleum, and only this mention of chemicals:

Where has barren land been turned fertile?

Lots of places. Northeast Thailand and parts of Brazil, for example, were once considered inhospitable farming environments. According to the FAO, these places had disadvantages like "unreliable rainfall patterns, poor soils and a high population density in the case of Thailand; and remoteness, soils prone to acidity and toxicity and low population in the case of the Cerrado [Brazil]."

In both countries, the government was able to help farmers overcome these obstacles. This was done through methods like better irrigation, adding nutrients and chemicals to make the soil more suitable for planting, and finding crops that would adapt well to the local environment.

This was so effective in the case of Brazil that that country is now considered an agricultural superpower--largely due to farming on the "unfarmable" Cerrado.

Coverage by the Food and Agriculture Organization: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/20964/icode/
Coverage by The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/scien ... .html?_r=1

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-of-it

So, while I think your concerns are rightly placed, I don't think your conclusions about either set of clips can be drawn from the material they actually present.

[Nordic]

You're reading stuff into Bartlet's pov that just aren't there. The guy is a scientist and his pov is scientific.

His right hand column lists the ways that populations can be reduced. Note that one of them is "small families". Where's your gasping fear at that one?

Another one is "contraception". Again, where's your knee jerk to that?

The guy is coldly and rationally laying out the situation. If you hafe an emotional response to it, that's not really his problem. He's not saying that's what you SHOULD do to reduce population, he's saying that those are the known ways for populations to be reduced.

And he's right.

He's right about the math, too.

The guy is making a point, and it's a good point, and it's a point that everybody should have to think about. Your average person has no freaking idea about growoth rates, economic and otherwise. Most of his lecture seems to be as much about the foolishness of our culture constantly promoting economic "growth" as a good thing.

And I have to say that I know what he's talking about regarding Booulder and its surrounding areas. I moved to Denver in 1984 or thereabouts. When I first moved there the drive from Denver to Boulder was one of itnense beauty. By 1990, when I moved away, the area had really filled up. With ugly suburbs, exburbs, office complexes (one of them called The Denver Tech Center) if I recall (or was that the one to the South?) ........

It was really heartbreaking to see. That vast beautiful landscape filled with SHIT.

[wintler2]

Heads up aussies, we've suddenly got a PM with a clue or two, i might have to vote for a major party.

Gillard shuts door on 'big Australia'
ABC

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is breaking free from one of her predecessor's main policy stances by announcing she is not interested in a "big Australia".

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was in favour of population growth, with his government predicting it to hit around 36 million by 2050, largely through immigration.

But Ms Gillard has indicated she will be putting the brakes on immigration in order to develop a more sustainable nation.

"Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population," she told Fairfax.

"I don't support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia.

"I support a population that our environment, our water, our soil, our roads and freeways, our busses, our trains and our services can sustain."

But Ms Gillard says that does not mean putting a stop to immigration all together.

"I don't want business to be held back because they couldn't find the right workers," she said.

"That's why skilled migration is so important. But also I don't want areas of Australia with 25 per cent youth unemployment because there are no jobs," she said.

Mr Rudd installed Tony Burke as the Minister for Population, but in one of her first moves as Prime Minister, Ms Gillard has changed his job description to Minister for Sustainable Population.

Mr Burke will continue to develop a national population strategy which is due to be released next year.

Ms Gillard says the change sends a clear message about the new direction the Government is taking.
..
Australian businessman Dick Smith has been a vocal advocate for a more sustainable approach to population growth and has applauded Ms Gillard's announcement.

But he acknowledges it will not be welcomed by everyone.

"The business community, my wealthy mates are completely addicted to growth because of greed," he said.

"So they're going to fight her every inch of the way. They just want growth, growth, growth, even though it's obvious that it's not sustainable.

"I think she's a brave lady, I reckon she will stand up to them."

But an urban planning group is trying to convince Ms Gillard of the benefits of a big population.

Urban Taskforce Australia chief executive Aaron Gadiel says a large population increases the tax base to fund improvements to infrastructure and welfare services.

"We shouldn't be trying to fight it, what we should be trying to do is ensuring that we've got the investment and infrastructure that makes that process easier to manage," he said.

"I think people should be focussing on how much state, federal and local governments have been investing in urban infrastructure to help absorb population growth."

A survey earlier in the year by the Lowy Institute found that almost three-quarters of Australians want to see the country's population grow, but not by too much.

The Lowy Institute surveyed more than 1,000 people and found that while there was support for increased immigration, Australians were not quite prepared to embrace the Government's predicted 36 million.

The poll showed 72 per cent of people supported a rise in Australia's population, but 69 per cent wanted it to remain below 30 million people.

..

[lupercal]

The guy is a scientist and his pov is scientific.

Bartlett is a quack and he's blowing smoke up your ass, but some people like the feeling. Enjoy.

It was really heartbreaking to see. That vast beautiful landscape filled with SHIT.

Who do you think is responsible for all that development? Superstitious Catholics? Wrong:

These are the 50 largest employers in Colorado:
# Employer City Number of Employees

1 LOCKHEED MARTIN SPACE SYSTEMS Littleton 10,000
2 PETERSON AFB Peterson Afb 9,286
3 50TH SPACEWING Colorado Springs 7,000
4 UNIVERSITY OF CO-BOULDER Boulder 6,902
5 UNIV OF COLORADO HOSPITAL Denver 6,500
6 IBM Boulder 5,000
7 TRANSPORTATION SAFETY OFFICE Denver 5,000
8 COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY Fort Collins 4,900
9 SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE Colorado Springs 4,800

http://www.acinet.org/acinet/oview6.asp ... &nodeid=12

That's right, the military industrial complex, but I don't hear Bartlett demagoguing about Lockheed Martin's exponential growth. Why is that, I wonder?