Futuristic horror films from the sixties and seventies predicted a world so far out that their premise was never taken seriously. Well, maybe we should have taken them more seriously.
It is easy to believe that the "Green Movement" of our time is perhaps named after the concept of a lush green healthy planet. Maybe that's what they want you to think.
But perhaps the choice of that name is more a mockery of our own gullibility than the description of planetary health.
As you read the article linked below, you might want to revisit the story line in the movie "Soylent Green" for a moment and then ask yourself, are we being duped by people with a dastardly agenda?
The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.
And if that makes sense, why not start cutting population everywhere?
It is certainly true that "fewer people equals a greener planet" is simplistic. In 2050, 95% of the extra population will be poor and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today's standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.
As a result, NGOs such as Oxfam, for whom I've just written a report on climate change's impact on humans, insist that dealing with consumption in the rich world is much more important than tackling population growth. According to the International Energy Agency, if the whole world moved over to clean electricity, the CO² savings would offset the emissions of up to 2.8bn poor people, easily accounting for the entire extra population forecast for 2050.
But what if we can't reform the way we produce and use energy? The most worrying of climate change's impacts – food and water shortages,
The NGOs believe it hypocritical to target the poor for having lots of children. It is one of the universal coping mechanisms of poverty; So why ask them to pay in unborn children for our profligacy?
Under normal circumstances, it takes perhaps a generation for the birth rate to drop with increasing wealth, whereas carbon emissions go up very quickly. As people get richer, they buy cars, use air conditioning, consume more calories and start to swap their vegetables for meat.
So the richer a country gets, the more pressing the need for it to curb its population. The only nation to have taken steps to do this is China – and the way it went about enforcing the notorious one child policy is one of the reasons the rest of us are so horrified by the notion of state intervention. Yet China now has 300-400 million fewer people. It was certainly the most successful governmental attempt to preserve the world's resources so far. [UK Guardian]
Forget the Frankenstein costume this Halloween. If you REALLY want to scare people, just dress up like a liberal.
Oh, and check your children's beggars bags. Don't want them eating any of those little green wafers now do we?
Talk about strange.......I was just viewing the Soylent Green video's on you tube last night.Not even sure why,now I know...:)
Posted by: Greg Todd | October 30, 2009 at 09:07 AM