SS Titanic: Sunday Brunch
Lubos Motl has a post up with an interesting quote from Tony Blair:
Not that I ever gave Kyoto much chance to work, even if the US had played. Only China has a policy that realistically confronts the fundamental problem - overpopulation. The means they adopted are probably only possible in an authoritarian society.
More hopeful is the example of Europe. Quite by accident, much of Europe has also achieved considerable success in limiting its population. Not only that, but they have succeeded without much sacrifice of personal liberty or economic prosperity.
The poorest, most miserable, and most dangerous nations on the planet are those with rapidly growing populations. The festering Muslim rage probably owes as much to explosive population growth as to resentment of the West. The catastrophes we see in Haiti and Africa are propelled mainly by overpopulation.
The US is not immune to this disease. Mothers who have many children, and especially mothers who have children early, are more likely to be poor and uneducated and produce poor, uneducated children. These same children are far more likely to become criminals than their agemates without these disadvantages.
Quite naturally, the people of these poor and overpopulated countries work very hard to escape to the prosperous countries that have succeeded in limiting their population growth. When they succeed, they often carry their culture, and its patterns of overbreeding, with them.
There is a fundamental Darwinian problem here: faster breeding populations will tend to crowd out slower breeding ones, but unlimited breeding leads to catastrophe. This is not a new situation for the human race, but the traditional ways of dealing with it - war, genocide, plague, and slavery - are morally obnoxious to us.
So is there any hope to escape this vicious cycle? Not while the US remains the capital of the stupidocracy, led by people opposed to population control, international agreements and humane principles. The duplicity, corruption, and incompetence of the present administration will bring it down eventually, but will there be anything much left of the US by then? I am far from certain.
Even with strong leadership from a still powerful US (if we should be so lucky), the task is still almost impossible. Religion and culture strongly promote overpopulation in most of the world. The only specific that seems of much efficacy is more rights and opportunities for women. In the Muslim world, that battle has seen little or no success.
"...My thinking has changed in the past three or four years. No country is going to cut its growth. [China and India] are not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto. What countries will do is work together to develop science and technology. … There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it. ... How do we move forward, post-Kyoto? It can only be done by the major players coming together and pooling their resources, to find their way to come together."This is first of all an admission of the obvious - an anti-pollution treaty can't work when the biggest polluters refuse to play. The guy who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island might have made a similar remark. Perhaps he hoped that some technological advance would intervene to save the island from ecological catastrophe, or, more likely, he, like Bush and Blair, was a sky pilot convinced his actions were pleasing to the gods.
Not that I ever gave Kyoto much chance to work, even if the US had played. Only China has a policy that realistically confronts the fundamental problem - overpopulation. The means they adopted are probably only possible in an authoritarian society.
More hopeful is the example of Europe. Quite by accident, much of Europe has also achieved considerable success in limiting its population. Not only that, but they have succeeded without much sacrifice of personal liberty or economic prosperity.
The poorest, most miserable, and most dangerous nations on the planet are those with rapidly growing populations. The festering Muslim rage probably owes as much to explosive population growth as to resentment of the West. The catastrophes we see in Haiti and Africa are propelled mainly by overpopulation.
The US is not immune to this disease. Mothers who have many children, and especially mothers who have children early, are more likely to be poor and uneducated and produce poor, uneducated children. These same children are far more likely to become criminals than their agemates without these disadvantages.
Quite naturally, the people of these poor and overpopulated countries work very hard to escape to the prosperous countries that have succeeded in limiting their population growth. When they succeed, they often carry their culture, and its patterns of overbreeding, with them.
There is a fundamental Darwinian problem here: faster breeding populations will tend to crowd out slower breeding ones, but unlimited breeding leads to catastrophe. This is not a new situation for the human race, but the traditional ways of dealing with it - war, genocide, plague, and slavery - are morally obnoxious to us.
So is there any hope to escape this vicious cycle? Not while the US remains the capital of the stupidocracy, led by people opposed to population control, international agreements and humane principles. The duplicity, corruption, and incompetence of the present administration will bring it down eventually, but will there be anything much left of the US by then? I am far from certain.
Even with strong leadership from a still powerful US (if we should be so lucky), the task is still almost impossible. Religion and culture strongly promote overpopulation in most of the world. The only specific that seems of much efficacy is more rights and opportunities for women. In the Muslim world, that battle has seen little or no success.
Comments
Post a Comment