Investor's Business Daily, April 18th, 2007
Population: Global warming, we've said repeatedly, isn't about science. Those who push us to take sweeping actions to curb warming often have a much different, far more radical agenda.
Take the innocent-sounding group, Californians for Population Stabilization. With Earth Day set to arrive this Sunday, they've taken the stance that in fact, the real problem isn't global warming per se, but people. The solution is simple: Just slash our population.
"If we had half as many people, we wouldn't have much of a climatic warming problem," Ric Oberlink, a spokesman for the group, told Cybercast News Service.
This means "population control," of course. And population control is another word for coercion by government -- the real agenda of many global warming supporters.
Population control sounds benign, but it really isn't.
It means things like more forced abortions, mass sterilizations and mandatory contraception. It means, too, that perhaps we will have to harden our hearts and turn away from the great tragedies -- AIDS, malaria, war -- that now kill millions of people around the world every year.
Already, each year, six million people die of starvation or malnutrition, three million from AIDS, 2.5 million from pollution, and just under two million from bad drinking water. How's that for population control?
UNICEF has estimated a mere $80 billion each year could end many of these ills, providing all the world's people with things like clean water, sanitation, health care and education. That would save millions of lives.
Instead, green advocates say we need to spend $180 billion a year to cut global warming by a mere 0.04 degree Celsius over the next century. As statistician Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, this trade-off makes no sense at all.
We don't mean to pick on the California group. It's just one of many out there advocating similar things.
But using population control to justify radical changes in the way people live shows the kind of hidden agendas pursued by global warming advocates.
As with the science behind global warming itself, the logic of population control is flawed. To begin with, no one really knows what the population will be in a hundred years. As the chart shows, the estimates -- based on the best available data -- are all over the ball park.
By 2100, if population is at the upper end of estimates, we will have some 12 billion people on Earth. If it's at the bottom of the statistical range of probabilities, it will be just over 4 billion. That's off by a factor of two-thirds.
Assuming no change in the amount of carbon dioxide produced per person that's a huge difference. Global warming might not be a big problem at all. Or it might be bigger.
We've been this way before. Recall that as far back as 1798, English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus predicted that rising populations would lead to widespread famine, destitution and misery.
He reasoned that population was growing at an exponential rate, while food supplies were growing at a far slower arithmetic rate. Thus, population would overtake our ability to feed ourselves, and mass starvation and death would result. It didn't happen.
Nonetheless, in 1968, Malthus' faulty ideas found new life when Stanford University Prof. Paul Ehrlich wrote the huge bestseller, "The Population Bomb," predicting a population explosion followed by mass famine and starvation.
As with Malthus' dire prediction, it never happened. But that hasn't kept this bad idea from coming back.
Malthus, Ehrlich and other population control advocates fail to understand that people aren't a curse, but a resource. In fact, having more people on Earth has led to less pollution, more food, better technology and longer lives -- the exact opposite of what population controllers fear.
Why? More people means more problem solvers working on the problems of humanity.
Arguing that the best way to cut global warming is by population control is circular logic. Sure, cut the number of people on Earth and any problem probably will decline.
But by taking such draconian actions to halt global warming, we walk a very slippery slope.
In the past, population control has been accompanied by a devaluation of humanity. It has led us down the horrible path to things like eugenics, mass euthanasia and genocide. Global warming just isn't worth it.
