Reducing Carbon by Curbing Population
Remember the population explosion?
When population was growing at its fastest rate in human history in the decades after World War II, the sense that overpopulation was stunting economic development and stoking political instability took hold from New Delhi to the United Nations’ headquarters in New York,
sending policy makers on an urgent quest to stop it.
In the 1970s the Indian government
forcibly sterilized millions of women. Families in Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere were
forced to have fewer children. In 1974, the United Nations organized its first World Population Conference to debate population control.
China rolled out its one-child policy in 1980.
Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the demographic “crisis” was over. As fertility rates in most of the world dropped to around the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman — with the one major exception of sub-Saharan Africa —
population specialists and politicians turned to other issues.
By 1994, when the U.N. held its last population conference, in Cairo, demographic targets had pretty much been abandoned, replaced by an agenda centered on empowering women, reducing infant mortality and
increasing access to reproductive health. (abortion)
Well, concerns about population seem to be creeping back. As the
threat of climate change has evolved from a fuzzy faraway concept to one of the
central existential threats to humanity, scholars like Professor Cohen have noted that
reducing the burning of fossil fuels might be easier if there were fewer of us consuming them.
“Population wouldn’t be the whole story but it could make a
big difference,” Mr. Cohen said.
An article published in 2010 by researchers from the United States, Germany and Austria concluded that if the world’s population reached only 7.5 billion people by midcentury, rather than more than nine billion, in 2050 we would be spewing five billion to nine billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide into the air.
This alone would deliver 16 to 29 percent of the emission reductions needed over the next four decades to keep the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the late 19th century, the threshold scientists predict could lead to severe disruptions to the climate.
Slower population growth could bring other benefits. The World Resources Institute has been looking into how the world will feed itself in 2050 without busting the carbon budget.
On current demographic and economic projections,
food production would have to increase 70 percent by 2050. “Population growth is responsible for about one-half of increased food consumption,” said Tim Searchinger of the World Resources Institute. “
The other half comes from higher incomes and richer diets.”
Much of the expected population growth is set in stone, but sub-Saharan Africa, expected to add 1.2 billion people by 2050 on top of its current 900 million, is an exception.
If fertility in sub-Saharan Africa slowed more rapidly than projected — declining to 2.1 children per woman in 2050 from 5.4 today — feeding the most undernourished region in the world
would be a lot easier. And sparing African forests and woodlands from even greater deforestation would substantially reduce the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere.
For all the benefits of slower population growth, population policies remain a
highly touchy subject.
Access to education is critical. Across human history, fertility rates have fallen when it has made economic sense for families to have fewer children. Education — especially of girls — has played a powerful role in expediting the decline.
Across much of the developing world, more educated women have fewer children, and their offspring are more likely to survive. The spread of public education was accompanied by plummeting fertility rates in such disparate places as Brazil and Iran.
The other obvious tool is access to reproductive health. In the developing world, 222 million women have an unmet need for modern contraception,
according to one study. Providing them with it, at a relatively small cost of $4 billion a year, could prevent 54 million unintended pregnancies.
These are hardly new ideas. The U.N. population conference in Cairo 20 years ago suggested pretty much this approach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/b...curbs-as-a-means-to-cut-carbon-emissions.html
One can see an agenda for population control as a means to CO2 control and it has been implemented in various forms and degrees throughout the world.
So yes Carnivore, under the guise of global warming (aka climate change), the plan is to make the world less rich (lower standards of living) and less populated.
