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Cut world population and redistribute resources, expert urges Paul Ehrlich
Nuclear disaster or plague likely unless population shrinks and natural resources are reassigned to poor, says Prof Paul Ehrlich.
The world’s most renowned population analyst has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor.
Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, goes much further than the Royal Society in London which this morning said that physical numbers were as important as the amount of natural resources consumed.
The optimum population of Earth – enough to guarantee the minimal physical ingredients of a decent life to everyone – was 1.5 to 2 billion people rather than the 7 billion who are alive today or the 9 billion expected in 2050, said Ehrlich in an interview with the Guardian.
“How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage.”
“The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there’s going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off.”
Bill Gates Foundation Buys 500,000 Shares of Monsanto
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock. Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of genetically modified food, which has been tied to numerous health ailments such as sterility and infant mortality.
AGRA Watch has issued a press release on the subject:
Monsanto has already negatively impacted agriculture in African countries. For example, in South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. According to Mariam Mayet, environmental attorney and director of the Africa Centre for Biosafety in Johannesburg, some farmers suffered up to an 80% crop failure. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the faulty product, it gave nothing to the small-scale farmers to whom it had handed out free sachets of seeds. “When the economic power of Gates is coupled with the irresponsibility of Monsanto, the outlook for African smallholders is not very promising,” said Mayet.
Monsanto’s aggressive patenting practices have also monopolized control over seed in ways that deny farmers control over their own harvest, going so far as to sue-and bankrupt-farmers for “patent infringement.” Monsanto was declared company of the year by Forbes magazine in 2009, despite its history of agricultural abuses. Monsanto has also been accused of dumping toxic waste in residential areas, resulting in a variety of severe health disorders.
Revisiting Carbon Trading
Carbon Trading puts corporate profits before climate justice. We need to dispel the misguided notion that carbon trading has anything at all to do with climate change mitigation, or the present and future well being of our communities.
Carbon trading lies at the centre of global climate policy and is projected to become one of the world’s largest commodities markets, yet it has a disastrous track record since its adoption as part of the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon Trading: how it works and why it fails outlines the limitations of an approach to tackling climate change which redefines the problem to fit the assumptions of neoliberal economics. It demonstrates that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the world’s largest carbon market, has consistently failed to ´cap´ emissions, while the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) routinely favours environmentally ineffective and socially unjust projects. This is illustrated with case studies of CDM projects in Brazil, Indonesia, India and Thailand.
UN climate talks in Copenhagen are discussing ways to expand the trading experiment, but the evidence suggests it should be abandoned. From subsidy shifting to regulation, there is a plethora of ways forward without carbon trading – but there are no short cuts around situated local knowledge and political organising if climate change is to be addressed in a just and fair manner.
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www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/cc7/cc7_web.pdf [PDF 8.5mb]
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Download: 350 Reasons Carbon Trading Won’t Work
See Also: Trading On Tnin Air
What is global dimming?
What is global dimming?
Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.
Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflective. More of the sun’s heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.
This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming.
Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world’s population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.
100 Year Old Light Bulb? True or False
TRUE
Today you’ll find a remarkable light bulb burning bright at a fire station in Livermore, California. It hasn’t been turned off since 1901, shining around the clock (save for a few brief interruptions) for nearly one million hours now.
The Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and General Electric agree the four-watt, carbon filament bulb is the longest-living in history, despite two moves and a few power outages during its lifetime.
The bulb was donated to the department in 1901 by Dennis Bernal, a pioneer in the area who owned the Livermore Power and Light Co. It was hung as a night light (so firefighters wouldn’t have to fumble around with lighting kerosene lamps) in a downtown garage that served as both a police and fire department five years before the great San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. A few years later, the bulb found its way to the “new” City Hall that also housed the two departments, and in 1976 it was moved two miles from the old Fire Department headquarters to Station No. 6. (The 1976 move, during which the bulb was out for a total of22 minutes,was the last interruption to the long-lived light’s otherwise constant shining. It now enjoys the security of a surge protectors well as battery and diesel backup power supplies.)
