The cuckoos in the green movement - the anti-pops

In the context of global warming, amongst the tussle of “my scientific experts are better than yours”, there lurks an insidious element waiting to foist their Malthusian principles on an unsuspecting public. These people are the anti-populationists (anti-pops).

They want to turn capitalism back to the 1700s and reduce Australia’s population to 7 million by 2050. Aren’t you glad you were born now rather than not being born in 20 years time?

While most of the Sustainable Population Lobby are geneticists or statisticians and who think the Cultural Revolution involved a lot of dancing and eating dim sims, their fear campaigns of a Malthusian world a-brim with ravenous people (usually Africans, Indians and Chinese) makes for fantastic reading - thoroughly enjoyable if you like movies such as Soylent Green or ZPG.

The anti-pops have two aims: sterlisation programs for both males and females, starting with the most populous countries in Asia and tying carbon production with family birth numbers in Australia.

While the Sustainable Population Lobby and their Trotskyist and Luddite followers are few in number, their racist propaganda has found considerable sympathy in middle Australia.

If you think of Australia - or the world for that matter - as a box with finite hard resources where information cannot get in or out, and if you think of people as rabbits, eating and breeding, breeding and eating, it’s half understandable in a purely instrumentalist way to say - “let's cut the population”.

While humans are consumers, we are far more than “breeders” to use an anti-pop expression. We are creaters of capital, of innovation, of opportunities. Human history is replete with inventions, developing new technology and adapting to changing environments.

The fact that solar energy and wind power uses the sun’s energy defeats the simplistic closed circuit thinking of the anti-pops. Human creativity, imagination and ingenuity defy quantification.

If you herded the world’s population in to Tasmania, you would have the population density of Manhattan. Admittedly it wouldn’t be much fun, but if you want a visual reference, there it is.

It’s worth looking at global population to debunk some myths. First of all global population is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and then drop off to about 7 billion in the next century. Keep in mind that these are projections. Global population is now approximately 6.7 billion.

They do not factor in the excellent work that the plethora of aid organisations such as Oxfam, Opportunity International, the Christian Children’s Fund, World Vision, UNICEF, the UN Development program, Save the Children, to name just a few, do in providing food, microfinance, education and healthcare, all of which help to pull people out of poverty and reduce population.

According to World Vision, 25 years ago, 60,000 children died everyday. Two years ago it was down to 30,000 and this year it’s 25,000.

But the Sustainable People Lobby hate these NGOs. Why? Because they are helping people to live longer and hopefully, happier lives.

Australia has a population growth of 1.9 births per female. Australia's forecast population projections were recently revised upwards by 20 per cent to 35 million by 2050. A 20 per cent revision in itself is news but it passed through unscrutinised by the media.

The population debate has only found traction recently when couched in terms of the most catastrophic global warming projections. The more horrific the projections, the more dire the forecasts of overpopulation. This is anti-logic.

It’s a common fallacy that by associating two different phenomena, you make emphatic and definitive statements about their cause and effect when you bring both phenomena together.

Recently Sydney Mayor Clover Moore rallied a crowd outside the Sydney Opera House and equated the Opera House - a symbol of optimism - with rising sea levels. She said:

Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming?

Really? It sits 7m above high tide.

Professor Nils-Axel Morner, a past president of the International Union for Quaternary Research Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution said there was “no rational basis” for such hysterical claims as Moore and some heads of state have recently made.

During the past 2,000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with five peaks reaching 0.6 metres to 1.2m above present sea levels. From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were almost 20cms higher than today. In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cms to its present level.

Yet The Copenhagen Diagnosis report co-authored by 26 climate scientists, states that melting of summer Arctic sea ice, loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and projections of the rise in sea levels have accelerated dramatically since 2007.

It says the statistical global warming trend has continued over the past decade, contradicting assessments by some scientists - including Copenhagen Climate Council chairman Tim Flannery - that there has been a recent cooling. Now James Hansen, a top NASA scientist and the spiritual leader of the climate change scientists, says he hopes the Copenhagen summit fails as it’s deeply flawed.

Who does one believe?

About 95 per cent of the world's population growth has come from less developed regions. Yet foolishly the anti-pops attack western government’s and say they should implement social, economic and medical measures at home to reduce population growth.

This is like a drunk who has lost his house keys in the shrubs but persists in looking for them under the streetlight. Why? Because there’s more light.

Remember this: if you educate the women and children in numeracy, literacy and healthcare you are helping to lower birth rates. Pleas to convince a farmer in Bangladesh not to have five children, because they will be voracious bio-consumers and polluters, will fall on deaf ears.

The anti-pops slavishly follow the dictates of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a British-based think tank warning of the dire consequences of human proliferation. It boasts powerful voices including Gaia thinker James Lovelock and Paul Ehrlich, the man who became a household name in 1968 with his book The Population Bomb.

Mr Ehrlich's predictions of mass starvation have not come true and at 81, he is highly critical of documentaries such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

"And the problem is that the Al Gores and so on of the world actually refuse to look at what are the really inconvenient truths. What are the inconvenient truths? There's a misdistribution of power.” Enrlich and Lovelock are fatalists. They believe the earth is doomed.

The anti-pops are the cuckoos of the environmental movement. They pose a nasty wedge issue for the Greens. The Greens are a single issue environment party who have adopted a range of social justice and post materialist agendas. They are social progressives: pro-immigration and pro-refugees.

Yet the anti-pops are functionalists. They look at the world in terms of systems and measurement. People are numbers to be manipulated for the greater good. They say people who are pro-immigration and pro-refugees are namby-pamby sentimentalists who are contributing to a global catastrophe. This runs counter to the Greens notions of cultural diversity and social justice.

The anti-pops have assumed the high moral ground by saying that science is on their side. But this ignores the fact that science, by definition, doesn’t supply value judgments.

Science provides no justification for or against a particular policy. What we have here is a battle of underlying value judgments. When the anti-pops question what positive things humanity has done, and refer to a record of wastage and destruction, remember that they don’t regard human life as a positive value.

They think of humans as a form of noxious pest. “The problem” is people, and the instrument they are urging to fix the problem is policy.

No one has a right to speak for values over and above human values. When people speak for “the environment”, they are merely asserting that their preferred use of scarce resources should be preferred by others as well.

Ultimately environmental and population questions boil down to an ethical one - is social co-operation is to be based on violence and threats, as anti-pop policy suggests?

The anti-pops and their knuckle dragging followers remind one of the barrenness of modern intellectual thought, epitomised by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless.