Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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Attenborough, that celebrated misanthrope, obviously never got our message
Oh dear. Does that mean we have to pull Rod’s Open Letter to him due for publication in next month’s Socialist Standard? Can we look kindly on a follower of Parson Malthus who blames overpopulation for environmental problems generally and who therefore, by implication, thinks that if the world’s population were to be reduced then these would be solved despite capitalism continuing?
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51123638
This fuller report makes no mention of population.
I find that those who believe in the population crisis are in as much denial as climate denialists. They simply reject the figures on the declining fertility rates and fail to understand that there exists a time lag which will eventually rectify itself and the population begin to decline.
Offering any socialist solutions to the social ills associated with urban over-crowding, mis-use and mis-distribution and allocation of resources and migration…they too prove an athema. They treat carrying capacity (or carbon footprints) as true reflections of reality
So it’s the Grauniad journalist or sub-editor highlighting their own prejudices then, even if Attenborough is on record as having expressed such views in the past?
Meanwhile Greta is accused of wanting to get rid of capitalism. If only, but who knows, after all it is the logic of her position.
I wasn’t intending the letter to Attenborough to look kindly on him. Usually I want to scream at the telly when he’s on, for not getting the point. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he’s an overpopulationist – all the more reason to try and put him right.
He is most definitely is an over-populationist being a patron of “Population Matters” along with the notoriously proven wrong Paul Ehrlich
I’m a bit surprised at others, but just expertise does the actress Susan Hampshire possess?
We cannot expect any better from someone in the present Australian government, ALB.
Canavan who said it is former executive of Peabody Energy and has family connection with the coal industry.
He is a committed climate change denialist and probably hates children too
Yes it is that logic that we must work upon…the logic that leads to the conclusion that the system is to blame, not lifestyles
Just opened my e-mail and RobertS much unappreciated Grist collation of news stories coincidently today has one item related to population.
From a pro-capitalist free marketeer (usually those who agree with us either are those types – bigger the population bigger the market bigger the profits – or from Catholic church anti birth control backgrounds)
While the blog has a post on Portugal which is actively encouraging immigration to stem its population decline.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2020/01/portugal-wants-more-people.html
And China’s population begins to decline in 2028
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-birthrate-sank-lowest-level-050025256.html
But I am sure the over-populationists will switch from numbers to resources…damn it, these Chinese want a western-style living standard, eating Macdonalds for breakfast lunch and dinner, instead of noodles
Came across this site.
Some of the Links are interesting. For instance according to one link sustainable development is “Marxist” so we must oppose it. LOL
The BBC and Chris Packham – over-population is the problem
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dl6q
It shows that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials per year.
The amount of material consumed by humanity has passed 100bn tonnes every year, a report has revealed, but the proportion being recycled is falling. The climate and wildlife emergencies are driven by the unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels, metals, building materials and trees. The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. The materials used by the global economy have quadrupled since 1970, far faster than the population, which has doubled. In the last two years, consumption has jumped by more than 8% but the reuse of resources has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6%.
And out of all the data, I note one glaring omission – no figure for resources devoted to military and armaments. No figures for the wasted resources expended in the destruction of wars and the necessity to reconstruct.
I know he didn’t mean what we mean but nevertheless
Janez Potočnik, a former European environment commissioner and the co-chair of the UN Environment Programme international resource panel, said the world needed to replace ownership with sharing, as is increasingly being seen with cars.
As you hint at, this is a measure of the waste of capitalism as a system not of how much each individual uses.
Taking total consumption and dividing it per head of population creates the illusion that ordinary people are to blame and that the way out is for us to cut down our personal consumption. But this wouldn’t make much difference. The other mistaken conclusion is that cutting down population would help. Ironically, by cutting down the figure by which total consumption is divided this would increase the figure for consumption per person!
Which all goes to show that consumption per head (they do it for individual countries too to show how the population there gets better off from year to year as capitalist production and waste goes up) is a misleading and pretty meaningless figure.
Another factor is the market driven propaganda about “green solutions”.
One example is the drive to replace old cars with new cars. This is a sop to the car manufacturing industry to increase demand.
The amount of CO2 produced in production of the car is not considered.
The average car produces about 4 tonnes of CO2 per year (on about 11,500 miles) but the production of the car itself is considerably higher. to produce a Citroen C1 uses about 6 tonnes of CO2, a new one reduces CO2 emissions by about 1 tonne a year, so it takes 6 years to cover the CO2 it takes to build the car. However that’s for a C1, a land rover Discovery uses 35 tonnes of CO2 to build it that’s nearly 9 years of average emissions.
With electric cars, the CO2 created through production actually rises, to about 8.5 tonnes, and although less CO2 is emitted by the car, CO2 is emitted in the production of electricity. The European Parliament (remember them anyone) calculated that if an electric car was run purely on electricity generated by fossil fuels, the car would generate nearly a third more CO2 during its lifetime than a petrol driven car, that’s not taking into account the high level of environmental damage caused by the extraction of rare elements for battery production.
Environmental change requires political and economic change where decisions about the use of the earth’s resources can be made democratically by all of those impacted by it on the basis of common ownership, with access to as much information as possible without the vested interests of the ruling class. Try telling that to extinction rebellion members and they look at you like your a fecking alien.
They put themselves forward as a revolutionary force, my cat has got more revolutionary spirit than those jokers, and he’s been dead for 2 1/2 years!
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