Opinion: CO2 is the Demon Because Malthus and Ehrlich Were Wrong About Overpopulation

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

The world focus on CO2 is simply the end objective of a much larger political agenda. The Club of Rome (COR) and then UNEP’s Agenda 21 under Maurice Strong created a political agenda based on certain assumptions all related to overpopulation.

1. The world and all nations are overpopulated.

2. All population growth is at an unsustainable rate.

3. All nations are using up resources at an unsustainable rate.

4. Developed Nations use resources at a much greater rate than Developing Nations.

5. Developed Nations achieved wealth using fossil fuel driven industries.

6. Developed Nations must pay compensation to Developing Nations for benefits gained at their expense and for hardships and adaptation costs involved in dealing with climate change created by CO2.

7. Reducing activities of Developed Nations and slowing growth of Developing Nations requires a world government.

8. Once a world government is established population control can progress.

Global warming and climate change are simply the emotional threats used to confront overpopulation. The problem is the world is not overpopulated.

The current attack on Developed Nations includes punishment for their success, and for the redistribution of their ill-gotten wealth. It is ironic that they chose Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834) and his ideas as the basis for their agenda because he argued that increased prosperity was hampered not by inequality of wealth but too many people unable or unwilling to create wealth. He didn’t want across the spectrum population reduction, just a reduction of those who were holding society back. His views and proposals are markedly different than the socialist solutions of Agenda 21. His major work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, proposed what today’s socialists would consider completely unacceptable reasoning and solutions. He wanted the government to end policies that encouraged people to have more children. Instead of reducing the population totally and taking from the wealthy to give to the poor, he wanted fewer poor people born.

Thomas Robert Malthus

The Club of Rome, under the facade of saving the planet, adopted and expanded the work of Thomas Malthus as an agenda for population control. As one group explains,

Malthus was a political economist who was concerned about, what he saw as, the decline of living conditions in nineteenth century England. He blamed this decline on three elements: The overproduction of young; the inability of resources to keep up with the rising human population; and the irresponsibility of the lower classes. To combat this, Malthus suggested the family size of the lower class ought to be regulated such that poor families do not produce more children than they can support.

This is important for the modern debate because overpopulation is still central and the driving force behind the use of climate change as a political vehicle.

Malthus blamed government social policy and charity for exacerbating the overpopulation problem by encouraging people to have more children. As he explained,

I entirely acquit Mr Pitt of any sinister intention in that clause of his Poor Bill which allows a shilling a week to every labourer for each child he has above three. I confess, that before the bill was brought into Parliament, and for some time after, I thought that such a regulation would be highly beneficial, but further reflection on the subject has convinced me that if its object be to better the condition of the poor, it is calculated to defeat the very purpose which it has in view. It has no tendency that I can discover to increase the produce of the country, and if it tend to increase the population, without increasing the produce, the necessary and inevitable consequence appears to be that the same produce must be divided among a greater number, and consequently that a day’s labour will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions, and the poor therefore in general must be more distressed.

Malthus’ objective was to reform or eliminate the Poor Laws and curtail charity. Unfortunately, his argument lacked hard evidence, and the examples he used were not relevant. For example, he used US population increase that more than doubled from 2 million in 1775 to 4.3 million in 1800. He failed to identify immigration as the major reason for the increase.

Malthus had a crucial influence on the theory of evolution, as Darwin acknowledged in his 1876 autobiography.

“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work”.

Darwin demanded evidence to support any theory but somehow overlooked it for Malthus. However, he clearly liked the idea of “favourable” (desirable) or “unfavourable” undesirable traits. It suited his acceptance and inclusion in the sixth edition of Origins of Species of Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest”. The problem is Malthus

Malthus and Darwin also ignored technology apparently because they were only interested in biological evolution. They didn’t include the Agricultural Revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution. This omission still pervades society today as many assume evolution has stopped. It is also central to the underlying theme of environmentalism that technology is a dangerous anomaly in human development. It underscores creation of the meaningless term sustainable development.

Alarmism over population growth was central to the ideas of the Club of Rome. It received momentum through Paul Ehrlich’s even more egregious and incorrect book, “The Population Bomb.” The fact that every single prediction Ehrlich and John Holdren, advisor to President Obama for Science and Technology made, have proved completely wrong doesn’t stop extremists seeing the need for total control. Some believe people should not exist. Holdren thinks they should be limited and controlled as detailed in a list of his totalitarian proposals.

· Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

· The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;

· Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

· People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

· A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Crucial to all alarmism is a mechanism to bypass public resistance to draconian controls, especially in the US with its constitutional guarantees. Holdren proposed a method for bypassing the Constitution by using the Constitution. He wrote,

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

It sounds very official, legal and plausible until you realize how it cedes control. He is the person who explains how the Constitution could be used in for this purpose. He is the one who decides when the crisis is sufficiently severe to endanger the society. This technique is applicable to any perceived threat, including climate change.

Holdren told his Senate confirmation hearing that he no longer held his views and refused to answer media questions about the views expressed in Human Ecology. His actions and support of global warming and climate change contradict the assertion. Certainly de-development, which is achieved by eliminating fossil fuels, is central. In a 2010 interview, he was asked to explain the thinking behind views expressed in Human Ecology.

CNSNews.com asked: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”

Holdren responded: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality. Thanks a lot.”

Sir John Houghton, the first co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead editor of the first three IPCC Reports, confronted the overpopulation issue differently. In an article for the Global Conversation in Lausanne in 2010;

First let me write a few words about God and science. A few prominent scientists are telling us that God does not exist and science is the only story there is to tell. To argue like that, however, is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is about. At the basis of all scientific work are the ‘laws’ of nature – for instance, the laws of gravity, thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and the puzzling concepts and mathematics of quantum mechanics. Where do these laws come from? Scientists don’t invent them; they are there to be discovered. With God as Creator, they are God’s laws and the science we do is God’s science.

The Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24), and Jesus is the agent and redeemer of all creation (John 1:2; Colossians 1:16-20; Ephesians 1:16). As we, made in God’s image, explore the structure of the universe that God has made with all its fascination, wonder and potential, we are engaging in a God given activity. Many of the founders of modern science three or four hundred years ago were Christians pursuing science for the glory of God. I and many other scientists today are privileged to follow in their footsteps.

A special responsibility that God has given to humans, created in His image, is to look after and care for creation (Genesis 2:15). Today the impacts of unsustainable use of resources, rapidly increasing human population and the threat of climate change almost certainly add up to the largest and most urgent challenge the world has ever had to face – all of us are involved in the challenge, whether as scientists, policy makers, Christians or whoever we are.

The COR and its manifestation Agenda 21’s arguments are considered neo-Malthusian because they expand his hypothesis to say that the population will outgrow all resources. The threat was laid out in the COR book Limits To Growth. It became the format for all subsequent claims, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on totally inadequate data including on population and resource reserves, it was subjected to analysis using very restricted development mechanisms and forced through a computer model to a predetermined result. Economist Julian Simon challenged the hypothesis of The Limits with a bet that resulted in an empirical study. Simon won the battle but lost the war. It is 35 years since Simon made the bet, but still most believe the world is running out of resources.

So the resource and population predictions are wrong, which is not surprising because Malthus was wrong about both. However, many still want to control and limit population. A summary of their proposals is revealing.

• Malthus wanted population reduction, but he decides which group must decline, but he was a church minister.
• As an atheist Darwin says nature will limit numbers, but that’s confusing because humans are natural.
• Houghton wants numbers to decline but claims God gave him the authority to decide.
• Holdren wants numbers to decline but since he or the political party he supports is superior to everybody they will decide.

The insanity of it all is that none of what they think matters because there is no overpopulation, no shortage of resources or any connection between CO2 and climate change. It is a story of science without evidence or at best-concocted evidence from Malthus through the COR to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).