Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Willie Soon; The climate population controllers are back.
TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE, EDUCATE GIRLS AND GIVE THEM BIRTH CONTROL
CLIMATE CHANGE IS a ubiquitous hydra, a many-headed beast that affects everyone and everything in some form. Solutions to climate change range from the effective and the practical to the potentially catastrophically dangerous—but, in this somewhat heated debate, a potent weapon in our arsenal is falling by the wayside: the empowerment of women.
Last year a coalition of scientists, economists, policymakers, researchers, and business people published Project Drawdown, a compendium of ways to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping skywards. Drawing from a plethora of peer-reviewed research, the document ranks 80 practical, mitigating measures—along with 20 near-future concepts—that could push back the oncoming storm.
Ranked in order of carbon emissions locked down by 2050, the usual suspects made the list. A moderate expansion of solar farms (number 8), onshore wind turbines (number 2), and nuclear power (number 20) would all save tens of billions of tons of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions. Increasing the number of people on plant-rich diets (number 4) and using electric vehicles (number 26) are effective carbon-cutting measures often proposed by climate hawks, and rightly so. The top spot went to managing refrigerants like HFCs, which are incredibly effective at trapping heat within our atmosphere.
But two lesser-known solutions also made this most practical of lists: the education of girls (number 6) and family planning (number 7). This is a stunning revelation, one that couldn’t be more pertinent, and yet, for the most part, discussions of mitigation and de-carbonization focus heavily on other matters, from the perceived perils and bona fide benefits of nuclear power, to just how quickly solar power is proliferating.
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Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/to-stop-climate-change-educate-girls-and-give-them-birth-control/
I agree a lot of backward poor country countries could be drastically improved with Western education. One of the reasons places like Afghanistan are such a mess, is parents are desperate to educate their kids – but in too many cases, the only people offering that educational “opportunity” are crazy people.
Telling the recipients that more education will cause their tribe to wither for the sake of the planet is not the way to sell Western education services. They are not the fools some Westerners seem to think they are – uneducated doesn’t mean stupid.
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If only climate alarmists were as sterile as their theories.
And the male climate alarmists are as impotent as their theories.
No, college won’t help. Most lefties have at least some college. Sterilization though,…
What helps the most is a job and the prospect of upward mobility in it. That’s what works the best historically.
That will, of course, require equal access to affordable electricity and sanitary conditions. The thuggery which has taken over the UN, plus the societal gender discrimination in the nations they “own”, together become the most tenacious obstacle to a natural depopulation of our globe to a “sustainable” level.
It was suggested by a PhD I’m close to, that A.I. might help folks make those sort of decisions in the future.
I told him GIGO. He stroked his chin and nodded.
We consequently changed the subject.
Education has taken a bad turn. I blame it on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It categorizes learning. Toward the bottom is factual knowledge. Toward the top is analysis. Every teacher wants to flatter herself that she is teaching at the top of the taxonomy. The result is that students are taught to analyze the crap out of almost no facts. Their left hemispheres (which handle language processing and logic) are strengthened. Their right hemispheres (which handle context) are denigrated. The result is weaponized military grade BS.
Iain McGilchrist has written a magnum opus, The Master and His Emissary in which he lays out the science related to the brain hemispheres. He points out that people with right hemisphere damage become detached from reality in a manner that mimics schizophrenia.
In this youtube interview, at around 12:03, he makes the statement that the left hemisphere blanks out anything that doesn’t fit its world view. Bingo. Now we know how a very educated person like Dr. Michael Mann can ignore recorded history as well as ignoring common sense and as well as ignoring almost all the previous evidence in order to invent his hockey stick. His left hemisphere has conveniently blanked out all the conflicting evidence. He’s a victim of his superior education.
Our education system has a lot to answer for. Foisting it on others is unconscionable.
They certainly have me baffled by their…. OT1H, over-population is the “root cause” of “the problem”. OTOH, we must expand socialist illfare programs and flood the Western world with “migrants”/ “refugees”/ “asylum seekers”/ invaders/ terrorists… with nary a gesture toward effective backgroind investigation to bar those most likely to initiate force or fraud… regardless of over-population, over-crowding which require over-taxation, over-regulation, etc.
Whip-saw? Rope-a-dope? OR some more specific variant?
I think they are causing a lot of incivility, transforming a lot of genial people into crusty, hardened defense forces against their scams…and pliant, easily duped people at the same time.
It’s not education and birth control that slows population, it’s a job and the improved conditions that a salary brings. There are good reasons to want population to level off, that have nothing to do with CO2. It’s already working in many places that used to have rocketing populations. People limit their children voluntarily. Capitalism solves another problem.
I should add, the jobs are for the women. It being hard to combine masses of children and other work.
You are confusing education with indoctrination. Real education, improved condition of living and access to contraceptive do reduce population growth rate.
No I’m not. Why would education reduce child berth? They know what causes babies but contraception won’t work if the couple doesn’t use it. However if the family’s income is affected by the woman being pregnant all the time, using contraception starts to make sense.
In fact you can see it in benefit cultures like that of the UK. Unemployed women can have large familes because the state will pick up the bill. More babies might even equal more income. They don’t have to make a decision between limiting their family or limiting their lifestyle. They have access to contraception and education. They just don’t have any incentive to use either.
Highly educated orthodox Jews have large families because their ideology demands it.
Likewise educated devout Muslims and educated devout Mormons (likely as among other Christian sects).
Education does not cure ideological fixation. One only need contemplate the incredible stupidity of ideological academics to prove that thesis.
The only thing that has ever reduced birth rates is growing wealth.
Giving poor people contraceptives doesn’t work because for poor people, kids are a resource not a burden.
I thought global warming decreased sperm count — so what are warmists worried about?
The Eugenics/Planned Parenthood/Greenpeace mentality is to eliminate humans as hazardous to nature. Consequently, the US has aborted 60 million since 1973. Another 60 million are consequently missing having not been conceived. Thus 37% of US population of 323 million were killed or missing. We lost those needed to support social security for the elderly. China’s 1 child policy was even more devastating, leading to 4 elders per worker and increasing rural suicide rates. 20 countries in Europe are now declining. Who needs to worry about global warming with such policies?
The book “What to Expect When Nobody is Expecting” covers this in some detail. Our population would be collapsing if we weren’t flooding the country with immigrants, legal and not. We have outsourced our breeding to the third world.
Given the post-modern ethics of our world, I’d family planning and education of girls are two concepts that contradict each other.
On the one hand, family planning is– or used to be– about a married couple deciding if they can have a child, or another one. This requires that society value the concept of protecting sex until marriage. However, as we know, sex is considered a free-access, unconstrained necessity of daily life in our world. Sex is now a base need that need not be held to the highest standards. So, we end up a sex-obsessed society, and naturally “family planning” becomes a soft cover for violent, abrasive counter-consequence behavior: abortion.
I am all for education girls in third and first world countries, because it does have an overall positive effect on society. But educated tainted with a dark obsession with sex, and family planning being the violent, deadly rescue tactic that it is, this future may be greener but well bereft of intelligent women… and men.
Wait… we’re already there.
I’m afraid that post-modern ethics have little impact on the third world, where the fertility rate is documented as anomalously high by post-modern standards.
That birth-rate, incidentally, is tempered by a reduced average lifespan, due to the environmental and socio-political conditions inherent to underdeveloped nations.
If the third-world dictators will seek free-market capitalism and private investment, instead of conspiring to strip the capitalist nations and co-distribute the booty, the global population promises to decrease significantly in a few generations.
(I must here make a disclaimer that certain religious sects encourage copious reproduction, in an effort to dominate the future national constituency)
In Africa and India education is strongly linked to family size.
Education and indoctrination are two rather different animals
MAy backfire when the newly educated realize what a nonsensical theory lays behind global warming hysteria.
The last thing a tyrant want is educated population. Tyrants promote dogma instead.
I think that’s what they mean by the “education of girls” and the “empowerment of women.” Their idea of education is to indoctrinate them with climate-change dogma when they’re young in hopes that they will practice birth control and demand reductions in carbon emissions when they’re adults.
Reporter Becky Griffin……reminds me of this
This calls for one of my favorite secular quotes.
“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” – Will Rogers
Wisdom, knowledge correctly applied.
If you’re planning your retirement, you might want someone wise in the financial realm.
If you’re stuck in the wilderness, who would you want to advise you? Your banker?
Or maybe the old guy who never went to school but has lived there for 60 + years?
It takes two to make a baby. And one of them isn’t a “girl.”
In many countries, the girl has no say on who’s the husband, when to marry, or how many kids to have. The mother-in-law has a poor education, and is concerned primarily on if her son’s genes are being passed on, and more often than not, the place is plagued by civil wars, poverty, and bad health care.
It’s nice people know what to do, like educate girls, but it’s not exactly quick and simple process.
However, not all is lost. Late Hans Rosling has excellent visualizations in Youtube that show how birth rates have gone tremendously down already almost everywhere.
The population growth is an issue, but it is an issue that is solving by itself. The only places that lag behind are central Africa, notably Nigeria, and some islamic countries. There is no reason to be misanthropic as leftists sometimes are, or simply predisposed as right-wingers might be.
Birth rates have gone down everywhere. It’s just that in some areas it’s gone down more than others. At present the biggest cause of population growth is lengthening life spans in the third world, not more babies being born.
I have a solution for that… no seriously, the birth rate is problem in a small set of countries. People living longer is not a ‘problem’. It is a result of a solution!
I think there needs to be more public intercourse concerning this issue.
As long as old, wrinkled politicians aren’t the ones leading the way.
And I was going to ask to watch, until that comment
Afghanistan was a poor choice for comparison. It was a thriving modern world in the 70’s.
Do a Google search “Afghanistan then and now” to see exactly what I mean.
Educated Afghan parents wanted their kids to be educated. Unfortunately the teachers in my opinion betrayed the trust of the parents, and radicalised the kids.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/17/groomed-suicide-taliban-recruits-afghan-children-murder
RE: “Unfortunately the teachers in my opinion betrayed the trust of the parents, and radicalized the kids.”
Sounds like the Washington Education Association union, here in Washington state.
There is probably a correlation with “good work” similar from crew like those of Crazyhorse 1/8 and Crazyhorse 1/9 in providing “education” to kids in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah.
This is a bit early. It is NOT April 1 yet.
There’s several different positions one could have about all of this.
agreed…
for educating girls….they used an example of Kenya
…for family planning…they used Gaza
I’m not going to take this lying down!
Maybe if the alarmists didn’t expect us all to stand erect and ready every time they opened their mouths this would be less of an issue.
Eric, I agree to a certain point with your post, then fundamentally disagree beyond. Wrote a whole book about your (and Willis) general hypothesis, the most operative for these purposes being chapter three of Gias Limits, based on food calories. As my own son said, “Dad, NOT a beach read”. A long data slog through a lot of hard irrefutable facts as of publication date 2012. Plus minus greening effects on C3 crops, suggests a planetary human carrying capacity of about 9.2-9.3 billion by about 2050. Just is. And we are now at about 7.8 billion.
Perhaps a few more large scale wars would help.
I sincerely hope not. But the root economics of what looms ahead is inescapable. i even granted non-exonomic free reign to virtual water, and it did not compute. Look at the data, not the beliefs
I suspect the carrying capacity of the planet is substantially higher than that.
Much of Australia could be developed for agriculture, nuclear (fusion?) powered desalination plants or even diverting a few tropical rivers would vastly increase available water supply. A lot of marginal Australian land wouldn’t take much terraforming to make it a lot less marginal.
Ditto Siberia and Canada – nuclear powered ground heating to lengthen growing seasons, extend arable land North.
We have barely touched the sea. Ocean Thermal energy conversion is pretty useless as a source of power, but the artificial nutrient rich upwellings such systems provide could cause algal blooms in vast areas of sea which are currently nutrient poor, creating a boom in global fish stocks – effectively harnessing a vastly increased area of the Earth’s surface for human agriculture.
When all these measures finally run out of steam, its space elevators, asteroid mining, AI and colonising other planets will plug any resource gaps.
Eric, no doubt. But at what cost to you to save refugee lives you currently quarantine in offshore PNG islands. Really?
Asteroid mining? At what cost. You theorize the maybe possible without considering the plausible. Get economically real..
You’ve left out Soylent Green.
We don’t need ground heating in Canada. Just a few degrees of global warming.
Asteroid mining is being taken seriously by the likes of Goldmann Sachs.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/goldman-sachs-space-mining-asteroid-platinum-2017-4
The first mined asteroid will be a high value target rich in very valuable metals like Platinum, well worth the cost of recovery. After that, who knows? It will likely prove much easier to build solar power satellites or whatever using materials already in orbit than to try to ship everything up from Earth.
If Earth was on the brink of crisis, Project Orion spaceships powered by nuclear bombs could kickstart space industry very quickly, and very affordably. But I doubt we shall reach such a crisis, AI packages launched by conventional rockets should be enough to open up large scale exploitation of space based resources.
If the enviros go nuts about adding a bit of CO2 to the atmosphere, what will they do when we start transferring tons of material from asteroids to the planet?
Nonsense, We could easily double crop production just by bringing the 3rd world up to 1st world technology.
If we still have a problem, in most 1st world countries, as much as half the land that could be farmed, isn’t.
Then there’s hydroponics, eating less meat, backyard gardens.
Actually, calculated your best practices theory by crop. chapter three of Gaia’s Limits Most hopeful is rice, about 2 x as best practices spread in SE Asia. Least hopeful is wheat, thanks to Norman Borlaugs green revolution already adopted evwrywhere. The future wheat problem is that Borlaugs dwarfing and rust resistance ‘green revolution’ inventions work once, not twice.
Hi MarkW
Can you show to any sources for this?
And this:
It would appreciate some evidence on this
Regards
Jan
The solutions you suggest are totally marginal. Backyard gardens are necessary in a system that’s incapable of delivering, like communism, but their productivity is lower than tgat of mass production. Eating less meat, yeah, I love these rainbow ideas. Lettuce has a worse track record in keeping people live.
About 30% of the US’s corn crop is used to make fuel. Around the world corn isn’t the only food being turned into fuel.
While backyard gardens are marginal, there are millions of acres available for them, if the need were to ever arise. Which it won’t.
There are no facts about the future. But just about everybody who predicts it is wrong.
ristvan
Carrying capacity is a function of how high Energy Return on Energy Investment becomes for sustainable energy (eg solar thermal) and how low the related costs become. That drives power, fuel and desalination.
If I was a climate denier, and you were a lady,
Would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?
The “LOL” was for this quip.
If the prophecy of Catastrophic “Anthropogenic” Global Warming comes to pass, then the selective-child doctrine will indeed be a viable (pun intended) means to its end. Invest in Planned Parenthood futures.
Many educated women choose to have more than 2 children.
Education drops birth rate, but it increases emissions per capita. I’d go for education.
“many” or “few” is pretty irrelevant. What’s relevant is “more” or “less”.
But just white Christian girls. We won’t be suggesting any of that racist ethnocidal climate nonsense for black and brown Muslim girls now will we.
No I do think when leftists talk about population control, they are not racist, possibly chiefly misanthropic. They, knowing that they talk about places like Nigeria, never mention Nigeria, since they’re afraid of being stamped as racists.
What they “are” doesn’t matter, and we don’t even have any means to know anyway.
What matters is what they do. and what they do is, preventing as much as possible girls to become women.
Could be relevant to know why if we could act on them to change their course of action, but the fact is, we cannot anyway.
I think we are, unbeknownst to most of us, acting and affecting on how they think. Civilization just creeps in, as Barbies, toasters, Toyotas, fridges etc.
LOL
Conversely, educated does not mean smart. Look at how many educated ‘climate scientists’ believe CO2 controls climate (and every other aspect of Nature).
The lefty greens are so hung up on CAGW that they are willing to ignore reality. Like they want to save the birds but build more wind turbines. In the case for contraception they still follow Margaret Sanger belief that stopping the poor from having children will make the world a better place. Sanger really didn’t care about the affects on the environment, she just wanted less poor people. What the lefties don’t realize today one whole religion, Islam, (1.4 billion) and its most conservative leaders are promoting Muslims to have as many children as possible. It is one of the strategies of the radical Islamists for taking over Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile the West has more single parent babies than anytime in history, often born to teenagers. Hypothetically we have the best education, at least when compared to the third world.
The thinking behind “smaller families = less CO2 production” presupposes that smaller families will consume the same resources per child as larger families. That is nonsense. Smaller families don’t just bank the extra money that they would have otherwise spent supporting additional children. They spend that money too. They take more vacations in more exotic locals, they buy nicer cars, bigger houses, better (and more) clothes, they eat better food, they buy more of everything. I seriously doubt that having less children changes the amount of resources that any given family consumes. Except for the fabulously wealthy, we all max out our resources, even the people who have no children at all.
Utter nonsense.
Until those children turn into adults making their own living and supporting their own family. They think about the future, and it obviously make a difference if there are 10 billions humans or just 10 millions, as the plan have it.
That’s just as ridiculous. Family planning means having families You might go from 7 Billion to 7 Billion over a generation or two instead of 7 Billion to 8 billion, but going from 7 Billion to 10 Million would require measures so draconian as to be unspeakable.
According to Chief Science Advisor to Prime Minister, New Zealand
https://twitter.com/ElyseTheGeek/status/965269017261957120
How do economic sacrifices benefit the next generation? Is it by limiting their prospects for education, jobs, mobility, and nutrition? If we send society back to the dark ages, only a few wealthy and the clergy will be able to afford an education. That’s how it was until the industrial age and capitalism gradually made it economical to provide education to the masses. There is no evidence that a little warming, if it occurs, will harm more people than it benefits. But we do have history to show us what will happen if “economic sacrifices” relegate society to living in mass poverty.
Sacrifice. Offer. It is a religion. I do make sacrifices, like for example, I sacrifice some fossils and wood logs to keep our house warm. The next generation is happy, and if we keep doing this, we’ll delay the next ice age for some time.
Just showing how ignorant of basic economics he is. I would not be richer now if my father had been poorer. If that worked, then the children of the poorest would be the richest people. If we get richer it’s because we have created more wealth, and that stays around for the next generation.
As in – will this generation of aspiring middle class and poorer people worldwide give up all attempts at giving themselves and their children a fair or better life in the future so that the well off can grab even more of the world’s resources so that they can become even more of a privileged elite while passing their greed off as saving the planet.
A plea – use “fewer” when referring to people, children, parents, cars, houses, etc.
“Less” should be used for things like sand, gases, mud, water, and things you can’t practically count as individual items.
The birth rate is already below replacement level in most developed nations. The almost all the places with significant birth rates are barely contribute to the activities that the alarmists say are causing climate change.
After we educate them, that will change.
Wow, my paragraph was a grammatical train wreck. Sorry about that. The second sentence should be: “Almost all the places with significant birth rates are barely contributing to the activities that…”
Indeed it was. But since I’m a walking railway accident, I’m none to say.
Saw the story on Salon getting aggregated on Google and Bing this morning.
A trial balloon from the Alarmists I would say.
Their, the Alarmists, interest is the forced sterilization of girls from 8-years old and older, principally in India, China and Africa. Countries in the Muslim world will do the dirty to their girl children as they have done and still do since 10 BC.
Mohammed was borne about 570 AD. But Islam is an unreconstructed 6th century religion. The west has moved on; they haven’t.