This planet needs lots more people!

Or maybe not. First, this excerpt from Robert Samuelson's op-ed on why we can't do anything about global warming: (emp add)

From 2003 to 2050, the world's population is projected to grow from 6.4 billion people to 9.1 billion, a 42 percent increase. If energy use per person and technology remain the same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, carbon dioxide) will be 42 percent higher in 2050. But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. Unless we condemn the world's poor to their present poverty -- and freeze everyone else's living standards -- we need economic growth. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more than double by 2050.

So, reining in population growth might be a good thing. For lots of reasons, including global warming. But that's not the way they think over at Focus on the Family. From an report over at their CitizenLink section: (excerpts, emp add)

Gates-Buffett Linkup Troubles Pro-Life Activists

The billionaires' combining of forces almost certain to mean millions more for abortion, population-control groups.

Billionaire financier Warren Buffett announced this week he is going to leave 80 percent of his estate — more than $35 billion — to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It's a donation that is troubling to the pro-life community, according to Joseph D'Agostino of the Population Research Institute.

"It's very scary," D'Agostino told CitizenLink. "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has very close ties and gives a lot of money to pro-abortion groups, such as Planned Parenthood, and for population control around the world."

"It's especially scary from a population-control perspective, because birth rates have been dropping dramatically in the Third World over the last few decades and continue to go down," D'Agostino said. "The last thing the Third World needs is more population control, because their populations are already facing dramatic aging, but they don't have anything like the financial resources we do to take care of all these older people."

D'Agostino said the "population time bomb" that Gates and Buffett seem to fear is a myth. But Gates' and Buffett's philanthropy is a "bomb" in its own right.

"Population control is quite literally destroying much of the Third World," he said. "Even in Mexico, the birthrate is below replacement level. And over time, since there are not enough children being born to replace the population, they are not going to have enough workers. They are going to have these old people who are going to retire, and there are not going to be enough workers there to support them — and these countries are facing, in the long-term, financial collapse."

Most of these poor countries already have too many people. The notion that growing the population will provide support for the aging sector is mistaken. It'll just make everyone worse off. But there you have it, a willful desire to increase the population of poor countries.


posted by Quiddity at 7/06/2006 02:41:00 PM