The month of 7 billion

Sometime this month the population reaches an estimated 7 billion, the most people the Earth has ever had – and it continues to increase, at great detriment to the environment we all depend upon. I cannot feel optimistic about the future – i.e. that humans will manage to radically change their attitude and society. Things will likely continue on the same self-destructive path until the environment is devastated, and the world will look like the nightmarish hellholes depicted in Avatar and Terra Nova. I would like to be proven wrong, but given intractable human nature, I think I will be disappointed. (A post at the Dark Mountain blog echoes what I am feeling: despair.)

National Geographic online has a special section on the topic.

In unwelcome news, Australia’s population has reached 22.5 million, just over half that due to excessive immigration, the rest to high birth rates.

There was a report on A Current Affair a family with 15 children; I didn’t watch it on TV but have been unable to view the video due to some technical issue (not viewable on any of my browsers), so I don’t know if they are all biological or if some are adopted. If they are all biological the family is irresponsible in the extreme. Unfortunately Government child support encourages such extravagance.

There is a large families section in a parenting forum on The Age. The concept that educating and empowering women will result in smaller families seems to have bypassed the women there. A few of the posts seem defensive – well, they bring it on themselves by their excessive breeding! The women have no excuse but selfishness. They obviously don’t care for the environment – no matter how frugally they might live, every extra child born negates that. [Looking at some of the posts in that forum, is pregnancy and giving birth addictive for some women, bizarre as that concept may seem?]

IVF timebomb

“Infertility time bomb: IVF children have higher risk of infertility, obesity and diabetes”, Daily Mail, 23/2. There is some evidence that infertility problems can be passed on genetically for IVF-conceived children, as well as health problems caused by the procedure itself.

“There are genetic causes of infertility that you can pass on,” said Dr. Van Steirteghem. “It means that the next generation may be infertile as well and this is something all clinics should mention to the patients – that if there is a genetic origin that this genetic origin of infertility may be transmitted to the next generation.”

Fertility treatment is so common that one child in every primary school year group is thought to have been conceived in a fertility clinic. But the growth of IVF may have come at a cost to a small, but significant, minority of children. Studies have shown that test-tube babies are slightly more likely to suffer from birth defects. Because so many are twins and triplets, they are also at greater risk of low birth weight, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure later in life. Doctors fear many IVF babies will also inherit the genetic mutations that caused their mother or father’s infertility.

So those are more problems that the public health system will pay for – which would have been unneccessary if IVF were never invented. That’s a major issue in the debate – this extra burden is preventable by banning IVF.

As usual the comments are heated (IVF brings out similar polarized opinions as abortion does). IVF in the UK and Australia is partly funded by the public health systems in both countries, which makes the issue more controversial. The point is usually raised that as various illnesses are paid for by public health care, why shouldn’t IVF be? The argument against this is that treating other illnesses don’t involve bringing another human into the world (who otherwise would not be there). IVF is unneccessary – it can’t be justified in an already-overpopulated world. At the very least, it certainly should not be taxpayer-funded.

A few comments (agreeing with my opinion):

There is a BIG difference betweem treating illness and having IVF. Yes, of course I have taken antibiotics, for ILLNESS. However, no-one has died from INFERTILITY!!! Your argument that just because people take treatment for illnesses means that IVF is necessary is ridiculous!

– linda Duncan-Adam, West Des Moines

This is what happens when humans tamper with nature – nature will always win. There are good reasons why a percentage of all mammals – including humans – are infertile. Having a child is a privilege, not a right as so any infertile couples seem to believe! Let’s hope sanity finally prevails on this issue. I resent my taxes going on NHS funded treatment for the infertile, it is an obscenity and an outrage when there are children starving in the world.

– Goldie, Sussex, 23/2/2010 4:23

Surely common sense (yet again) should prevail in this issue. Just why does nature let some couples conceive naturally and some not? Maybe because those who can conceive naturally and easily have the best genes to pass on. And maybe nature is telling those who can’t conceive naturally that there could be problems with any offspring if nature allowed them to do so. But of course, to some people, a baby is the ultimate “must have”, and so they will go to any lengths to have one.

– linda Duncan-Adam, West Des Moines

An entry on another blog annoyed me to the point of commenting – then I got castigated by some self-righteous females. Women like these seriously irritate me – they are of a leftist political view in which they think public health care should pay for everything. I am Leftist in many respects (and certainly support public health care), but my opinion diverges on this issue for previously-stated reasons. Such people are too focused on individual rights, and not on responsibilities to the society they live in.

I hate that term – “socially infertile”, as if someone who wants to become a parent so badly that they’re prepared to undergo the trauma of IVF has to justify why. It’s like the old debate on whether being gay is “genetic” or “chosen” – why on Earth does it matter? The point is that it’s not wrong, and that no-one should be discriminated against because of it. Same with those who, for whatever reason, cannot become parents without the aid of a particular medical treatment – they’re not going to apply for it unless they need it, are they? The reason is “I want to become a parent and can’t do so without this medical treatment”. It’s not a cosmetic procedure people are choosing to undergo because it sounds like fun, now, is it?

“Socially infertile” refers to lesbian couples and would-be single mothers who could otherwise concieve children naturally by mating with a man. There is no way IVF should be publically-funded for this – if they want children that badly, either adopt one – or mate in the normal fashion.

Increasing people, declining jobs

Some articles on decreasing job opportunities and increasing unrest:

“As the Global Economy Sinks, Tensions Over Immigration Rise”, TIME magazine, 6/2. “And as economic pressures increase, the potential for conflict clearly grows also. ‘Traditionally […] migrants don’t compete for [the] same jobs as native populations,’ says Pandya. ‘But the moment [those native-born] people think they have to find any job, they will be in direct competition with migrants. That’s where friction arises.’ ”

“Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide”, New York Times, 15/2. Rising unemployment and prices is breeding resentment in many countries. Decreasing jobs due to automation and efficiency, combined with an increasing population is a potentially explosive combination. The only long-term solution is to reduce population growth – economies cannot keep growing indefinitely in a world of finite resources.

“Sponsorship system open to exploitation, say academics”, Herald-Sun, 20/2. A Monash University report (not online yet) recommends cutting the absurdly high rate of immigration (currently 200 000 a year) so as to protect local jobs for citizens. I could not agree more! Of course, they will get castigated for this, but quite a lot of article commentators agree. The high levels will only increase resentment toward immigrants who compete for jobs against citizens (as is seen in other countries such as Italy).

There’s a documentary coming up on SBS on 26/2 called Baby Boom to Bust, about the supposed threat to society from an ageing population and declining birthrate. I thought a declining birthrate was supposed to be a good thing!

“Missing Children” – A two-part series about one of the biggest issues of our time: our ageing population. By 2050 one out of five of us – over two billion people – will be over 65. In some developed countries there are so many elderly and so few births that the population is actually dying off. And in parts of the developing world, the numbers of old people are growing at an even more astounding rate. This series looks at the looming social, political, economic and human impact of a rapidly ageing society. Part one looks at the lack of children being born throughout the world. In most countries across the developed world the fertility rate has fallen well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. With fewer children, who will do the work and pay the taxes in the future, not to mention care for all those baby boomers, who are living longer than ever?

(Mini-rant: the baby boomers will damn well have to look after themselves! They’ve wrecked the world for my generation and those following.)

“No Babies?”, New York Times, magazine, 29/6/2008. An alarmist article about the falling birthrate in Europe, making the absurd remark about the USA:

Which brings us to a sparkling exception. Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.

With a looming recession due to foolish and unsustainable economic policies, and thousands losing their jobs, an increasing population is definitely a liability!

The article does note that:

Meanwhile, in the midst of arguments about natalist and immigration policies come other voices and more elemental questions. Is it even possible to increase the population significantly? Is it even necessary? There are those who think that “lowest low” is not in itself a looming disaster but more of a challenge, even an opportunity. The change that’s required, they say, is not in breeding habits but thinking habits.

[…]

According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better.

[…]

But while few locals themselves may feel religiously inclined, the thinking is that if religious pilgrimage is the best card in your hand, you play it. This notion — embrace shrinkage in order to revitalize your economy, rather than trying to coax women to have more babies — is, according to more than a few observers of the European scene, the right tack. Or better said, it is one part of the best overall strategy — one that embraces population decline. For there are those who argue that low birthrate in itself is not a problem at all. Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford scientist who warned us about the “population bomb” in the 1960s, is more certain than ever that the human race is catastrophically straining the planet. “It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,” he told me. “Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support systems.”

New Scientist magazine published an article by Paul Ehrlich, “Enough already” (reproduced on my site as the NS article is, annoyingly, subscriber-only) suggesting the declining birthrate and aging population is not a bad trend.

Coping with this change will doubtless create challenges, but there will also be benefits. Whereas in a developing nation with high birth rates as many as half its citizens may be under the age of 15, in industrialised societies there are typically fewer than 20 per cent. Commentators raising alarms about ageing populations neglect to mention that with fewer children, far less of their society’s resources will be needed to support and educate them. In addition, fewer young people means lower crime rates, because crimes – including terrorist acts – are overwhelmingly committed by people aged between 15 and 30. In the U.S., crime rates fell markedly from about 1990 on – 18 years after a big drop in the birth rate. We don’t think this is a coincidence.

Not all old people are infirm, and many can still make useful contributions to society! (E.g. volunteering, mentoring younger people.) Perhaps robots will be developed as assistants for the elderly (don’t assume you will be looked after when old). There will be a “hump” to get over when the old outnumber the young, but once the old have passed on and the young contine to have fewer children (assuming a sane population policy), these concerns will be allayed. This post at PublicPopForum explains this better than I do:

Every detailed international and Australian study shows the health costs of the ageing population are manageable. Sweden and Japan are among a dozen or so countries which spend a lower portion of GDP on health than Australia but have older populations and equal or better health outcomes.

This has been known for some time. Epidemiologist Dr Michael Coory pointed it out in an excellent article in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2004.

But the scare-mongers with their own agendas are out there using this as an excuse to push measures to put more youth into the population. More of them anon.

One thing is for sure: the ageing are here whether we like it or not and their health will have to be attended to. If we add more births and more immigrants, the total health bill can only be higher.

Next misconception: Getting a younger population through immigration. When the baby boom started, it was as if our friendly python has swallowed a goat. The aging goat is slowly passing through the system. While it does that it will always be a hump. It is an idiotic mistake to imagine that as the goat’s lump passes through the python that the way to bring the python back to standard shape is to attempt to fill out the rest of it with more goats from mouth to tail.

The high birth rates of 1945 to 1960 coupled with low infant mortality was an aberration the world has never seen and most likely will never see again. We should accept that aberration. The baby boomers will die off and the shape of population graph will return to normal.

Incidentally, “normal” is not the age distribution of 1950-1980 with a big bulge of young people.

Can we afford to look after the old people without more immigration? Yes, because more immigration compounds the problem. We have a dependency ration of 75 – 75 dependants for every 100. That is projected to get to 115 in 2050. Ouch, that’s a lot of people to support, you might say. Quick, let’s have some immigrants to fix it. Well, to keep a 75 ratio through to 2050 you would need an immigration program that would result in a population of 160 million. Taken through to 2100 we would have a population of 900 million. It would be far easier to support the existing old fogeys than all those immigrants, who themselves would get old.

We should just accept the baby boomer aberration and let it work through the system.

“Solution for the world’s water woes”, BBC News, 10/2. Yet another article on conserving water, but the author does not mention containing population growth! Again, some commentators (including me!) corrected this oversight. (The BBC has a site section called “The Green Room” addressing environmental issues.)

“Gaza population ‘rising rapidly’ ”, BBC News, 15/2. A sure way to increase violence is to cram humans into a confined area, and the continuing unrest in Gaza is a prime example. As I noted in my 13/1 entry, Israel should perhaps air-drop boxes of contraceptives and condoms!

The 8/2 Guardian newspaper had some articles on women choosing not to have children:

• “Why I don’t want children”: “Guess what I don’t want? Babies. I never have and I never will. Please don’t tell me I’ll change my mind. It’s patronising, and how the hell do you know anyway?”
• “The dummy mummy decade”: how ridiculously neurotic modern parenting is
• “Twenty other reasons not to have a baby”

Two is enough

It was revealed that the woman, Nadya Suleman, who recently had octuplets by IVF already previously had 6 children (also conceived by IVF). There is some public outrage. I find this comment irksome, though:

“A number of commentators are saying a woman with six kids should not be allowed medical treatment to have additional ones, and I think, at a common sense level, that makes good sense,” Mr. Tipton said. “However, to make that work, that means someone is going to start deciding for other people how, when and why they can have children. That’s a very big step and one that we might not be prepared to take.”

Well, “someone” damn well should decide! In my view she should be compulsorily sterilized! At the very least, she should not receive any government (taxpayers’) assistance with her family, as this only encourages others. People who chose to have large numbers of children are selfish as this adds to the competition for resources amongst an already too-large population.

(I found a photo of her during her pregnancy – seriously scary! Her abdomen looks ready to explode! I shudder at the damage 14 pregnancies have done to her body.)

“Green GP refuses to help women have large families”, Times Online, 1/2. “Dr. Pippa Hayes, a Devon GP, has a conscientious objection. She believes couples should restrict their families to two children – and says she would not help to provide fertility treatment for women who want to have exceptionally large families.” Someone with the right mindset and a sense of social responsibility! In the same issue, a U.K. environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt, said that there should be incentives to have no more than two children, and those who chose to have more are irresponsible (“Two children should be limit, says green guru”). Yes, this is social engineering, but if you want a livable society, such engineering is necessary! Making the choice to have a large family should become regarded as socially unacceptable.

“One last chance to save mankind”, 23/1, New Scientist. Environmentalist James Lovelock is critical of the government attempts at being green (which I share the same cynicism for):

Not a hope in hell. Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It’s absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that’s an awful lot of countryside.

He believes that humans will eventually learn to regulate their behavior, but things will get very unpleasant before that:

I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2°C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4°C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.

“Tehran’s Health Patrol”, TIME magazine, 29/1. Despite the bad press Iran gets, it seems to be doing something right with health care, including enabling women access to family planning. In this regard, Iran is more socially progressive than many of its neighbors!

Women Health Volunteers arose out of a mix of necessity and pragmatism as well as a fundamental belief, expressed by Malek-Afzali, that “women are the axis of health development and health is the axis of sustainable development.”

[…]

Perhaps the program’s most crucial success was to introduce family-planning to revolutionary Tehran, an effort that has brought down the birthrate per female, from six children to two, with the full support of religious leaders. They at first urged Iranians to boost the ranks of the “soldiers of Islam” but then promoted contraception to stop the alarming growth in population. The lower birthrate is critical to a nation like Iran as its economy evolves. About 7,000 women went door-to-door in Tehran and talked to mothers about the benefits of smaller families, informed them of the different types of birth control and handed out condoms and pills. “I must give credit to Iran’s religious leaders for a pragmatic and creative approach to family-planning,” says Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Ahad, an Egyptian who is head of the United Nations Population Fund in Iran.

“Water – another global ‘crisis’?”, BBC News, 2/2. Population growth is briefly mentioned as a factor in worldwide water shortages, but not the solution of reducing such growth!

A more populated world – and there could be another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050 – is likely to be a thirstier world. Those extra people will need feeding; and as agriculture accounts for about 70% of water use around the world, extra consumption for growing food is likely to reduce the amount available for those basic needs of drinking, cooking and washing.

“Planetary demographics and space colonization”, The Space Review, 2/2. There is a belief amongst some spaceflight enthusiasts that the overpopulation problem on Earth can be solved by sending off the excess people onto space colonies or other worlds. This is a foolish fantasy as:

• The development of sustainable space colonies could be centuries away – I can’t see it happening this century at least, unless there is some radical technological breakthrough.
• If the negative attitude towards regulating populations (i.e. “social engineering”) doesn’t change, then the off-world colonies will eventually face the same problems as on Earth – depletion of resources from overpopulation. So colonization is only sending the problem somewhere else (i.e. delaying the inevitable).

The very real problems of environmental degradation from overpopulation need to be solved this century if we want a still-habitable planet by its end.

Overcrowding and terrorism

I began this blog last year, then stopped, but will try again this year. I have backposted entries from my static journal for 2008.

“How the city hurts your brain”, Boston Globe, 2/1. This article vindicates why I find cities such disagreeable places!

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we’re crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it’s become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

With the increasing world population, cities are only going to get more hellish to live in.

Regarding the Israel-Palestine situation, I was thinking that one (long-term) solution would be for Israel to give women in Gaza access to education and family planning! As noted in this article:

Gaza has become a giant warehouse of misery. It has no economic growth, no prospects, almost no civil order, yet about half the population is under the age of 17. The population has exploded amid economic privation. Women, living under Sharia law, are used primarily as breeding stock. Nizar Rayan, the most senior member of Hamas killed in the latest Israeli attacks, he had four wives and 14 children.

A Population Media Center blog entry, “Timely Book Puts Finger On Terrorist Attacks in the Gaza and Elsewhere”, reviews a book that addresses these issues.

Clearly as I read this book it is obvious to me after reading page 117 that the current Israeli Gaza attacks are certainly partially the result of Palestinian control of women who get little family planning and typically have 6 children. The 1950 population was 1 million, is now 3.1 million and could be 9 million by 2050. Sex and War reports, “Arab society is sexually chaste and few young men have sexual outlets prior to marriage but lack the financial independence to marry. Given the large pool of young men, the lack of opportunities, the sexual frustration and the inevitable resentment toward a dominant out group, it is hard to imagine a more perfectly conceived breeding ground for team aggression, in this case taking the form of terrorism.” Solution? First understand the problem, then take the actions suggested.

I like Cate Blanchett as an actress, but any more statements like this might make me rethink that!

She doesn’t even rule out more babies. “Who knows?” she says breezily. “Don’t close those doors. The world is very overpopulated, but we do make nice ones. They all look like Andrew. To say he has dominant genes would be an understatement.”

She has 3 children already (not that it shows!). Seems to pop them out effortlessly. (Source article) (Posted to ChildFree Hardcore)