Quote:
The modish cause of today’s chattering classes, says Brendan O’Neill, is overpopulation. They thrill to hear how a world of seven billion people is imposing an “unbearable strain on nature’s limited larder”. They rush to the London theatre where an Oxford don has been giving “a lecture dolled up as a drama” on the “perfect storm of resource depletion and pollution” that lies ahead. Some subscribe to the Optimum Population Trust’s website that allows “well-off Westerners” to offset their carbon emissions by helping prevent more births “in less fortunate countries”. But the agonising is misplaced. The “population panic merchants” make just the same mistake as Thomas Malthus, the great 19th century doomsayer, who failed utterly to foresee the huge boost in output brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The Earth’s population has trebled over the past century, yet in the same period the real price of rice, corn and wheat has fallen, thanks to advances in agricultural science. So away with this needless “Malthusian miserabilism”: have faith in human ingenuity. (Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator, Aug 2012, in an article about over-population).
A comment like this from the highly politicized Spectator is to be expected. The agenda of the extreme Right is to lull the peasants into a false sense of security so that the funders and friends of the rich can continue spending and consuming, consuming and spending, gobbling up the world’s resources and exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor unimpeded.
The evidence to man’s contribution to global warming is now so overwhelming that only people people directly funded by oil and similar corporations with deep pockets continue with climate skepticism. But global climate change is only one of the threats to the world. Simple lack of water resources is another serious problem, even in California, but particularly on previously desert fringes and countries like Bangladesh. Even London is threatened . The world situation is totally different to the era of Malthus. Has Mr. O’Neill not heard about the drought in the Midwest, a warning sign that what we previously could rely on is no longer reliable? Every year there are further signs of threats to food supply . There is a raft to similar threats one could add. Ingenuity might help somewhat, but the the practical people, the ingenious people at organizations like the OECD are talking about giant glass self-contained bubbles, like giant covered stadiums, in which life will go on as usual. Sorry, they will be for the privileged. And the rest? Well, the poor don’t vote.
Epicureans are realists.
