At Rio+20 next month, the world’s elites will meet in Brazil with the aim of holding back human progress.

Ben Pile - Thursday 17 May 2012

Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that the demands of a growing population were taking more from the planet than could be replaced by natural processes. The second, related idea was that there exist natural ‘limits to growth’. These two reinventions of Malthusianism became the basis of a new form of global politics, which has sought to contain human industrial and economic development ever since.

Fears about the possibility of global environmental catastrophe and its human consequences, as depicted by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich - author of the 1968 prophecy, The Population Bomb - and the Club of Rome - a talking shop for high-level politicians, diplomats and researchers - became the ground on which a number of organisations established under the United Nations were formed. In 1972, the UN held its Conference on the Human Environment, and began its environment programme, UNEP. In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, aka The Brundtland Commission, after its chair, Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland) was formed, leading to the publication of its findings in 1987 in Our Common Future. Also known as the Brundtland Report, it became the bible of ‘sustainable development’.

Having established sustainable development as an imperative of global politics, more organisations and programmes under the UN were formed to deliver it. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, the first ‘Earth Summit’, was held in Rio, leading to the Agenda 21 ‘blueprint for a sustainable planet’, UN conventions on climate change and biodiversity, and the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNSCD). Since then, an entire ecosystem of global, national, governmental and non-governmental organisations has emerged, to advocate and implement the closer integration of human productive life with knowledge about the environment: to observe the ‘limits to growth’. The most notable of these is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is being sought.

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The latest pseudoscience from the former vice president

David Harsanyi - June 29, 2011

For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.

“We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms—an estimated 8,760 species die off per year—because, simply put,” explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, “there are too many people.” (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)

In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman asked: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we’ve learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.

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S. Michael Craven - June 6th, 2011

Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that have shaped the thinking of many people and, subsequently, public policy is the myth that the world’s population is spiraling out of control and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life.

This whole concept of “overpopulation” can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and Anglican clergyman (albeit a very misguided one) who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet’s rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet’s ability to produce food, resulting in massive worldwide starvation. Malthus’s predicted famine never materialized, of course; he could not have predicted the industrial revolution or the enormous impact subsequent technological innovations would have on our ability to produce food. Recall that today our federal government actually pays farmers not to grow crops due to the abundance of food produced on considerably less farmland than existed just a century ago.

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Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

It is a great pleasure to be here at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for this retrospective on “The Death of Environmentalism.” In early 2005 Yale invited us to debate that essay, and since then the School has continued to demonstrate a genuine interest in what our friend and colleague Peter Teague has taken to calling ecological innovation. You train your students to ask hard questions — we saw this first hand in 2010 Breakthrough Fellow and Yale School Masters candidate David Mitchell — and your flagship publication, Yale360, is publishing some of the most interesting green thinkers today. We are grateful once again for this opportunity to reflect on the nearly seven years since we wrote our essay, and make some new arguments about what the green movement must do now.

Seven years ago the two of us started interviewing America’s environmental leaders with the intention of writing a report on the politics of global warming for the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. We came away from the experience deeply disappointed. Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge. None expressed much interest in rethinking their assumptions about the problem or the solutions. What we heard again and again during our interviews were the same old riffs that green leaders had been repeating since the late 1980’s. Global warming would be solved through the same kinds of policies that we had used to address past pollution problems such as acid rain. Most were confident that John Kerry was, with their help, about to be elected president, and the biggest funders in the movement told us they were just a few steps away from passing cap and trade legislation.

That October we delivered our paper, “The Death of Environmentalism,” at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference. While leaders at environmental philanthropies and national green groups hoped that the debate the essay started would just go away, “The Death of Environmentalism” struck a cord with many others and sparked a spirited debate. Many took the paper’s arguments personally and, without question, the most common reaction to our essay was “I’m not dead.” Our friend Adam Werbach gave a speech called “Is Environmentalism Dead,” wherein he suggested that environmentalists make common cause with a broader coalition of progressive interests in hopes of building a broader and more diverse movement. And Yale’s own Gus Speth questioned whether capitalism itself was compatible with ecological sustainability and suggested a radical shift in values was required to deal with the problem.

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Terry Melanson (Feb. 5, 2011)

I’ve only watched three episodes of Meltzer’s show, online, and each of them was dissatisfying. The latest one on the Georgia Guidestones was especially so.

The Meltzer gang of ostensible noobies, drive up to the monument in a brand new Porsche Cayenne. (Way to go guys, my kind of sponsor!) After giving the stones a quick look, they are approached by Raymond Wiley who proceeds with an accurate but cursory account. Wiley mentions that people have suspected a Malthusian, new world order agenda behind it. I would also have included the words “population control” and eugenics. But guess what? Not a single mention of it again in the whole episode. Instead they focus on the Rosicrucian angle and neglect to actually get to the bottom of the message. Hey, History channel “researchers” – you do know that Mr. “Christian,” in a booklet, actually expounded further on the matter, don’t you? More on that later.

Back on the road, Bud starts talking about trying to find out the identity of R. C. Christian, and whether he was really involved with the Rosicrucians. Scott, however, interrupts with a better line of thought: “Don’t you wonder what’s running through the mind of a person who conceived of that [whole] idea?”

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Michael Lind - Jan 11, 2011

Does it often seem that many American politicians and pundits are talking past each other? That is because they really are. The frustrating nature of public debate arises in large part from the fact that Americans do not share a single worldview.

A worldview is a more or less coherent understanding of the nature of reality, which permits its holders to interpret new information in light of their preconceptions. Clashes among worldviews cannot be ended by a simple appeal to facts. Even if rival sides agree on the facts, people may disagree on conclusions because of their different premises.

Both the conservative and liberal camps include people with different and sometimes incompatible worldviews. American public debate is arguably dominated by five significant political worldviews: neoliberal globalism, social democratic liberalism, populist nationalism, libertarian isolationism and Green Malthusianism.

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Dominic Lawson on the “increasingly noisy claque of Malthusians.”

Robert Bradley Jr. - November 1, 2010

In the name of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and James Hansen (et al.) have made doom-and-gloom predictions about business-as-usual in an attempt to shock humanity into immediate legislative action and lifestyle changes.

It did not work. The elapsed predictions have failed to come to pass. Little wonder that new installments of climate alarmism, such as Juliet Eilperin’s ”25% of Wild Mammal Species Face Extinction: Global Assessment Paints ‘Bleak Picture,’ Scientists Say, and Figure of Those at Risk Could Be Higher” in the Washington Post (October 7), don’t register with voters.

Worsening their predicament, the perpetrators will not renounce their specious predictions. They remain the smartest guys in the room–versus all of us commoners, we the hundreds of millions of market-failure-ites.

Here are the Big Three: 1) the dean of modern alarmism, Paul Ehrlich; 2) Al Gore’s influential climate scientist James Hansen; and 3) Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” member John Holdren.

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When modern Malthusians insist that resources are finite, they only expose their historical illiteracy, misanthropy and social pessimism.

Brendan O’Neill - 8 November 2010

On 30 October, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill debated Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, at the Battle of Ideas in London. O’Neill’s speech is published below.

The main Malthusian idea I think we should challenge is the idea that resources are finite. The idea that the Earth itself is finite. The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food.

Because it seems to me that the population-control lobby’s obsession with finiteness really exposes what it is all about. It reveals the historical illiteracy and the social pessimism that underpin the pseudo-scientific movement of Malthusianism. The Malthusians’ focus on finiteness explains firstly why they are always wrong about everything; secondly why they are so misanthropic; and thirdly why they put forward such illiberal proposals, dressed up, of course, in the language of ‘female empowerment’.

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Finnish philosopher says oppressive and brutal government should exert “tireless control of citizens” in shocking insight into threat of eco-fascism movement – Linkola openly calls for Nazi-style mass extermination policies to “kill defectives”

Paul Joseph Watson - September 20, 2010

A Finnish environmentalist guru has gone further than any other global warming alarmist in openly calling for fascism as a necessary step to save the planet from ecological destruction, demanding that climate change deniers be “re-educated” in eco-gulags and that the vast majority of humans be killed with the rest enslaved and controlled by a green police state, with people forcibly sterilized, cars confiscated and travel restricted to members of the elite.

Philosopher Pentti Linkola has built an enthusiastic following of self-described “eco-fascists” receptive to his message that the state should enact draconian measures of “discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression” in order to make people comply with environmental dictates.

Linkola’s barbaric and dictatorial philosophy has remained relatively obscure but is now gaining traction as the mask of environmentalism is lifted to unveil its true nature – a justification for 21st century tyranny on a grand scale, characterized by eugenics, sterilization, gulags, police states, and total government control over every aspect of our existence.

Linkola’s doctrine is more extreme, repulsive, and threatening to liberty than anything carried out by history’s worst dictators, Hitler, Stalin and Mao – combined. Indeed, Linkola laments that such monsters didn’t go far enough in wiping out many more millions of people.

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See also: THIS is the Alternative to “Eco-Fascism”? and pentti linkola at Disinfo

Steven Mosher - September 3, 2010

On Wednesday at the Discovery Channel offices in Maryland, environmental activist James Jay Lee took company employees hostage, threatening to kill them unless the media outlet agreed to turn itself into a propaganda channel for population control. The standoff ended when the gun-toting and bomb-laden eco-terrorist was shot dead by a SWAT team.

Lee had earlier outlined his demands on his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, where he posted a 1,100 word manifesto aimed at the Discovery Channel. In it, he demanded that Discovery change its programming and focus on getting rid of people who are “polluting” the planet.

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants…” Lee wrote, “…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. … That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”

It is because there are too many people, he exclaims elsewhere on the site, that “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world.”

Where did he get such wacko ideas?

From the mainstream environmental movement, that’s where, which early embraced the idea that the best kind of environmental protection was population control.

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The so-called ‘progressive greens’ challenging the idea that the planet is overpopulated are actually only interested in making Malthusian thinking more palatable and PC.

by Brendan O’Neill

In recent years, a few environmentalist thinkers have started to criticise the narrow Malthusianism of their fellow contemporary greens. Peoplequake by Fred Pearce is the latest attack by a greenie on the Reverend Thomas Malthus, the original population scaremonger, and his slavish followers in today’s population-control lobby. With its quips about the weird, harelipped reverend’s hatred of poor people, its critique of the deeply misanthropic eugenics movement, and its challenge to the idea that Africa is overpopulated, Pearce’s book might even look to some like a refreshing defence of rational thinking against the hysteria of the human-hating, womb-fearing lobby. It is no such thing. Pearce, like other influential green thinkers, is burying Malthus only to save Malthusianism.

Peoplequake is the literary equivalent of reaching into the steaming pile of historic bullshit that is Malthusian thought in a bid to salvage some pellets of prejudice that might be applied to today’s world. Pearce, like the Guardian’s George Monbiot, Andrew Simms of the New Economics Forum and other leading proponents of climate-change alarmism, is simply made deeply uncomfortable by the fact that so many contemporary greens have been inspired by Malthus, a man who, not to put too fine a point on it, was the scum of the Earth, who thought poor people should be deprived charity and healthcare and if they died as a result, well good, since they have ‘no claim of right to the smallest portion of food’. Disconcerted about being associated with such foul elitism, and conscious of the fact that the scaremongering claims of every single Malthusian since Malthus himself have been contradicted by humanity’s leaps forward, Pearce and others are keen to create a new kind of outlook: what we might call post-Malthus Malthusianism.

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The subheadline in Diane Francis’ now-infamous article reads: “The whole world needs to adopt China’s one-child policy.” However, the verb “adopt” really just sugarcoats what she’s actually advocating.

She writes that a “one-child policy,” “planetary law … is the only way,” and admits that China’s one-child-only measure is in fact an edict: e.g. an authoritarian/totalitarian decree. Nothing will work to cure “environmental degradation,” unless “a China one-child policy is imposed.” “Governments should control family sizes,” or we’ll regret it, she writes.

Watch Francis try and dissemble in this interview (failing miserably):

Here’s a quote from another Francis interview, which illustrates her elite mentality: “The fact is we have a global economy and we have no global governance and so what we’re seeing is the beginning of a global government….I think it’s a welcomed development.” Diane Francis, National Post (3:53-4:19)

Francis has received a lot of flak after writing the article; it was a colleague, Colby Cosh, who made one of the best points:

I don’t understand why people who claim to be “passionate” about the environment of the future haven’t adopted zero-child policies for themselves.

Well, actually, I do understand it, because they all used to be big on Zero Population Growth as both a policy goal and a social ideal back in the ’70s. Diane Francis is singing an old song that environmentalists unlearned for strategic reasons. It made them look like she looks right now: authoritarian and nihilist and out of touch with the hopes and ambitions of ordinary people. And many of those environmentalists wanted to have kids themselves — i.e., they hypocritically put their personal desires above the interests of the planet when confronted with the biggest choice of all.

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Further reading:

• Forced Birth Control Kills Mother and Child
• Climategate Did Not Begin With Climate (Remembering Julian Simon and the storied intolerance of neo-Malthusians)
• Jack Cafferty All But Endorses Global One-Child Policy to Fight Climate Change
• Fear depopulation, not overpopulation
• Population Control Today
• Copenhagen Anti-Population Push Coming from UN

As the Copenhagen summit starts, the rise of eco-Malthusianism shows the anti-human, future-fearing essence of climate-change alarmism.

Frank Furedi, 7 December 2009

Below a picture of 12 black babies, the caption warns: ‘Babies in Dakar, Senegal.’ Then, with a literary sigh of relief, the subtitle to the caption points out that a ‘cost analysis commissioned by [the Optimum Population Trust] claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions’ (1). In other words, the destructiveness of such babies, these carbon emitters, can be counteracted if we prevent them from being born in the first place.

The odious Optimum Population Trust (OPT) is a zombie-like Malthusian organisation devoted to the cause of human depletion. Looking at the article by John Vidal in the Guardian, which contained that photo of 12 black babies and reported on the OPT’s new initiative inviting people in the West to offset their CO2 emissions by sponsoring ‘family planning’ in the developing world, I am not sure what I found most shocking: the message conveyed through the photograph, or the absence of any anger over the OPT and its supporters’ casual devaluation of human life.

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