Demography 23: The UN, Depopulation and Climate

This is one more proof that the UN is the springboard of Malthusian eco-socialism and global central planning. This lady is the Exec. Secretary of the UN FCCC, the club of governments to "save the planet." Story from Jews News, April 27, 2915.

For the UN, more people = more energy demand = more CO2 emission = more "man-made" climate change. Therefore, to "fight CC", the planet should have less CO2 emission, less power plants (mostly from fossil fuels), less people. Ang galing ano.

One more reason why the UN should shrink. Its top bureaucracy are becoming explicit eco-socialists.

When the UN IPCC was established in the 80s or earlier, it was meant as an activist body with an implicit goal of expanding governments and the UN -- via more environmental and energy regulations. But unlike before, the UN climate officials were less explicit in their advocacy for eco socialism. Now they are more explicit.

Here in the ASEAN, India, etc., people are optimistic about our "young and big population", more producers and consumers, more entrepreneurs and workers. At the other side of the globe, in one building in NYC, international bureaucrats there are plotting how to shrink Asian and other population. They are thinking of de-industrialization and energy poverty, lower standards of living and lower life expectancy, then global population will decline.

These three stories are from WUWT. 

1. Overpopulation: The Fallacy...

"Global warming and climate change are simply the emotional threats used to confront overpopulation. The problem is the world is not overpopulated.

The insanity of it all is that none of what they think matters because there is no overpopulation, no shortage of resources or any connection between CO2 and climate change. It is a story of science without evidence or at best-concocted evidence from Malthus through the COR to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

(2) Riddley: IPCC and OECD...

"TCOR and later UNEP’s Agenda 21 adopted and expanded the Malthusian idea of overpopulation to all resources making it the central tenet of all their politics and policies. The IPCC was set up to assign the blame of global warming and latterly climate change on human produced CO2 from an industrialized expanding population. They both developed from false assumptions, used manipulated data and science, which they combined into computer models whose projections were, not surprisingly, wrong. The result is the fallacy of global warming due to human CO2 is a subset built on the fallacy of overpopulation."

(3) Opinion: CO2 is the demon because...

"These IPCC and OECD reports are telling us clear as a bell that we cannot ruin the climate with carbon dioxide unless we get a lot more numerous and richer. And they are also telling us that if we get an awful lot richer, we are likely to have invented the technologies to adapt, and to reduce our emissions, so we are then less likely to ruin the planet. Go figure."

The successor to  Malthus negativism is Dr. Paul Ehrlich. Two short articles from Steven Goddard, Real Science.

I think the Earth's resources are infinite -- minerals, fossil fuels like oil and gas, coal, geothermal, etc. The Earth's core keeps regenerating itself, pushing up hot gases and molten rocks upwards, mineralizing otherwise "ordinary" rocks and soil, forever. New islands are created, the whole PH archipelago is a product of volcanic and EQ movements, our lands rose from under the sea. Centuries from now, we'll have the Bentham Rise/Plateau, possibly same size as Luzon. Rising consistently from under the sea. But by then, it can be another country.
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See also:
Demography 19: Top 30 Countries in Population by 2050, August 05, 2013 
Demography 20: Presentation at ILS, DOLE, on Population and Growth, November 19, 2013 
Demography 21: China Overtaking the US' GDP Size in 2014?, May 02, 2014 
Demography 22: Japan's Depopulation and Migration Policy, May 11, 2014 
Climate Tricks 38: Arrest Climate Change Deniers, April 11, 2015

Population Control 17: China's Depopulation and RH Law

* This is my second guest post in antipinoy.com, posted the other day.
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China’s depopulation has begun. While it’s true that they still have a big number of younger workers, they also have a rising number of ageing people who need more healthcare, more pension and other retirement benefits. So the burden of taking care of the ageing people will really fall on the shoulders of the younger population.

The China communist government cannot simply  dispatch its hundreds of millions of bureaucrats, or robots, to take care of their oldies. 

A friend noted that the “inequalities in the distribution of the benefits of the fruits of its development will make China implode.” While this may be true, “more equitable” European societies are also slowly imploding. They sustain their forced equality only via endless borrowings, but those huge debts are now calling the kettle. For countries with declining working age population, there are three solutions: raise the retirement age from 60 to 65-70, more migrants, and/or more robots.

I read that in the US, there is no more retirement age, people choose when to stop working. This is good,  encourage people to stop being “employee forever” and become start up entrepreneurs and job creators themselves. While it is relatively easy to do this in the US, it is more difficult in in socialist China or some near-socialist European economies as government taxes and bureaucracies are high.

Is big population a liability to more economic growth?

The advocates of the recent RH law said YES, that is why they supported more government coercion — more taxes, more sex education, more forced but free services by OB professionals, etc. — to control the country’s population, especially that of the poor. The debate ended in favor of the lovers of more government coercion, but implementation is another issue.

The Malthusian alarmism of “we will have less land, less water, less food and even less radio spectrum bandwidth per person” as the population expands is wrong. There is zero limit or constraint to vertical space. Too many people die every year because there is too much rain water and flooding not because there is lack of it. And the main health concern now is more fat, more obese people than undernourished ones because there are lots of food and drinks. The number of cell phones and laptops are rising and yet internet speed is rising.

So the Malthusian population alarmism is pushed always by statists. Control inequality, control prices, control businesses, control population.

People are assets, not liabilities. The real liabilities — killers, rapists, thieves, land grabbers, carnappers, extortionists, etc. — both in the public and private sectors, that’s the proper role of government to control, to implement the rule of law. If the poor become construction workers or public market vendors or department store cashiers, so be it. They are working, they produce various goods and services. Government should not penalize and over-bureaucratize the poor if they become self reliant and independent.

Those construction workers, bus and taxi drivers, security guards of expensive buildings, malls, shops and villages, etc. – those useful people, they normally do not come from 1 or 2 children households, but from 4 or more children households. And the RH camp demonize the fast growth of the population of the poor.

Population control or population expansion, leave it to civil society and individuals. Government should step out of that concern. Instead, government should over-bureaucratize, over-regulate, over-control and over-penalize criminals ,whether rich or poor, whether in the private or government sectors.

Singapore, Japan, some European countries now are into government-sponsored population expansion, but there are not much takers. The governments for instance give allowance per child until 18 years old (Germany, etc.).

We are far from what China, Japan, HK, Sing, Taiwan, Europe, are experiencing of greying population. And that is precisely our strength — we have a high and young population, many of those aged people in Europe, Japan, etc. would be feeble or dead by now without the Filipino healthcare professionals assisting them. But the government and the bleeding hearts say that high population is wrong and hence, government-sponsored population control should proceed.

It would have been different if population control is done by civil society and individuals themselves — they buy those condoms, pills and injectibles themselves and distribute for free to the poor, put their money where their mouth is. But they did not. They went for national coercion and legislation, so that even people who do not believe their “bright idea” are now forced to finance their actually stupid idea.

Another friend noted that there are plenty of “jologs” among the poor, they just multiply fast then ask the government to take care of their kids. There is some truth to this, and many NGOs and the foreign aid/consultancy establishments hype up the problem, to get more public funding for their various “save the poor” contracts and projects.

But it is also true that many of the poor want to stand on their own and do not want to run to government and politicians whenever possible as they are simply being used by many corrupt politicians. Problem is that government gives them various bureaucracies if they start some micro entrepreneurship projects, so they go for unregistered, informal businesses, and are subject to harassment and extortion by the barangay, the police, and/or city hall bureaucrats.

There are more jologs in government than in the private sector. The most opportunistic, the shrewd and cunning among the population, are always attracted to politics and government. The honest ones do not need politics nor government position to help others, or to create jobs for other people.

One indicator if an idea is bright or stupid, is if it requires new legislation and coercion. If it does, then 90-100% it is a bad or even stupid idea.

For instance, some people want to help the poor have more food, so they simply develop their farms, or they put up carinderia and other cheap sources of food. They did not require a single lobbying, a single peso of tax money, to help the poor. This is one example of a good idea. In contrast, the RH law is an example of a bad idea.

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See also:
Population Control 13: Excess People are Liabilities kuno, August 25, 2012
Population Control 14: Lessons from the Cybercrime Law, October 08, 2012
Population Control 15: Debate, Debate, on the RH Bill, December 03, 2012
Population Control 16: RH Bill as HR, Coercion as Choice, December 13, 2012