NO ROOM WITH A VIEW FOR YOU SONNY BOY!

A huge expanse of beautiful coastline has been "saved" from "development" -- meaning that people will not be able to live on any part of it: The usual anti-people Greenie thinking. Any kind of compromise about use of the land was not of course considered. And the good old taxpayer foots the bill!

"California agreed Friday to buy a parcel of coastal property near Hearst Castle in a tentative deal that would bar housing development on nearly 82,000 acres that many consider among the most beautiful and threatened land in California.

The agreement calls for the Hearst Corp. to sell 1,500 oceanfront acres, as well as a conservation easement that would bar housing and commercial development on about 80,000 additional acres, an area twice the size of San Francisco, said Sam Schuchat, executive officer for the California Coastal Conservancy.

The deal will cost the state $95 million, including $80 million in cash and $15 million in tax incentives, according to Hearst Corp. Vice President Stephen Hearst....

Lyon said the deal will include agricultural restrictions, but declined to provide specifics.

Funding will come from bond measures already approved by California voters along with $23 million in federal transportation money.

The company began looking into selling the land and development rights in 1998 after the California Coastal Commission shot down a proposal to build an 18-hole golf course and 650-room resort on some of the ranch property".

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GREENIE PREDICTIONS BOMB AGAIN

What's 7 billion (yes billion) people between friends?

In less than 40 years, according to the latest UN projections, the world's fertility rate will have fallen to below replacement levels. World population is expected to stabilise at 9 billion, not the 16 billion projected only 14 years ago.

And even China's low fertility means its labour force will start shrinking by 2020, and its over-60s population will burgeon. In its big cities, the birthrate has fallen to 0.7 per woman, prompting the expectation that it will soon drop its one-child policy.

Phillip Longman, writing in the latest Foreign Affairs journal, says: "Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of what was once East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by 750,000 a year. Japan's population, meanwhile, is expected to peak as early as 2005, and then to fall by as much as a third over the next 50 years - a decline equivalent to that experienced by medieval Europe during the plague."...

Peter McDonald, professor of demo-graphy at ANU, adds that having enough young workers is critical to a country's international competitiveness: "In every generation it is young workers who assimilate new technology and implement it," he says.

For some countries the threat of an ageing and declining population is acute. But Australians have less reason for panic. The birth rate has fallen from a high point of 3.5 children per woman in 1961 - the year the birth-control pill arrived here - to its current 1.7.

That is a better position to be in than a host of other countries - including Austria, Greece, Portugal, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy, Singapore and Korea - with birthrates of 1.2 to 1.5.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

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