Greens are always warning that the Earth's overcrowded... In fact, the West's plunging birthrate will usher in a dystopia
I think the scenario pictured below is a tad alarmist but lower birthrates will undoubtedly cause adjustment problems. Overlooked is that birthrates may recover for various reasons. Straight-line projections are usually simplistic. After non-maternal women have weeded themseves out of the gene pool, The remaining more maternal women might produce a quite high birthrate
Picture the cities of the future. Do you imagine glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and limitless clean energy?
I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets – like modern-day Detroit.
According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at ‘replacement rate’ – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.
All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birth rate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.
Eco-activists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up resources and despoiling the natural world.
The reliably hysterical BBC presenter Chris Packham has claimed that ‘human population growth’ is ‘our greatest worry… There are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.’
Greens like Packham seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.
Fewer babies mean older populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work ever longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.
So if you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.
In modern industrialised societies, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population. By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.
In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21 and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.
Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.
There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.
The dramatic fall in Britain’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do badly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns.
In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office of National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, almost 74 million by 2036 and almost 77 million by 2046 – largely fed by mass migration.
Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last ‘baby boomer’ (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.
In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories and everything else.
And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become ever harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.
So, though medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect, or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.
How has this crisis crept up on us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and others were voicing concern at overpopulation.
For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out.
Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.
They could not have been more wrong.
Amid all the Packham-esque hysteria about a ‘population explosion’, many failed to notice that birth rates had actually already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.
As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.
The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.
The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of more than 9 per cent in just five years.
To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are being born.
According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.
On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.
So what, if anything, can we do to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?
For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments and better and cheaper childcare are all a must, so that mothers don’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.
Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.
But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.
Yet in truth, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.
Absent some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.
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Even lefties now admit closing the Indian Point nuclear plant actually HARMED the planet
Daniel Turner
Those on the environmental left cheering the Biden administration’s electric-vehicle mandates or Gov. Hochul’s offshore wind farms would be wise to heed a painful and embarrassing lesson New York is learning from its not-so-distant past.
Not only do so-called “green” policies drive up consumer prices, decrease reliability and upend everyday life (say goodbye to wood-fired pizza ovens and gas-powered stoves), they often end up harming the environment they’re supposed to be saving.
Talk about a lose-lose.
Consider disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s forcing the Indian Point nuclear plant to close in 2021.
Heralded by a who’s who of leftist extremists — socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had labeled Indian Point a “catastrophe waiting to happen” while Hamas sympathizer Mark Ruffalo praised the move as a “BIG deal” — there were immediate and obvious problems.
For starters, Indian Point provided nearly one-quarter of New York City’s power.
Unilaterally and arbitrarily taking it off the grid meant other forms of energy would take on a new importance.
It wasn’t as if Big Apple residents were suddenly going to cut their power consumption 25% overnight.
Cuomo was already setting New York on an ill-advised path of becoming 70% reliant on “renewable” energy like wind and solar by 2030.
Still basking in the media’s COVID-era adoration, Cuomo was seen as a man with White House ambitions.
His wandering hands and all-around creepiness that led to 11 claims of sexual harassment and a swift resignation ahead of an expected impeachment were still to come.
To compete nationally in today’s Democratic Party, one must be a full-fledged disciple of the green cult.
It’s the reason candidate Joe Biden pledged to “end fossil fuel” in 2020.
Cuomo saw the writing on the wall, and Indian Point was a small price to pay for his political ambitions.
To fill the sudden void created, New York did not turn to wind or solar.
It was fossil fuels to the rescue, just as it is every time the weather turns severe and citizens’ safety depends on the lights and heat staying on.
In the month after the plant’s closure, New York’s natural-gas generation increased from 35% to 39%.
Nearly four years after the Indian Point fiasco, New York emits more carbon per megawatt-hour than Texas — the nation’s leading oil producer — and outpaces America as a whole.
Another twist in this saga: The power Indian Point produced was carbon free.
In fact, nuclear is such a clean form of energy that France derives 70% of its electricity from it.
Naturally, the 1,000 jobs Indian Point provided also went away and never came back.
When even the fairly left-of-center British outlet The Guardian admits Indian Point’s closure turned out to be a bad decision, the eco-left is running out of friends and advocates.
As an unabashed and unapologetic advocate of fossil fuels, I’m not terribly interested in the debate over “carbon emissions.”
They’re an ever-shifting goalpost metric eco-lefties created, and I do not play the game by their rules.
No emissions number satiates them, so the fossil-fuel industry and individual fossil-fuel companies should stop trying to appease them.
America became the envy of the world because of — not in spite of — our abundant, affordable domestic energy.
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and the other titans who built our country didn’t do so with windmills or solar panels.
If fact, you can’t even build windmills and solar panels with windmills and solar panels.
They are all manufactured with fossil fuels in plants that run on fossil fuels.
Yes, the same eco-left playing the “net zero” shell game will tell you it’s bad to use fossil fuels to make electricity — but China polluting air, land and water to manufacture wind and solar that Biden buys with our tax dollars and are shipped across the ocean, burning millions of gallons of diesel, and installed on our beautiful landscapes, turning purple mountain majesty into wildlife killing fields while making the grid unstable and costing ratepayers more money is “green.”
What a racket.
The New York City I grew up in knows a con job when it sees one.
There’s a valuable lesson in Indian Point: Our energy situation is getting worse.
Like Cuomo before him, Biden has called for nationwide “net-zero emissions” by 2050.
Should that initiative come to pass, say goodbye to the reliable and affordable 60% of our electricity that came from fossil fuels in 2023.
The fate of the additional nearly 20% from nuclear is anyone’s guess.
So when you see Team Biden touting its “tailpipe emissions” rule to force us into electric cars or Gov. Hochul celebrating the completion of the South Fork Wind farm in Long Island Sound, remember they’re doubling down on proven failure.
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What do you think? Post a comment.
If Indian Point’s past is prologue, not only will life become more expensive, but the planet will likely get dirtier.
Yet they’ll still call it “green.”
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BBC Meteorologist Falsely Claims South Sudan is Experiencing “Extreme Heat” for March
South Sudan is experiencing “extreme heatwaves” and is shutting schools and cutting power, reports BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor. “It is exceptionally early for South Sudan to experience such heat – temperatures often exceed 43°C but only in the summer months, according to the World Bank’s Climate Change portal,” he states.
Hot days in the capital Juba – five degrees north of the equator – are for some a big ‘climate change’ story, but it is difficult to read into the World Bank data the interpretation that Taylor wants to publicise. In fact it is impossible, since the data clearly show that average South Sudan temperatures peak in March and then fall away through the wet monsoon ‘summer’ months.
Quite how Taylor can draw the conclusion from the above World Bank graph that it is “exceptionally early” for South Sudan to experience such heat, in a place where temperatures often exceed 45°C “but only in the summer months”, is not clear. Anybody else looking at the graph would draw the opposite conclusion. Perhaps Taylor is unclear on the difference between rainfall totals (the blue bars, which do peak in the “summer months”) and average temperatures. He also seems to be unaware that South Sudan is equatorial so does not have a “summer” and certainly not in June through August.
In fact the “heatwaves” in South Sudan drew headlines in other climate-crazed mainstream media. The New York Times reported on March 20th that: “Climate change already worsened floods and droughts in the young nation. Now soaring temperatures are forecast for two weeks.” Both the BBC and NYT write about temperatures soaring well past 40°C, but, as is often the case, we must count the spoons and consult the original sources when dealing with such unreliable propagandists.
According to the Time and Data website, in the five days up to March 21st the temperature in Juba only once went over 40°C at midday. Since a 42°C high last Sunday, the temperature has dropped up to 6°C. Hot, it would seem, but not exceptional at the equator.
But the BBC was in full disaster mode with Taylor reporting that South Sudan is the latest in a “long-line” of countries to experience blistering and, in many cases, record-breaking heat. “This heat is very serious, and it’s really affecting our work,” says Wadcom Saviour Lazarus, who is said to run an NGO. “Because of this heat we are not able to move from one place to another,” he adds. Juba resident Ayaa Winnie Eric is said to take “lots of water to keep me hydrated”. Light clothes are worn and walking in the hot sun is avoided.
How did people cope in the past living right next to the equator? Of course they didn’t have ‘climate change’ alarmism to cope with as another World Bank graph below demonstrates.
The graph plots the temperatures for South Sudan going back to 1901. On a five year smoothing average, the temperature in 2022 at 27.64°C was only 0.41°C higher than 121 years ago. Interestingly, since 2007 the average temperature has actually dropped a full degree centigrade from 28.64°C to 27.64°C. Looking at the cyclical nature of the graph, it is difficult to see a correlation with trace atmospheric carbon dioxide which has of course risen throughout the period.
The Taylor story is another crass example of the constant fearmongering undertaken in the mainstream media to nudge populations to accept the collectivist Net Zero project. In this case it can only be assumed that readers will take the hint over devasting human-caused climate change and not look at the underlying data.
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The grim cost of firming up solar and wind
Alan Moran
The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.
These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law, where computer chip performance doubles every two years. The application of this to electricity supply, it was argued, just needed a short-term leg-up.
Time has demonstrated this to have been spurious. The need wind and solar facilities have for subsidies, far from withering away, have escalated.
The initial measure provided a subsidy to renewables (and cost to consumers) growing to about $380 million per year. To his credit, John Howard resisted pressures to increase this but the Rudd/Gillard governments and state governments vastly expanded the support with new schemes for rooftop facilities and budgetary expenditures. The Turnbull and Morrison governments further expanded the subsidies, which at the outset of the present government’s tenure amounted to $9 billion per annum.
The Albanese government has introduced a number of additional measures. These include the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires the major carbon-emitting firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 or buy the equivalents in carbon credits. The cost is conservatively estimated at $906 million per annum.
The government is also set to introduce the Capacity Investment Scheme involving power purchasing agreements designed to attract $68 billion of spending on additional wind, solar, and batteries. The best estimate of the cost to the taxpayer is $5,775 million per annum. In addition, the government is expediting the transmission roll-out.
Present subsidy levels are estimated at $15.6 billion per annum. The effects of subsidies have come in three phases.
The first was in the decade after 2003 when renewables progressively increased their market share as required by regulations. By 2014/15, wind and solar had grown to about 7 per cent of the electricity market. The subsidised supplies placed downward pressure on the market price as well as taking market share from coal. That outcome was intensified by new Queensland gas supplies coming on stream. Without access to export ports, that gas was redirected to domestic electricity generation and the share of gas supplies in the National Electricity Market increased from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. Gas now has more lucrative markets overseas and governments are exerting pressure on the producers to allocate more than is commercially sensible to the domestic market.
This first phase came to an abrupt end when low prices and higher supplies forced major coal generators, Northern Power in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria, out of the market.
Those market exits led to a second phase, whereby reduced coal capacity brought a trebling of wholesale market prices from their 2015 level of $40 per megawatt hour (MWh). Covid caused a temporary downward blip but the wholesale price is averaging $119 per megawatt hour in the March quarter, 2024.
These higher prices reflect the higher cost of wind and solar and will continue to prevail and, in fact, increase. Price increases may be concealed by governments entering into power purchasing agreements but this means subsidies financed by taxpayers rather than electricity users.
The subsidies to wind and solar have now resulted in their market share growing from zero 20 years ago to over 30 per cent. This is ushering in the third phase of the ‘transition’, which involves desperately seeking ways to firm up the intermittent and largely unpredictable electricity supply from wind and solar.
Gas, coal, and nuclear can operate pretty much continuously and without special storage facilities, but weather and nightfall limit solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.
With wind and solar at their current market share, coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply, albeit unprofitably. But the policy in all Australian government jurisdictions is to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover, coal (and, for that matter, nuclear) is technically ill-suited and costly to be used as a back-stop to variable wind and solar supplies. ‘Social licences’ aside, new coal or nuclear plants could not be commercially built except as near continuous baseload.
Other means of ‘firming’ wind and solar supplies are therefore increasingly required. One such is the conversion of Snowy Hydro into a pumped storage facility. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.
Snowy 2 is planned to provide 376 megawatt hours of storage. The Capacity Investment Scheme is an attempt to augment this, though, notwithstanding its name, it earmarks 70 per cent of its intended power purchasing agreements simply for more wind and solar. These add nothing to replacing the dispatchable (controllable) power being lost from the forced retirement of coal plants. The Capacity Investment Scheme will add just 36 gigawatt hours of storage from the 9 GW of facilities planned to be contracted.
The Australian Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated Systems Plan for 2050 envisages a total storage capacity of 642 gigawatt hours for a system double the size of the present one and overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar. This is utterly inadequate for backing up intermittent power.
Francis Menton has assembled a wealth of evidence of how much storage a renewables system would require. He authored a major report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation as well as many other papers like this. Basically, his work shows that a wind and solar system, if it is to provide a secure and reliable electricity supply, requires some 26 days of storage. For Australia, this means 13,000 gigawatt hours of storage, which is 25 times what the AEMO Integrated Systems Plan envisages.
The highly regarded GlobalRoam consultancy estimated that the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia), with perfect planning and no losses in storage or transmission, would require at least 9,000 gigawatt hours of storage. The costs of this, at $US 350 per kWh, would be three times Australia’s GDP for batteries that would need to be replaced every 12 years.
It might be argued that Germany, with little storage back-up, already has wind and solar providing 45 per cent of its electricity and, although it has some of the world’s highest prices, its supply is reliable. But Germany also has access to supplies from Polish coal and French nuclear power to firm up its wind and solar. Australia has a stand-alone system.
Our politicians are plunging us into a perilous future. Policies have already given us an electricity supply system with costs that cannot support energy-intensive industries. Those policies are now poised to bring about lower reliability than is compatible with a first-world economy.
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comm
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-grim-cost-of-firming-up-solar-and-wind/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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