Our fight against climate change will be hopeless unless we choose to have smaller families

The writer below, BELLA LACK, is well-named.  She is lacking in almost everything that  would enable an intelligent comment on her topic.  She seems totally unaware of the history of population limitation calls -- from Malthus on. See here for starters.

She makes the characteristic Leftist mistake of treating all men as equal.  That Africans and Europeans have very different reproduction rates seems unknown to her.  So lumping all birthrates together into one number is highly misleading.  A scientist would say that she fails to take account of a bimodal distribution.

What the future holds out because of the difference is a SHRINKING population in Europe and an increasing population in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World.

So if we were to follow her logic, she should be an urgent promoter of contraception in Africa while praising Europe for their "responsible" behaviour.  There is no sign that she sees that logic.  If she had another brain she would be lonely


Come 2030 I will be 27-years-old.  If population growth continues at its current rate I will be one of 8.5 billion people on Earth. That’s almost one billion more than today, and more than double the number of people alive in 1970. By 2050 some 10 billion people could call earth home.

The spellbinding beauty of mother nature is impossible to resist. Last year I travelled to Southeast Asia hoping to catch a glimpse of an orangutan at home in Borneo’s lush rainforests. Standing in warm twilight outside the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre in Sabah, I gazed through my binoculars at orangutans hanging out in the tangled rainforest canopy. I paused for a second to reflect on the unfathomable privilege of being able to witness these creatures in the wilderness. In that moment there was nowhere on Earth I would rather have been. I was home.

Our natural world gives human beings so much and expects very little in return. But right now we are not honouring our side of the bargain. The devastating effects of global warming are already being felt by the natural world. The concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now stands at 410 parts per million. This is the highest it has been for some three million years. In Antarctica Adélie penguins are starving to death because the krill they eat are dying as sea ice retreats. In Central America the golden toad has been driven to the point of extinction due to droughts.

We gaze in wonder at our precious wildernesses but then think nothing of tearing them down. More than 80 percent of the original forest that covered the Earth 8,000 years ago has been cleared, damaged or altered. The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We simply can’t go on like this.

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Climate protester’s cameraman asks Katie Hopkins the color of her underwear in attempt to refute her point

When a climate protester ambushed U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) leader Gerard Batten, media personality Katie Hopkins turned the tables on him, demanding that he answer just one question.

Hopkins noted that Batten had humored the protester, who had brought a friend with a camera to record him as he peppered the UKIP leader with questions, answering some 15 of his queries before she stopped him and asked where he had gone to school.

Hopkins called him “posh” several times, arguing that, in her experience, protesters appear to be affluent, and they prompt policies that would have a much more profound impact on those who were not as wealthy.

“Can I ask you a question just to interrupt the constant monologue of you talking?” she asked. “There’s this perception I have where I live, and it’s called ‘the rest of the U.K.,’ that climate protesters are massively over-privileged and kind of ‘posh’ kids — and you seem to be falling straight into that for me. So can you explain to me why it seems to be almost a luxury of the privileged that live in London to dictate to the rest of us what we should and shouldn’t be allowed to do?”

Hopkins went on to ask the protester where he had gone to school, needling him about whether it might have been a prestigious boarding school. He pointedly refused to answer, arguing that it didn’t matter.

The person carrying the camera cut in then, asking Hopkins, “What color is your underwear? I don’t give a f**k!”

Hopkins fired right back, saying, “I don’t have any underwear. I don’t wear pants. I don’t wear pants. I can show you that, too, if you like.”

The protester and his cameraman tried to turn the conversation back around to climate change but to no avail.

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The cult of Greta Thunberg

This young woman sounds increasingly like a millenarian weirdo.

Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.

It struck me that this was a march against people. Most radical protest and direct action is aimed at officialdom or government or people with power. This macabre schlep through London was aimed squarely at ordinary people. Banners and placards made no disguise of the marchers’ contempt for how the masses live. We were told that ‘Meat = heat’ (that is, if you carry on eating meat, you fat bastards, the planet will get even hotter) and that driving and flying are destroying Mother Earth. Of course, it’s okay for them to fly – Emma Thompson jetted first-class from LA to London to lecture us plebs about all our eco-destructive holidaymaking. It’s only a problem when we do it; it’s only bad when we take advantage of the miracle of mass food production and the expansion of flight to make our lives fuller and more pleasurable. They detest that. They detest mass society and its inhabitants: the masses.

In keeping with all millenarian movements, the extinction-obsessed green cult reserves its priestly fury for ordinary people. Even when it is putting pressure on the government, it is really asking it to punish us. It wants tighter controls on car-driving, restrictions on flying, green taxes on meat. That these things would severely hit the pockets of ordinary people – but not the deep pockets of Emma Thompson and the double-barrelled eco-snobs who run Extinction Rebellion – is immaterial to the angry bourgeoisie. So convinced are they of their own goodness, and of our wickedness, that they think it is utterly acceptable for officialdom to make our lives harder in order to strongarm us into being more ‘green’. People complaining about Extinction Rebellion disrupting people’s lives in London over the past few days are missing the point – the entire point of the green movement is to disrupt ordinary people’s lives, and even to immiserate them. All in the jumped-up name of ‘saving the planet’.

And now the green cult has pushed Ms Thunberg into the position of its global leader, its child-like saviour, the messiah of their miserabilist political creed. What they have done to Ms Thunberg is unforgivable. They have pumped her – and millions of other children – with the politics of fear. They have convinced the next generation that the planet is on the cusp of doom. They have injected dread into the youth. ‘I want you to panic’, said Ms Thunberg at Davos, and the billionaires and celebs and marauding NGOs that were in attendance all lapped it up. Because adult society loves nothing more than having its own fear and confusions obediently parroted back to it by teenagers. They celebrate Thunberg because she tells them how horrible they are: it is an entirely S&M relationship, speaking to the deep self-loathing of the 21st-century elites.

Young people, Ms Thunberg isn’t your leader. She’s a patsy for scared and elitist adults. Don’t do as she says. Instead, refuse to panic, mock the blather about hellfire, and appreciate that mankind’s transformation of the planet has been a glorious thing that has expanded life expectancy, allowed billions to live in cities, and made it possible for even the less well-off to travel the globe. Sin against St Greta.

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Green New Deal Would Have 'No Effect' On Climate Change

The impact would be "barely distinguishable from zero."

Green New Deal proponents, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have long claimed that the GND, an expansive, costly, and dramatic change in the American economy (and in American infrastructure), would be worth it if it such extreme measures would in the long run lessen our impact on climate.

Now, though, a new study from the American Enterprise Institute questions whether the Green New Deal would have any real impact on climate change at all — leaving it little more than an effort to dismantle industry.

The AEI report breaks down the GND into bite-sized policy proposals, assessing not simply the cost, but the proposed effectiveness of each legislative item to address the core goal of the GND: reducing American carbon emissions to a "net zero" by 2050.

The researchers' ultimate conclusion? "It is not to be taken seriously."

The "net zero" emissions proposal is particularly nonsensical, AEI warns, given that such an effort would require an estimated $490 billion per year investment in "green energy" and a sharp decrease in land available for agriculture. It also fails to address a very specific problem when it comes to U.S.-specific plans for climate change abatement: it fails to consider that the U.S. is only one of several heavy carbon-emitting nations, and that the vast majority of industrial pollution comes from the developing world and from countries like China and India.

In total, completely enacted, funded, and efficiently meeting goals — things AEI does not anticipate the GND would ever do — the full plan would cut the global increase in temperature by a whopping "0.083 to 0.173 degrees," a number, the report says, is "barely distinguishable from zero."

And that's assuming that the United States could ever fully enact the Green New Deal. As The Washington Free Beacon points out, the undertaking would be akin to declaring total war on the environment and shifting the focus of every industry directly to the abatement of climate change. Every home would be outfitted to rely on alternative energy, the GND proposes, but, AEI points, out, its authors fail to account for any transition from traditional energy sources to "alternative ones," making the U.S. a land of temporary brownouts and energy restriction.

"[E]ven with an entire state's worth of solar panels," the WFB reports, "the country would still need to rely on conventional energy generation to fill in "brown out" periods, when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Zycher estimates that this back up would require 1.4 million gigawatt-hours of energy per year, resulting in about 35% of 2017 emissions—hardly zero."

Instead, AEI found, the GND is a government control-grab, thinly disguised as an environmental bill.

"The GND at its core is the substitution of central planning in place of market forces for resource allocation in the U.S. energy and transportation sectors narrowly and in the broad industrial, commercial, and residential sectors writ large. Given the tragic and predictable record of central planning outcomes worldwide over the past century, the GND should be rejected," the report concludes.

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Pro coal and anti coal groups face off in Australian coal town

A police spokeswoman said an emergency call was made before midnight on Saturday after reports a loud noise was heard near the camp of protesters at Clermont. Police it was suspected the noise could have been a firecracker and no one had reported seeing the source of the noise.

Stop Adani convoy organiser and former Greens leader Bob Brown said demonstrators were having a great day in the town after a hostile reception yesterday. ‘‘There were a few firecrackers over the fence in the middle of the night, but everybody had a cracker of a night,” Mr Brown said.

However, anti-Adani protesters complained that rocks had been hurled at cars in the convoy and women were “abused and threatened”.

An additional 100 anti-mining protesters were due to arrive to join a Stop Adani rally in the town on Sunday.

Clermont’s three pubs refused to serve convoy participants yesterday and a sign was hung from a hotel which read, “go home and turn off your power and walk”. Another read, “Mr Brown and ‘Stop Adani’ protesters, you may have travelled far and wide but you won’t get food inside”.

The publican of the Grand Hotel in Clermont, Kel Appleton, said the town had been brought together by going toe-to-toe with the Stop Adani group.

“We’re just normal people, we don’t go pushing our rhetoric on anyone else like they do to us.” Mr Appleton said.

Mr Appleton said having United Australia Party leader and senate hopeful Clive Palmer, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and LNP MP Michelle Landry under the same balcony at his pub on Saturday was a surprise. The politicians arrived to show support for locals yesterday.

He said he understood locals would now leave the anti-Adani protesters alone in the town’s showgrounds as they held today’s rally.  “We still get treated we’re like a bunch of hooligans but we’re not, like I’m half proud of being called a redneck, we probably are, we live out west, there’s graziers, there’s cotton farmers,” he said. “People have driven up from Toowoomba (nine hours away) to stand on our side. “That’s what brought everyone together, just being all good people, you know.”

Mr Brown said some impartial business owners had “expressed regret” at the hostility and he thanked Queensland police for keeping the peace. “This is about every Australian child’s future security in a rapidly heating planet,” Mr Brown said in the statement. “You can back your children or you can back Gautam Adani’s mine but you can’t have both.”

The anti-Adani convoy to stop Adani’s Galilee Basin mine is trying to convince the coal-reliant Queensland town it would be better off without the industry.

But the 400-strong convoy was greeted by jeering Clermont residents lining the main street of the central Queensland mining town on Saturday.

Mr Brown has accused the counterprotesters of “thuggery”.

The former Australian Greens leader, said his “law-abiding and peaceful” convoy would be welcomed in the town, but for a “gaggle” of right-wing politicians including Matt Canavan, Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer, who spent yesterday afternoon rallying the “start Adani” group.

“It’s a complete fabrication that people in central Queensland aren’t worried about this mine,” Mr Brown said. “I was braced for a hostile reception in Mackay and it turned out it was mega-friendly.

“We should all be committed to putting the aggression to one side and talking about the issues, the key issue being the future of our children.”

However, Mr Brown said pro-Adani supporters had threatened local restaurants, forcing them to cancel reservations for members of his convoy, describing an “air of thuggery” about the group.

Police redirected the convoy to an alternate road, away from the main street, in a bid to avoid violent clashes, he said.

“Some of them came up to us, surrounding cars and tearing off flags and stickers,” he said.

State shadow mining minister Dale Last, also in Clermont, said residents were “very angry that this group’s coming out here to tell them what they should and shouldn’t be doing.” “I think these protesters will be left in no doubt they’ve walked into a hornet’s nest in this country,” he said. “They’re going to get a very, very hostile reception, I can assure you of that.”

Adani Australia thanked its supporters in a tweet on Saturday: “Amazing turnout with hundreds in Mackay showing up to support the coal industry.”

An anti-Adani rally on Sunday is expected to include speeches and singing.

SOURCE 

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