November 16, 2015

Population's role in climate change finally getting international attention

Robert Engelman, New Security Beat -  As most of the world’s governments are puzzling out what they can offer to combat global climate change, a sensitive but critical aspect of the problem is coming into clearer focus: population. The word appears 20 times in a new 66-page synthesis of country pledges to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Secretariat. And those are the mentions of population in the context of size or growth, not the word’s more frequent use as a synonym for “people.”

This follows the strongest statement yet from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change one year ago on the contributions of population growth to rising greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC for the first time also touted the benefits of wider access to voluntary family planning services.

This growing awareness matches one of the emerging conclusions of the Worldwatch Institute’s Family Planning and Environmental Assessment project: Researchers around the world are increasingly recognizing the strength of the population-climate change link.

This isn’t to say that population dynamics will gain serious attention at the upcoming climate conference in Paris beginning on November 30. The topic remains too fraught with the potential for shaming of high-fertility groups and individuals, and scars from coercive “population programs” by some governments in the past. Yet the question of how changes in population influence changes in the environment, and how people respond to them, cannot be wished away.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, let's get rid of the people - except for the 1% of course. They will only need a few slaves. Robots can take care of everything else. And the few lived happily ever after, with precious resources intact and unspoilt.

Anonymous said...

Who cares if just the 1% remain? There are too many people on the Earth! I'd rather not breed and just let my lineage disappear than make offspring who will just be slaves to the rich or superfluous humans who will just slowly die in ghettos. I mean let's face it, the left, the poor, the "people", whatever you want to call them, will never win the "struggle". The resistance of the masses has become a joke, I often laugh at how pathetic, short-sighted and stupid it is. Hippie nonsense, stupid marches with placards just make the rich laugh and laugh. There is no real resistance, there can never be. Protesters are more concerned with identity politics, politically correct wording and inane bullshit rather than stopping capitalism or the 1%. Let's face it, people in general are too dumb, putrid and stupid and will never unite to improve the world and it will only keep getting worse. Let the 1%, the Muslim fundamentalists, criminals, welfare moms, corporate psychopaths and the rest have the world, they can bomb and kill each other while I quietly go extinct and don't contribute DNA to the continuing human farce. Besides, eventually the AI's and transhumanists will make everything so goddamn awful anyway. Anyone who is smart and not selfish, just concerned with propagating their DNA would agree with me. There is absolutely no hope whatsoever of anything ever getting better. We all know it in our hearts. We all know.