Republican Fertility and Population

[Lionel Mandrake]

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Saturday, 7 Jan 2012 Washington, DC

1. ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE: IT’S PROPORTIONAL TO HUMAN POPULATION.
One by one, the great ocean fisheries are being destroyed by overfishing,
including the storied Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Elsewhere, ocean gyres
(circulations) have trapped gigantic "floating garbage patches," consisting
of barely-buoyant pieces of man-made plastics that threaten marine life. On
land, the Green Revolution saved billions of lives from starvation in the
20th century, but at the cost of lower groundwater levels over much of the
globe and depleted reserves of phosphate rock. It would be impossible to
repeat the Green Revolution today. Moreover, population growth pushes oil
production ever closer to the dreaded Hubbert Peak, even as atmospheric
carbon from burning fossil fuel contributes to global warming and lowers
the pH of the oceans, with serious environmental consequences. The lesson
is clear: excessive population is damaging our environment at a rate that
far exceeds the natural recovery rate. What then determines the population?

2. FERTILITY RATE: IT’S PROPORTIONAL TO HUMAN IGNORANCE.
World population reached 7 billion in November 2011 and is on track to a
disastrous 9 billion by mid-century. This is generally taken to be
evidence of a powerful reproductive instinct. There is, to be sure, a
nurturing instinct, but who thinks about that during foreplay? The Pill
will one day be recognized as the most important invention of the 20th
century; it permits us to plan our most essential function: reproduction.
Unfortunately, industry wants more consumers, generals want bigger armies,
priests want their souls. Fertility in developed nations, however,
including all of Europe, is at or below the replacement rate, usually taken
to be 2.1. This is not the result of some policy consensus; it's simply
that access to the Pill now empowers women to develop to their full
potential. The lowest fertility rate is in China, where the current
economic miracle refutes the belief that a low fertility rate is bad for
business. The highest fertility rate of any country is 7.0 in Afghanistan,
where the Sunni Muslim Taliban forbade girls to learn to read.

3. REPUBLICAN FERTILITY: IS IT PROPORTIONAL TO POLITICAL SUCCESS?
In Rick Santorum’s marriage, fertility follows the appalling rate of
Afghanistan. A father of seven and a Catholic, Santorum described
contraception as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter
to how things are supposed to be." Uh, what sexual things is he talking
about and how should they be? With five children of his own, Mitt Romney,
barely edged out Santorum in the Iowa Republican Caucus but trails him
slightly in fertility, five being closer to that of Rwanda. The presumptive
Democratic presidential candidate has two children.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org

[Gregorian]

1. I agree with the sentiment. But careful singling out. Dick Gregory has 10 children.

We're getting into shady territory when we start singling out.

What kind of intelligence? I call it an awareness that gives people the ability to put two and two together to see how population is related proportionally to destruction of the planet.

It's a tough subject. And none is more important.

The problem is that modern living gave us the ability to increase population above what can be sustained in a natural equilibrium within the planet's ability. But now that we've accomplished that, it's all about population.

We just didn't like being ripped apart by animals. Or having rotten teeth that killed us. Or any of a number of discomforts. Warm water.

It's a phenomenon now. On the horizontal portion of the curve (ie., up to about a billion people), we could have as many children as we wanted, and not make much of a difference in population, with respect to what the planet could carry. Now if everyone has four children, we're looking at a spike of nearly 20 billion people.

It's no different than global warming. We can't force people to believe it and adhere to frugal lifestyles. There are people who just want to jump on a plane to go hike the Himalayas. We can't stop them.

And you'll find that even the most liberal will take issue with this topic. We're at the mercy of the weakest link. Just like politics. We can't eliminate republicans. And we can't eliminate population offenders.

[HillWilliam]

2. It's the hypocrisy

Pubbies flip out when anybody else has sex, especially when they're apparently unable to keep it in their britches... with their wives, their mistresses, their staffers, ...

[Lionel Mandrake]

3. We can't eliminate anyone, but the planet can.

When the arctic permafrost all melts, which is now inevitable, it will release enormous quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is lighter than the major constituents (nitrogen, oxygen, and argon) of the atmosphere. It will mix with them in the troposphere and tend to rise up to the level where solar UV radiation is absorbed. There it is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The result will be a huge spike in global warming. This will reduce our ability to grow crops.

There will be more people and less food than we have now. The result will be mass starvation, probably accompanied by new epidemics of what are now called tropical diseases.