Planting the seeds of a demographic winter

Did you know that planting a tree won't save the earth? You've got to plant 483 trees just to offset your household's carbon footprint. And that's just for two people.

We know this because the Washington Post Home section on May 8 featured a cover story encouraging folks to plant trees while sternly warning them that this won't help much because people are a cancer on the planet.
 
Okay, they didn't quite put it that way, but it would be hard to miss the message. A graphic with 483 little green trees illustrates this stat from the EPA: "A two-person household is responsible for releasing 41,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. To offset that, each household would have to plant 483 trees and let them grow for 10 years."
 
If a two-person household is that bad, what does that make families with children? Environmental criminals, at the least, and maybe earth wreckers.
 
Before giving us tips on tree planting, Post writer Adrian Higgins exudes the fumes of global warming hysteria: "Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by a third since the start of the industrial revolution, due mostly to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and that buildup has been linked to global warming."
 
Think about this for a minute. The industrial revolution revved up around 1850 or so, and with all the population growth and industrial production over the last 158 years, carbon dioxide has increased by only a third? He does not mention that this constitutes only a microscopic percentage of the entire atmosphere encircling the earth.
 
Could this mean that people are not really a threat to the planet after all? That we can get on with planting trees because ... they're pretty?
 
We ought to be focusing on a much scarier, and likelier, picture of the near future than the specter of too many people breathing, eating burgers and committing other random, senseless environmental atrocities.  The really frightening future is a human race that is quickly depopulating.
 
A new documentary, Demographic Winter, provides the grim facts behind the worldwide trend away from having children. 

- 70 countries, including virtually all of Europe, are now below replacement birth-rate levels. 
- Russia's current population of 140 million will decline to 70 million by 2045 if current trends continue. The economic and political consequences would be staggering. 
- The money boom triggered by the Baby Boom is about to run its course in the United States, as the Boomers make less, spend less and retire, drawing on the taxed earnings of a shrinking population of economic producers. 
- In Germany, in 2006, in one province alone, 220 schools were padlocked for lack of pupils. 
- Japan's population reduction is so severe that the country is virtually shutting itself down, with labor shortages and plants closing. 

Now, if you buy into the global warming theory, this may seem all to the good, since each human is a detriment. As the Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz notes in Demographic Winter: 

A lot of people I've talked to about this say, "Isn't it great if the birthrate is going down, because, after all, that's fewer carbon footprints and less stress on Mother Earth." They're not thinking about how much their own care is going to cost when they get older.

And it will be costly. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are speeding toward a crash against a fiscal roadblock: the number of workers to pay for it is shrinking. Not only are we creating fewer kids, but more of the ones we do create are being born out of wedlock, which increases the likelihood that they will themselves be less self-sufficient.
 
The scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists and other experts featured in Demographic Winter, which include Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker, Rutgers marriage expert David Popenoe, Harvard's Nicholas Eberstadt, New America Foundation's Phil Longman, Family Research Council's Patrick Fagan, Norval Glenn of the University of Texas, and many others, provide data that show the decline of the two-parent family is at the heart of human decline — globally. And it won't necessarily help the environment.
 
Dr. Jianguo Liu, director of sustainability at Michigan State University, notes that "global households are increasing more than the number of people" and thus using more resources. Because of divorce and the rise in single-person households, in 2005 alone in the United States, people used an extra 600 billion gallons of water and 73 billion kilowatts of electricity.
 
It turns out that the nuclear family is the most environmentally friendly way to house people. Yet the family is under assault by a constant media drumbeat about alternative lifestyles, the illusory "benefits" of the sexual revolution, and the costs of having children. A wire story the other day crowed about a study that says people are happiest in marriage when there are no kids around (it lets the adults be the kids instead).
 
On top of all that are the scare stories fueled by environmental groups. Stop reproducing! Heck, stop marrying! (Unless you're gay!) Fewer marriages mean fewer children using fewer resources. We get not only a greener earth, but the end of any pesky sexual "norm."
 
It's hard to escape the propaganda. Even when you turn to a paper's Home section for gardening tips, you find a screed against the impact of people (read: children) on the planet.
 
You might be happier if you skip the media altogether and go out and plant a tree, preferably with your kids, your dog and any other carbon-exuding criminals you can throw in.

so every human being in the world are Environmental criminals, and should be behind bars or pay fine....

A lot of people I've talked to about this say, "Isn't it great if the birthrate is going down, because, after all, that's fewer carbon footprints and less stress on Mother Earth."

I guess it would be an ideal to just wipe all human out of the earth to stop making CO2 and save the world...

Do people even know what they are thinking? 

A hundred years ago there were a LOT less trees in the United States.  Just think of all those old stone walls running through the woods in New England.

Those stone wall are a reminder of the land that was farmed and the trees that were cut to "BURN NASTY SMELLY POLLUTING FIRES"   Ag was a lot less efficent and took more land.

Humans and Nature has been polluting since the existance of fire and Volcanoes.  And what about all those Buffaloe and Dinosaurs belching out CO2 and methane?

How about the "GOOD fairy" swamps? Swamps that produce lots of green house gases, Diseased mosquitos, beaver (girardia), and ducks (flu)

H ere is what the United Nations Has planned for all those steak lovers:

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's
most serious environmental problems," senior UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. "Urgent action is
required to remedy the situation."
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

The 2021 diet is in line not only with the Future Studies green food consumption but also with the most common recommendations in literature ...It is primarily the reduced consumption of meat that leads to the reduction in energy requirements, CO2 emissions, and costs.... Measured in calories output, meat requires almost 14 times more energy input than vegetables.

"www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_umu_diva-80-1__fulltext.pdf

  Virtual water content and energy water productivity

Cereals and starchy roots have the highest
energy water productivity, ...Animal products generally have much lower energy water
productivity than plant products. For instance, beef needs 17 times
more water than wheat to supply the same amounts of energy.

www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci-discuss.net... />

Food production requires about 70 percent of worldwide, human, fresh water use... food production will lead to water shortages...The only option to reduce water requirements for food is to reduce the total amount of crops needed ... for example, by the reduction of the use of animal feed, and thus smaller consumption of food items derived from livestock systems.

dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/science/2006/p.w.gerbens-leenes/thesis.p\
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 i THINK WE HAVE A MUCH BIGGER FIGHT THAN WE THINK

The world population is relentlessly going up. Go to http://www.worldometers.info and also to

http://dieoff.org for more links to what is going on. Since 1972 there have been at least 3 major multi-disciplinary studies of the world carrying capacity for humans in the long term, basically interglacial epoch maximum. They varied from 1.5 to 2 billion humans that could be sustained, and recent studies have shown the sustainable figure going down in a delayed somewhat mirror image of population gain in overshoot.

What the above data tells us is that the most intelligent people who see what is happening and have reduced the amount they reproduce accordingly, are the only ones going toward this sustainable level. Everyone else is not. The other various demographic groups, through lack of intelligence, religious, or cultural reasons are over-reproducing enough for the continued overshoot to crash scenario of a stimulated mammalian population curve. This is a classic half-bell shaped curve, with what is called the crash being the near vertical line of population decrease from ecological collapse.

The efforts of the above groups, and their sacrifices, will not stop the end result. Too little, too late. The moslems with their 7 kids per woman want to gain world domination. The latinos want to outbreed the gringos to take over the USA as the Ogallala Aquifer goes dry with other smaller aquifers. Their intelligence matches the averages of Africans having over 6 kids per woman (from the data of the "Bell Curve" 1993). The world taken over by nut cases and dummies as the last of the water and soil is used up, and other species we depend on go extinct at more and more rapid rates, with pollution also having profound deleterious effects. Wars, cannibalism, malnutrition diseases and diseases from compromised immunity, and starvation with be the norm as nearly a billion per year die until few are left in a malevolent biosphere. If they survive, they will have to learn to be sustainable, and control their reproduction according to knowledge of the conditions and ecology they live in.

Are the people of India planting trees by the billions? Hell, no. They have less than 1% of their forests left and the dung of their underfed sacred cows is insufficient to do all the cooking and boiling the polluted water---as they take jobs from Americans. Calling us often for solicitations or often ineffective customer service that makes you want to tear your hair out. While 90% of the people down wind in the Maldives suffer with crop reduction from sky darkened by the soot of India's increasing coal fired power plants, and glaciers melt at record paces. Yet, Indians claim a small "footprint", just way too many of them, and they still have nearly 3 kids per couple. Insane.

The population crash in 2050 does not require oil depletion. It does not require malevolent climate change. It doesn't require massive pollution. Although these things could be considered coup-de-graces to the species including our own. God never said to over-fill the Earth, and He did say to Replenish the Earth, which was not done. Personally, I don't think those who caused the death of future children will get everlasting life in Heaven.