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Culling for Climate
Over the weekend, Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, set X/Twitter afire with the following Tweet, which foresees the “culling of the human population” as the “only realistic” way to address climate change — a Tweet which he later deleted:
climatThe issue of “overpopulation” is one that has long been present in the climate science community, but is rarely discussed in public in the stark terms employed by McGuire. Yes, I put the word “overpopulation” into scare quotes because it is not a meaningful analytical concept but it is one with a lot of symbolic baggage.1
I don’t want to be too harsh on McGuire as he simply articulated what some in the climate science community actually believe and had the unfortunate experience of committing a Kinsley gaffe. A view that climate change is really about overpopulation is not that uncommon among climate researchers.
Let’s go back in time.
Writing in 1990, only two years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created and two years before the Rio Earth Summit, atmospheric scientist and president of the National Academy of Engineering, Robert M. White2 warned that,
The climate warming issue has also become a surrogate for other agendas. . . [Proponents argue that] because population growth is at the root of the environmental pressures being experienced by the world, prospects for stabilizing the climate and arresting the deterioration of the habitability of the planet are hopeless, argue the proponents, without population control.
Indeed, writing just one year later, the late Stephen Schneider suggested several strategies for addressing climate change including “curtailing population growth” and
“in developing countries they involve forsaking fossil fuels as a basis for development, as well as dramatic slashing of population growth rates as a strategy for addressing climate change.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Dark Origins of the Davos’ Great Reset
Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.
Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.
In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Creating the new paradigm
At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included
The Club of Rome;
the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF);
the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference;
the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth;
and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.
Club of Rome
In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Defending degrowth is not Malthusian
Defending degrowth is not Malthusian
Self-limitation is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits.
Political ecology ‘has made strong arguments against natural limits’ and is in friction with ‘degrowth’s .. urgency of less’, writes Paul Robbins. Indeed, political ecologists developed the field as a response to 1970s neo-Malthusianism. Nancy Peluso, Lyla Mehta or Betsy Hartmann have exposed the racist, classist and patriarchal underpinnings of neo-Malthusian discourses of environmental degradation, overpopulation, or scarcity.
I am a political ecologist. I love these books. How do I square then this with my defense of limits and degrowth?
It took me sixteen years after my PhD to figure it out. We should distinguish, I always felt, reactionary notions of limits, like the ‘coming anarchy’ of prophets of doom like Robert Kaplan or Garett Hardin; and limits like those defended from activists at places like Standing Rock. Lumping all defenses of limits as Malthusian is analytically sloppy and politically wrong.
I felt this in my skin when, as a late-night twitter intellectual, I was told by fellow travelers that I am a baby-killer and a Malthusian (Me, a Malthusian?!). But the catalyst that got me going was an essay by Gareth Dale, in which I learned that Malthus was actually in favour of growth, not limits.
Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population is one of those classic works that academics feel comfortable citing without taking the trouble to read. I followed Gareth’s lead and sat down to read it again – line by line. And here is the story I have to tell.
First, Malthus was not a Malthusian, he was an economist. Second, radical environmentalism has always been romantic – and romantics were the fiercest critics of Malthus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
