An Inconvenient Population
The current propaganda crusade and fearmongering surrounding global warming and climate change is nothing new. It is a programme (UN spelling) that follows a well worn pattern.
“The Population Bomb,” by Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich (1968) is the forerunner, and likely a test run, of today’s Climate Change scaretactics. Ehrlich declares that overpopulation is a global emergency requiring radical, drastic, and totalitarian global government policies — sound familiar? — just as Global Warming is declared today.
Ehrlich’s cause never quite caught on and the predictions of disaster never came true. But what might the world look like today had Ehrlich’s political vision been implemented? What kinds of freedoms would we have given up for the ’security’ of saving the planet?
Just like Al Gore today Paul Ehrlich relentlessly lies, fabricates, and exagerates evidence to promote a cause whose ultimate end is the kind of totalitarian control that dictators dream of.
The Prologue of “The Population Bomb” succinctly sets out the agenda and manifesto of the environmentalist movement. First there is the appeal to disaster: all is lost! Doom! Fear, Fire, Foes! Then the blame for ‘The Apocolypse’ is assigned. And finally a solution is put forward that demands extreme control for an extreme problem.
- Imminent Doom, Planetary Emergency
- Assignment of Blame (America)
- Yield control to the planetary saviors
PROLOGUE
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to “stretch” the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole.
Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present affluent society. They will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the 1960’s are dead. As the most powerful nation in the world today, and it’s largest consumer, the United States cannot stand isolated. We are today involved in the events leading to famine; tomorrow we may be destroyed by its consequences.
Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control. And while this is being done we must take action to reverse the deterioriation of our environment before population pressure permanently ruins our planet. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer (Ehrlich, Prologue, 1968).
The plan then is the same as the plan now. Only the details have changed. The goal is to engineer the ‘kind of society’ they want.
Obviously our first step must be to immediately establish and advertise drastic policies designed to bring our own population size under control. We must define a goal of a stable optimum population size for the UNited States and display our determination to move rapidly toward that goal. Such a move does two things at once. It improves our chances of obtaining the kind of country and society we all want, and it sets an example for the world. (Ehrlich, 1968, pg. 135, para 1).
Al Gore and the Environmentalist prophets of doom
Reference
Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.
