Academics: Achieve Sustainability by Easing Population to 4 Billion by 2200

Reminder: No Class until after Labor Day.

Today’s title is real, and from a peer-reviewed paper of the same name by Mark Keegan and a bunch of other academics in Sustainable Development.

That title is so good that I’m going to write it one more time. See if you can spot the magic word in it: Achieve Sustainability by Easing Population to 4 Billion by 2200.

Yes. You got it. Easing.

Easing.

Since there are 8 billion of us, this is my new favorite euphemism for killing off half of us. Try it out at parties. Pull out your weapon and say “I’m going ease half of you from the room.” Get ready for Science laughs!

This paper is Science. No giggling, now. I mean it. We know it is Science, because it has equations in it. Like this one:

“TotalImpact = Population x PerCapitaImpact.”

You’re amazed, I know it. Amazed that this is wrong. It’s not only that the total “impact” would be the sum of each individual “impact”, but that the equation would also highlight that some “impacts” would be negative, meaning that many are responsible for improvements in the world. Like farmers. Especially meat farmers. Cows are doing splendidly as a species on this green earth.

And have you noticed the same thing as I have?

This paper, like all those in this Gloom and Doom sector, all speak of “ecological footprint functions”, energy usage, consuming in general, “impact” as we saw, resource usage and the like. It’s not wrong to say that, for instance, people consume food. But academics speak of such things as if there is shame in it.

What you and I both noticed is that these categories and calumnies only apply to people, and to the animals we tend. Only man and cattle are a menace. Bears do not “consume resources”. Fish do not have “carbon footprints”. Bugs have no “impact”, except on windshields. Trees deplete no solar energy. What all these things eat, the space they occupy, the modifications they make to the land and sea in order to live never counts.

All species are assumed only to contribute to “the environment”, never take from it. Except man, and his food or companions, who can only be avaricious. Man is never seen as part of the environment as is all other life. He alone harms, or if any other species is implicated, it it only because of man that that species sinned.

But enough about that. Let’s look at the Science.

There is another reason we know this paper is Science: they use, and boast of using, “p values.” Sing about confusing correlation with causation, baby!

The authors here make a big show—this is their entire paper—of comparing their “consumption” measures from ancient history (1970) to now, and then marveling that all indexes are up because population is. For instance, energy use goes up as population does. Wee Ps confirm this! Amazing! Awards will doubtless be heaped upon them.

They don’t like the trends, which are up. Which is how they come to speak of easing half of us into grave. These next words come in, I remind us, a Science paper:

What kind of world do we want for the children of the future? Most people would opt for a world free of resource conflicts and poverty, a world of thriving nature and a stable climate. But as seen by the trends graphed here, our efforts are not urgent enough.

How does one, scientifically, opt for a world free of resource conflicts? Is this not the naiveté of emotional high schoolers? What in the world does this have to do with science or medicine?

They fret larger populations will mean more “consumption”, which is true, but by itself is of no importance. Because it assumes nothing changes, everything will be as it is now, which is surely false.

Finally comes their blood prescription (my emphasis):

Gently reversing population growth is the better course. Embracing a smaller population may seem discouraging or strange, as we have lived in an era of rapid global population increase. But the global population quadrupled over the past century, and that is a much more disruptive change than if population were to shrink by half over the next 170?years. Easing to a smaller and sustainable population would not deprive additional billions of life but instead ensure that when they do arrive conditions will be good.

The last sentence is grammatical nonsense. People who will not exist will never arrive anywhere.

By what mechanisms do these academics propose to ease half the population into the grave? They hope to do it “quickly and non-coercively” by “fulfilling women’s and couples’ unmet needs for reproductive health services”, by which euphemism they mean nonreproductive lives, “and by improving girls’ educational opportunities”, because even academics know women enamored with “careers” and shopping do not have children.

If these voluntary methods aren’t sufficient, then they recommend, darkly, “goals and policies.” They speak of enforced quotas—by whom?

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