"Demographic Winter" Coming - More Babies Needed

Worried about too many people breathing and eating burgers, messing up the environment? That puts the focus in the wrong place, as Robert Knight outlines here. Instead of worrying about too many people, we need to be worrying about two few people. "Demographic Winter" is coming, and is much scarier than alarmist environmental worries. The really frightening future is a human race that is rapidly 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.

Here are some of the scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists and other experts featured in Demographic Winter:

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.

Oddly, having fewer kids also puts strains on 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.

So the nuclear family is actually 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.

Environmental groups are saying:

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.”

Meanwhile, young men are increasingly pulling back from marriage and children.

In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period. (From http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_single_young_men.html)

People are assets to an economy when they are workers. Working people add to the prosperity of workers and non-workers alike, because of the high productivity rates per worker in developed economies. But there is such a thing as a "working age" - roughly 18-65. When that population falls in relation to those 65 and older, it becomes a "graying" population. That is when we are in big trouble!

The only way to have more workers is to have more children. We also know from many studies that children who do not live with both a mother and a father, married and living in the same house, have more problems and lead less-productive lives as an adult.

So that means the way out of the coming "Demographic Winter" is more marriages, earlier in life, with more children in them, and marriages that last. That, and not dubious environmental alarms, is where our greatest focus should be.

Scott McClellan's Dad Did The Same Thing

That is, Scott's Dad Barr McClellan wrote a book attacking former employers and benefactors, accusing them of bad things.

Barr McClellan's book, Blood, Money and Power, attacked former employer and benefactor Lyndon Johnson and former employer Ed Clark by claiming they arranged the assassination of JFK.

Barr McClellan's book got a fresh boost in February 2008 when a man surfaced claiming to be JFKs secret son, saying that one reason he came forward was Barr McClellan's book. Perhaps the book's sales increased at that time. That might have given impetus to Scott McClellan's going forward with his attack-book.

Scott's Mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn who is a Texas politician, is also miffed at the Republicans after losing the Governor's race to Rick Perry in 2006.

Scott McClellan's whole family may have influenced him toward writing an attack book against Bush and his Republican policies.

All That Love Can Give

This is from Richard Fernandez, the "Wretchard" of the famed "Belmont Club, here. A Harvard-trained Filipino, he speaks eloquently of the his childhood memories of the fabled Filipino heroes who fought back against the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines during WWII:

I thought they would never die; that through some mysterious process sheer bravery would save them from old age and death.

As I child I sat listening to my parent's family friends tell of the ones who didn't make it. Of the guerrilla Captain from Calumpit. A Japanese ratissage had hauled up all the men in town on the bridge. They were lined up on the bridge where a hooded informer led a Japanese officer to the only man he knew for certain to be in the guerillas -- the Captain.

A Nipponese officer asked him to identify his men. He refused. The Japanese officer flicked off his ear with a sword. The Captain stood straighter. And the inquisition went on until he fell to his knees, every part of him that could be sliced off, gone. And then the Japanese officer shot him through the head.

I asked our family friend if the Captain had revealed the names of his men. "No," he said, "and he could have shifted the whole questioning to his second in command -- his Lieutenant. But he didn't."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Because I was the Lieutenant. I stood next to him in that line. And he never said a word."

I knew then that I would never be as brave as that unnamed Captain whose identity is lost to posterity, save through the memory of a child, as he writes decades later.

And as they began to pass, I realized that the tears at the funerals were in part for ourselves. We were weeping for ourselves. While they lived we felt safe in their fading shadows. And the tears were for a day when we knew we would be alone, orphaned in our patch of history.

Then no longer could the Captain on the bridge come to strengthen us in our dreams. They say that no man comes into his inheritance until he possesses it himself.

We have been given all that love can give. The rest is up to us.

Getting Rid of Christians in Myanmar

(From Chuck Colson's Breakpoint today, at www.breakpoint.org:)

The news from Myanmar/Burma keeps getting worse. As of May 11, nearly 300,000 were dead or missing. The UN said 1.2 - 1.9 million were struggling to survive after the storm.

But the conduct of the Burmese junta is even more appalling. It actively hinders relief operations. After it seized food aid last week, the UN had to stop sending it.

...a week after the cyclone, the junta was still refusing to let relief workers into the country, insisting that countries send only supplies and not personnel.

The junta eventually relented, but only after stamping their own names on the boxes, and not soon enough to prevent a catastrophe.

Their intransigence may have already doomed a generation of Burmese children, according to international aid agencies. They warned of epidemics of “apocalyptic proportions.” The death toll from the epidemics and starvation could exceed the death toll from the storm itself.

The junta does not value the lives of its people.

Burma's Christians know this better than anyone. The junta has used...

...ethnic cleansing of Christian minority groups, destruction of villages, forced conversions and even rape and murder...“to create a uniform society in which the race and language is Burmese and the only accepted religion is Buddhism.” (bolding added)

The mainstream media has mostly ignored this story. Most Westerners do not even know that Burma has a substantial Christian population.

We ought to be at the forefront of alleviating the suffering of the Burmese people.

But at the same time, we ought to point out to the world that while cyclones do not discriminate between Buddhists and Christians, this junta does.

And our nation ought to be mobilizing world opinion to bring down this oppressive regime.

Fight Global Warming? Or Cooling? Or Stop Fighting Climate Change?

Apparently the globe has stopped warming (if it was actually warming) and has started cooling (if there actually is a cooling trend.) But we are still rushing ahead with drastic, often harmful, measures to stop global warming..

Shouldn't we be stopping what we are doing to cool the earth? Should we start trying to warm the earth instead? Or should we stop everything about warming or cooling until we see what, if anything, we should be doing?

In fact, is trying to fight "climate change," whether warming or cooling, something we should be doing at all? Is it even within our capacity to stop the climate from changing? And if it is within our power, should we even be trying? And shouldn't we answer such questions before we try to do anything further about the climate?

We can't just keep going as we are, anyhow. It is already too costly, and too harmful. A glaring example is using cropland for biofuels instead of food, which is contributing to soaring world hunger and soaring food prices. Another example is blockiing more production of oil, which has caused soaring oil prices and could greatly harm our prosperity.

Fighting global warming and fighting oil production are causing world-wide problems, even for the prosperous. But it is the poor of the world who are suffering most.

Still, if we stop fighting global warming, won't pollution get worse? No. The things that might contribute to warming are not the things that cause pollution.

Warming gases and polluting gases are not the same, but opposite to each other. The warming gases - water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide - do not pollute. They are clean, clear, non-toxic gases. They do not cause air pollution. They do not kill anyone, or even make them ill. In fact they are necessary if there is to be life on earth at all.

Water vapor is 95% of total warming gases. Nothing can be done about water vapor. So "Warmists" focus mostly on carbon dioxide instead. But CO2 is only around 5% of all warming gases. Almost all of that 5% comes from the oceans anyhow. Human-caused carbon dioxide is a only tiny fraction of about 3% of that 5%! That is not enough to warm the climate significantly, or even measure accurately. That tiny percentage of CO2, plus the tiny percent of mathane that is human-caused, are the only warming gases we could do anything about anyhow.

Polluting gases, on the other hand, COOL the earth. They consist of particles in the air. Particles in the air reflect sunlight away from the earth, which cools it. An glaring example is the great volcanic erruptions of the past. They threw great clouds of particles into the air, which had a cooling effect on the climate for 2 or 3 years. Pollution has a cooling effect.

If the global Warmists were more serious, they would have promoted more air pollution. They would have been crying "Drill for oil! Refine more oil! Burn more coal! Increase smog!" All these things would produce more air pollution, which would help COOL the earth.

Wouldn't any impartial observer think we are insane?

So where do we start to re-think about climage change, and about pollution? We already know that pollution is bad for human, animal and vegetable life. So is fighting pollution a good thing? The answer would seem to be yes, but only if we do it in well-considered ways that do not harm us more than they help us.

Finally, should we try to stop climate change in order to avoid bad storms? Scientists differ as to whether there are more storms in cool or warm periods. But they agree that strong, vast movements of air are necessary to keep the earth's climate mild enough for life to exist at all. So there will be storms, regardless of whether the climate is cooling or warming. Humans have always had to deal with them, and we are no exception.

All we know for sure about handling natural disasters well is that the more prosperous nations are, the better they handls them. There is less loss of life and property, better response to disaster, and more rapid rebuilding afterwards, when a nation is more prosperous. So for human safety and well-being, we need to promote those things that make nations more prosperous. That puts capitalism, the acknowledged best path to national prosperity, in a whole new and more kindly light.

What then should we do about climate change? Apparently, we could not change the climate if we tried. The climate has changed from warm to cool and back again so long as the earth has existed. It will not stop, no matter what we do. Human efforts have always been to try to adjust to whatever climate changes came. That seems like a pretty sound plan. Not so exciting, true. But less harmful.

UN Says Myanmar Junta Stealing Aid

"UN Halts Aid to Myanmar After Junta Seizes Supplies," at http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D90I3ORG0&show_article=1

Why would they do that?

When there is a major disaster in a poor country, the major obstacle in getting aid in is usually that country's government. Very often, it steals the aid supplies and sells them for its own profit. If somewhat democratic, it is simply corrupt. If a dictatorship, the corruption is worse.

Such governments use the plight of their people to extract aid from the rest of the world. They hold their own suffering people hostage. They drag their feet in allowing aid to enter. The anguish of a watching world grows. Countries become more frantic to deliver aid. They become more willing to pay bribes and allow considerable theft, just to get at least some aid to the suffering. It is a common form of blackmail.

This is what is happening in Myanmar. The dictatorship is one of the most closed in the world. It keeps Myanmar an almost-closed country, to keep it tightly controlled.

The AP reports this morning:

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) - A U.N. official says the World Food Program is suspending cyclone aid to Myanmar because its government seized supplies flown into the country.

He says the WFP has no choice but to suspend the shipments until the matter is resolved.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley said Friday that all "the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated." The shipment included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits.

The UN already had voiced concerns that the junta wanted supplies, but would not allow aid workers to come in with it. Aid givers will not give supplies without its own workers, to make sure the supplies go to those suffering and are not simply confiscated and sold by corrupt governments. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24514879/page/2/.

Mealwhile, salt water still stands in much of the delta, which supplies most of Myanmar's rice. This harvest was lost. There will not be enough rice this year. The land cannot be planted again until the salt has leached out.

Bodies are everwhere - people and animals. The government will not allow them to be collected and burnt, apparently in the hope that the size of the death count will not be known. Some aid agencies estimate that the death toll could reach 500,000 if disease takes hold.

Available water is not only too contaminated to drink, but too salty. Food is disappearing. Mass disease looms.

The U.S. navy waits offshore, with its huge capacity to produce fresh water. Aid supplies are standing on tarmacs of all surrounding countries, with air transport ready. The U.S., the largest provider of air support in the world, is waiting nearby, but forbidden to enter. All but the U.N. and a few private agencies are kept out.

Now, after seeing all its aid stolen by the government, even the UN is halting its aid.

The tragedy grows.

Economist Robert Samuelson Says "Start Drilling!"

This is excerpted from the dean of American economists, Robert Samuelson, at realclearpolitics.com.

What to do about oil, as the price soars and is likely to keep soaring? Samuelson says we are almost powerless to affect oil prices, because...

...we didn't take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two.

The first thing to do: Start drilling.

The U.S. is the 3rd largest oil producer in the world. We could be producing more:

...but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico...these areas may contain 25-30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity. Americans favor both "energy independence" and cheap fuel. They deplore imports -- who wants to pay foreigners? -- but oppose more production in the United States.

Got it?

The basic cause of exploding prices is that growing world demand has nearly exhausted global surplus oil production capacity.

The best we can do is to try to influence the global balance of supply and demand. Increase our supply. Restrain our demand.

Output from older fields, including Alaska's North Slope, is declining. Although production from restricted areas won't make the U.S. self-sufficient, it might stabilize output or even reduce imports. No one knows exactly what's in these areas, because the exploratory work is old. Estimates indicate that production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge might equal almost 5 percent of present U.S. oil use.

Congress complains about high oil profits, but frustrates oil companies from using these profits to explore and produce oil in the U.S. Meantime, high oil prices perversely encourage other countries to cut back on production, to drive up prices ever more.

But it's hard for the United States to complain that other countries limit access to their reserves when we're doing the same. If higher U.S. production reduced world prices, other countries might expand production. What they couldn't get from prices they'd try to get from greater sales.

Oddly, alternatives to drilling are often environmentally worse.

Subsidies to ethanol made from corn have increased food prices and used scarce water, with few benefits. If oil is imported, it's vulnerable to tanker spills. By contrast, local production is probably safer. There were 4,000 platforms operating in the Gulf of Mexico when hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit. Despite extensive damage, there were no major spills.

Our long-term oil problem will remain, although we can make it much better.

But this is not a task of a month or a year. It is a task of decades; new production projects take that long.

If we don't start now, our future dependence and its dangers will grow. Count on it.

But read the whole article, at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/start_drilling.html.

Global Warming Proponents Get Rattled

This is from "Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths", by Christopher Booker, The Telegraph, May 4, 2008, here.

The big story should have been the evidence pouring in against the idea that the world is heating up. Now some are ruching to modify the computer models that are being contradicted by the facts.

Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.

While NOAA claimed that March was "the warmest on record,

... this was in striking contrast to a graph published last week on the Climate Audit website by Steve McIntyre. Tracking satellite data for the tropical troposphere, it showed March temperatures plunging to one of their lowest points in 30 years.

Meanwhile, the infamous "hockey stick" graph has been exposed as the result of a faulty computer model that "would have conjured even random numbers from a phone book into the shape of a hockey stick."

On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF) ... published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place....

What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal). (Italics added.)

But the most dramatic anti-warming evidence came last week:

...with an announcement by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

Meanwhile, last week Nature published data predicting a decade of cooling from deep ocean movements in the Atlantic. This may be reinforced by an even greater movement in the Pacific, where

...the West coast of the USA might already be experiencing these effects in the recent freezing temperatures that have devastated orchards and vineyards in California, prompting an appeal for disaster relief for growers who fear they may have lost this year's crops.

...this hugely important debate is almost entirely overlooked by the media, and is instead conducted largely on the internet, through expert websites such as those run by Mr McIntyre and Mr Watts.

So while our politicians are spending wildly on anti-warming schemes, they are...

...all based on blindly accepting the predictions of computer models that the planet is overheating due to our output of greenhouse gases.

The fact is that what has been happening to the world's climate in recent years, since global temperatures ceased to rise after 1998, was not predicted by any of those officially-sponsored models. The discrepancy between their predictions and observable data becomes more glaring with every month that passes.

Many cling to global warming because they think it is the same as global pollution. But polluting gasses cool the earth. Warming gases do not pollute! No pollution will result if we stop being concerned about warming gasses.

One way or the other, it is time to stop spending incredible amounts to stop global warming. The climate os growing colder, a trend that appears likely to last at least 10-20 years..


How long will we cling to an irrational, semi-religious global warming fixation?. And when will we stop huge spending programs designed to stop a problem that does not exist?