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The depopulation bomb, or, 40 million guys with no one to date
Not sure if anyone else noted this story in The New York Times early this week: "Fearing Future, China Starts to Give Girls Their Due." The piece says the powers that be in China just might be considering a shift from the controversial one-child policy (enacted in the 1970s to help control population growth) to a two-child policy. Why? Well, for one, there's a grave shortage of girls in the country, due to selective abortion (or worse):
In early January, the government announced that the nationwide ratio had reached 119 boys for every 100 girls. Studies show that the average rate for the rest of the world is about 105 boys for every 100 girls. Demographers predict that in a few decades China could have up to 40 million bachelors unable to find mates.
These figures may bring to mind some sort of hideous plot for a reality show. (Oh, wait, isn't that a tautologous statement? Someone throw me a bone.) But the dismal issues of selective abortion and female infanticide aside, the story also hints at a topic being discussed in other parts of the world, too, one that ought to concern environmentalists but hasn't received much attention thus far in the United States: Does there come a point at which declines in fertility rates advance too far? The Times piece alludes to a "looming baby bust" in China. Who will provide for the country's "rapidly aging population"?How scary that the world's most populous country might be considering -- never mind enacting -- policies to encourage people to have more kids. While such a possibility may be a ways off in China, the discussion has been more fully joined in parts of Europe. I just returned from a trip with three French citizens, progressives all, who voiced deep concern that their country's population was leveling off. They talked with passion about the need for France and Europe as a whole to find a way to fuel population growth, whether through immigration or E.U. expansion or whathaveyou. Rather than celebrating success at approaching zero population growth or, better yet, a decreasing population -- with all the imaginable pluses for resource consumption, CO2 emissions, and other forms of pollution -- they focused on the need for population growth.
I have greatly simplified the Times piece here (and also somewhat my friends' perspective) to call attention, however inarticulately, to this underreported debate. Seems to me that environmentalists should be working furiously to show that a country with a declining population can still be competitive economically and provide a high level of social services (Scandinavian or French style). It's beyond me at the moment to make this argument -- I confess I'm new to the topic, too -- but I wonder whether anyone out there can do so. Anyone? Anyone?
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Land easements
A joint Congressional committee has recommended reducing or eliminating tax breaks for conservation easements. The policy details around this stuff are somewhat technical, but it's very big -- and very bad -- news in the world of land trusts, and should be of concern to any enviro. Over at Nature Noted, your one-stop-shopping location for all matters land trust related, Pat Burns is all over it. Start with his January archive and just keep scrolling.
Update [2005-2-4 12:44:40 by Dave Roberts]:More from Jon Christensen.
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Speaking of hybrids
The CEO of Nissan made some disparaging comments about hybrids today. Wonder if he'd see this news:
Supported by ongoing demand and additional models, combined US sales of hybrids in January 2005 almost doubled from levels in January 2004, rising 98.8% to 8,455 units from 4,252 units the prior year.
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Fox addresses henhouse
Can you guess who said this?
We've talked about Kyoto a lot. That's been out there. It's the big boogie man in the last few years. Kyoto is dead. Kyoto is absolutely dead. It's not going to happen. We're taking steps right now to reverse every piece of paper that EPA has put together where they could call CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That's going to be nailed down in the next few months ... Now, having said that, mercury, in my opinion, is very Kyoto-like in its potential impacts. Mercury to me is the issue that scares me the most of the ones that are out there right now.
Un-friggin-believable. -
New low for global birth rate
Our friends who like to butt heads over population might be interested to know that the global birth rate has fallen to its lowest point. The average woman in a developing country now gives birth 3.9 times over the course of her lifetime, compared with 5.9 in the 1970s, according to the U.N.
That's not down to the replacement level of 2.1, of course, but consider it in conjunction with the far-below-replacement levels in some (over)developed countries like Spain (1.15), Italy (1.19), a handful of other European nations, and Japan, and it marks progress.
Still, in total we're at 6,416,395,969 and counting ...
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Hybrid slogan
A while back New American Dream had a contest: come up with a short, punchy slogan to encourage American automakers to make more hybrids. Apparently they got nearly 35,000 submissions and they've narrowed it down to 100 (that's some serious intern grunt work!). If you sign up for an account over there, you can vote on your favorite.
(Reading these over, I'm wondering how bad the other 34,900 were. Some are okay, but "Do it right! Go Hybrid!"? Me, I'm voting for the current favorite: "Green cars today. Blue skies tomorrow.")
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See Hotspot Run
Ecologists identify nine new biodiversity “hot spots” The world’s biodiversity, it seems, is in trouble. A new report compiled over four years by some 400 ecologists has identified nine new “hotspots” where animal and plant biodiversity is both high and imperiled. The 34 total hotspots identified since 2000 cover only 2.3 percent of the earth’s […]
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Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”
Remember when bestselling author Michael Crichton jumped into the global warming debate with both feet, releasing a book called State of Fear that cast environmentalists as ruthless loonies and climate change as a case of mass hysteria, and everybody was buzzing about it, and every publication on the planet published reviews of the book, and Crichton did the rounds on talk shows playing the martyr, and American pop culture was all a-twitter?
Back in December?
Yeah, well, we're ready to weigh in now. (We just wanted to get the last word!)
My review of the book is up, and so is a scientific debunking of the book from Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (It's a much-revised version of a piece he published over on the might-as-well-put-"indispensable"-in-the-name Indispensable RealClimate.org.)
More reflections below the jump.
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The Brick of Disaster
Autism may be linked to environmental factors, research says A new study looking into possible environmental causes of autism, a neurological disorder that affects communication and social-interaction abilities, demonstrates that a suite of pollutants working in combination can critically affect a developing embryo. The research focused on several chemicals found more than a decade ago […]
