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    Disaster - China's population falls Archived Message

    Posted by John Monro on January 17, 2023, 3:20 am

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/17/chinas-population-falls-for-first-time-in-more-than-60-years

    I don't know how other posters feel, but planetary over population is the single biggest existential threat to our civilisation. So when I read articles such as this, describing China's population fall (of 0.07%) "a demographic time bomb" or "a bleak demographic outlook" I wonder of the mindset that treats population reductions as some sort of disaster. It would be if that fall was due to a nuclear war or deadly pandemic, but a planned population stabilisation and ultimate reduction is to my mind one of the few sane things that humanity should be trying urgently to achieve

    That it runs counter to the "growth" paradigm of our hyper-capitalist system is its manifest and unavoidable logic. Yet "Greens" and environmentalists can equally get sucked in to the oxymoron of "sustainable growth" - it's a form of capitulation or appeasement of a way of thinking that their intellectual cowardice will not allow them to counter. An economic system that only "works" by growing, in other words by stealing from the future, can no longer do so when thet future has been plundered and lies bare and fallow. We are now arriving at that point, as predicted by the Club of Rome in 1972.

    Yet the modern perceived wisdom as displayed in this article is just about universal. Certainly, lots of intelligent and expert opinion also understands overpopulation as a huge issue, but that opinion seems to have been successfully sidelined

    Almost every problem we have in regard to our existence on this planet would be solved or at least substantially ameliorated with a substantially smaller world population - everywhere, in the "advanced" nations just as much as the poorer - every one less person in the advance nation is equivalent in planetary ecological terms to about ten impoverished people. - though the difference isn't quite so great in local environmental terms (eg water, food, soil etc) .

    When I was born 76 years ago the world population was approximately 2.5 billion - the US about 150 million and Europe about 500 million. (now about 350 and 750 million respectively - the increase in ecological terms is about the same as 3.5 billion third world citizens) Anyone who continues to claim now that the world is not overpopulated (like George Monbiot for instance) has to tell you exactly how it was in 1946, when I was born, that the world was seriously underpopulated and that the extra 5.5 billion people have been nothing but a boon.

    We are beginning to see the first preliminary waves of the population tsunami arriving, literally, on our shores. Predictions for the number of displaced people from climate change and environmental destruction by 2050 varies from about 150 million up to 1.2 billion, this latter a prognosis from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in Australia. Our societies and civilisations would not survive this sort of human forced mobilisation . I doubt if anyone has tried to predict such numbers by the year 2100.

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