Posts Tagged ‘population’
Population Control
I wondered how long it would be before someone brought up this taboo subject, sadly it seems to be hidden away in a corner of the BBCs website – maybe it should be on the front page.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7865332.stm
It may be politically incorrect to discuss but the maths is simple – less people means less consumption means less pollution. I watched a video last night TED – on TV of all places in which a guy discussed the fact that methane as we know comes from livestock – most of which are there so we can eat them – and contributes 18% of greenhouse gases. Bearing in mind that there have always been greenhouse gases and the earth has always kept everything in balance, it seems to me that reducing livestock would make a considerable difference to the effect that greenhouse gases have on our planet. There are two ways to make this happen – if we had less people, we’d need less cattle. Alternatively if we simply ate less meat we’d also need less cattle. Given that the latter, by and large just isn’t going to happen thanks to multinational food giants and our insatiable greed, it seems that a reduced population would be a good second option. After all it’s not as if anyone is going to be hurt by avoiding pregnancies unless you’ve some mystical view of the world.
Of course something as simple as encouraging populations to have no more people than they can actually afford, back in the real world is a non-starter, we’ll probably wait until the population gets so high that a virus does it for us.. but at least now, hopefully the subject is on the discussion table where it should be.