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Reporting From the Field
This week, I'm at the Aspen Environment Forum, and will be putting these daily round-ups together in rare free moments and gaps in the schedule. I beg your patience, and apologize in advance for anything I might miss.
New Fuel Efficiency Standards
The Obama administration is set to annouce today "a combined car and light-truck fuel economy standard for the 2011 model year of 27.3 m.p.g., a placeholder for a much-broader reworking of fuel efficiency rules later this year." This marks the first increase in the standard in more than two decades. [Detroit Free Press]
Only God Should Move Mountains
"In Appalachia, there is a growing struggle between two formidable forces – the coal industry that provides jobs in this impoverished region and the religious leaders who knit its rural communities together....Half a dozen major religious denominations have issued statements opposing mountaintop mining in recent years, but the strongest voices in this fight are coming from the local churches." [SolveClimate]
Remembering Three Mile
Tomorrow marks the 30 year anniversary of the nation's worst nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Here's Walter Cronkite reporting the incident to the country: "The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse."
More on Three Mile Island's place in history here. [Scientific American]
Labor and Environmentalist Unite Against Climate Change
"Four labor unions and two environmental organizations today announced their support for comprehensive cap-and-trade climate change legislation in 2009." [Blue Green Alliance]
Nothing I can think of can be more vital to a good enough future for the children than a global flow of ideas regarding the population dynamics of the human species on Earth. A virtual mountain of scientific knowledge supports the near-universal understanding that a finite planet with the size, composition and frangible ecology of Earth cannot be expected to much longer support an endlessly growing number of human beings worldwide, many too many of whom appear to be willfully choosing to increase in an unbridled way their conspicuous per-capita consumption and unnecessary overproduction of stuff.
With the hope of promoting necessary discussion of the subject of global human population growth, I would like to share a recent email from one of our most respected colleagues, Dr. Gary Peters, a splendid contributor to the blogosphere.
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"Steve has mentioned the work below but I'm not sure how many of you have actually been able to look at it. It is solid and worth your time, especially if you have an interest in population growth and any variation on the idea of sustainability.
Gary
P.S. For those who like such data, the world population now grows by close to 220,000 people per day."
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If you will, please rigorously examine the presentation, World Food and Human Population Growth.
Usual objections to the research of Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D. and David Pimentel, Ph.D., have focused the human community's attention upon "Demographic Transition Theory." Although this theory is descriptive in character, the demographic transition theory has been widely shared, consensually validated and erroneously deployed, by many too many demographers and economists in particular, as a tool for effectively predicting the end of population growth soon and the automatic stabilization of the human population on Earth in the middle of Century XXI.
With remarkable clarity the research of human population dynamics by Hopfenberg and Pimentel shows us that, as a predictor of the increase or decrease of absolute global human population numbers, the theory of the demographic transition is fatally flawed and directly contradicted by more adequate scientific evidence.
While the theory of the demographic transition does offer a useful historical view of recent patterns of human population growth, its value as a tool to forecast the increase or decrease the population numbers of the human species worldwide can now be seen, in the light of new research, as fundamentally defective.
If the human family continues choosing to keep doing precisely what we are doing now as absolute global human population numbers skyrocket toward a projected 9+ billion people, can reason or common sense possibly support the idea that future outcomes regarding human population growth will be any different either from the results we are seeing now or the results which have been occurring throughout recorded history?
Perhaps someone will kindly explain what you think will happen that would effectively lead to the stabilization of population numbers of the human species in the year 2050, given the fully anticipated young age distribution of the global human population at that time?
At the midpoint of the twenty-first century, what do you suppose hundreds upon hundreds of millions of fertile young people, who are expected to be capable of reproducing, will be doing with their sexual drives and instincts other than what their ancestors did for thousands of years?
Psychologists have often commented about such circumstances in this manner: doing the same things over and over again while fully expecting that a new succession of events will somehow magically occur is an example of extreme foolishness.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php