By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty - (www.bannerofliberty.com)
Last week the World Wildlife Fund announced that the earth "will expire by 2050." It claims, with a perfectly straight face, that "Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, that outer space will have to be colonized.
Or, at least so reports the Observer in the midst of the slow-news summer of 2002. The report states: "seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted.
"The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now."
"Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tons in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995."
This kind of flat-out silliness is possible, apparently, only by assuming that the human race will sit and do nothing while it simply starves to death because it can no longer reap without sowing. Twenty years ago we were hearing that salmon were all going to die unless we tore down the dams which supply water to western cities and allow the salmon back into areas they inhabited 100 years ago.
However, I find on going to the super market, salmon is far more plentiful in the stores than it was 20-50 years ago. It seems that some of those plundering humans figured out a way to grow salmon on salmon farms and are supplying fresh salmon by the ton to grocery stories.
What this is really all about is advance advertising for the 10 year update of the 1992 Earth Summit that is planned for Johannesburg September 3-4. It was the 1992 Earth Summit that brought the world "sustainable development" and the "Kyoto Treaty" which basically is an environmentalist plot to prevent the rest of the world from being able to accomplish the increase in health, longevity and improved standard of living enjoyed by the United States and other Western nations.
A major goal, Factor ten, of the 1992 Earth Summit, in fact, states: "per capita material flows caused by OECD (developed)countries should be reduced by a factor of ten." That is basically a 90% reduction in what we Americans produce and consume.
Considering the fact that a major part of our increased longevity as Americans is based on our improved living conditions, obviously reducing our "per capita material flows" by 90% will also meet another UN goal - reducing the population. Robert William Fogel, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, points out in his book, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism that the improvement in living conditions in America during the 20th century increased the life expectancy and the height of the U.S. population increased dramatically.
In 1930 the life expectancy of Americans at the age of ten, when most of the childhood diseases were behind them, was 52. By the year 2000 that had increased by 25 years to 76.9 at BIRTH.
Eventually, of course, for one reason or another people will die. So far, in the past decade in Africa, millions have died of AIDS, reducing the numbers of people of child-bearing age dramatically. In fact, the CIA Factbook for AIDS stricken South Africa qualifies the population figures given by stating: "the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; ... can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and death rates, lower population and growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected."
Yet, the United Nations is simultaneously demanding more aid to Africa from the United States while insisting that we also reduce our wealth by 90%.
The World Wildlife Fund report, according to the Observer, "shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans."
Of course, U.S. citizens also PRODUCE a bit more than Africans. The per capita gross domestic product in 1985 for Americas was valued at $16,494. In Zimbabwe the per capital gross domestic product produced in 1985 was $1,680, one tenth the per capita GDP of the USA. Sustainable development would reduce the per capita material flow to the United States to approximately what it is in Zimbabwe - which certainly would reduce consumption, since the United States would no longer have the means by which to produce the per capita material flow we now enjoy.
And, just think, your tax money goes to support this kind of nonsense at the United Nations.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com .
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