Many thanks to Mark O’Connor for this submission.  It reminds one of the statement: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair (1935).  This posting can also be found on Mark’s Blog, at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/

The spin-doctors of the BCA (Business Council of Australia) are at it again, demanding rampant population growth for Australia — “to around 30 million in 2030 and 36 million in 2050″. And they are trying to present this selfish demand as reasonable and “moderate”.

In the world of the Gruen Transfer this is known as the “suit” ploy.  (The male business suit is designed to create an image of maturity, discipline, and sobriety, even if it sometimes covers a pot-bellied snake-oil salesman.) So the BCA’s tactic is that the more extreme, selfish, and short-sighted their position becomes, the more it is necessary to keep telling people how reasonable,moderate and far-sighted it is.

You can find these tactics on display in the BCA’s Media Release “Moderate Population Growth the Best Path to Prosperity” where they assure us that

“The projected growth in the Intergenerational Report that would see our population increase to around 30 million in 2030 and 36 million in 2050 is a moderate and sensible guide to what is likely to be needed to meet Australia’s long-term goals.”

The BCA claims it “has thought long and hard about the best population strategy for Australia.” Its conclusion: grow like hell for short term gratification and business profits, don’t worry about the long-term future, but keep saying that you are looking to it and what’s best for Australia’s interests.  Oh, and talk about “leadership”. The BCA promises “leadership to inspire people about the future rather than populist debates that seek to scare people about the present.”

This Media Release follows the BCA’s submission  to Tony Burke, the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities on how to achieve a sustainable population for Australia. Its tenor can be guessed from this graceful rubric on its cover-page:

Improving the quality of life of all Australians within prosperous, secure and liveable communities requires well-managed population growth over the first half of this century.
Continue Reading »

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.  See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1361374/Water-demand-outstrip-supply-40-20-years-climate-change-population-growth.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Water Demand Will Outstrip Supply by 40% within 20 Years

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:03 AM on 1st March 2011
Water demand in many countries will exceed supply by 40 per cent within 20 years due to the combined threat of climate change and population growth, scientists have warned.

A new way of thinking about water is needed as looming shortages threaten communities, agriculture and industry, experts said.

In the next two decades, a third of humanity will have only half the water required to meet basic needs, said researchers.

Agriculture, which soaks up 71 per cent of water supplies, is also likely to suffer, affecting food production.

Filling the global water gap by supply measures alone would cost an estimated £124billion per year, a meeting in Canada was told.

But this could be cut to between £31billion and £37billion by an approach which both raised supply and lowered demand, according to leading water economist Dr Margaret Catley-Carlson.

Around 300 scientists, policy makers, and economists attended the international meeting in Ottawa hosted by the Canadian Water Network (CWN) in the run-up to U.S. World Water Day on March 22.

Dr Catley-Carlson, a director of the CWN, which co-ordinates water research and policy in Canada, and vice-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Water Security, said: ‘We need to brace for what could easily be humanity’s greatest short-term challenges.’

Thanks to Ross McCluney for this article from Scientific American.  See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-americans-so-ill

Why Are Americans So Ill-Informed about Climate Change?

Scientists and journalists debate why Americans still resist the consensus among research organizations that humans are warming the globe

By Robin Lloyd | February 23, 2011

As glaciers melt and island populations retreat from their coastlines to escape rising seas, many scientists remain baffled as to why the global research consensus on human-induced climate change remains contentious in the U.S.

The frustration revealed itself during a handful of sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, coming to a peak during a Friday session, “Science without Borders and Media Unbounded”.

Near the forum’s conclusion, Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Kerry Emanuel asked a panel of journalists why the media continues to cover anthropogenic climate change as a controversy or debate, when in fact it is a consensus among such organizations as the American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Association and the National Research Council, along with the national academies of more than two dozen countries.

“You haven’t persuaded the public,” replied Elizabeth Shogren of National Public Radio. Emanuel immediately countered, smiling and pointing at Shogren, “No, you haven’t.” Scattered applause followed in the audience of mostly scientists, with one heckler saying, “That’s right. Kerry said it.”

Such a tone of searching bewilderment typified a handful of sessions that dealt with the struggle to motivate Americans on the topic of climate change. Only 35 percent of Americans see climate change as a serious problem, according to a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

It’s a given that an organized and well-funded campaign has led efforts to confuse the public regarding the consensus around anthropogenic climate change.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-americans-so-ill

From http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/01/an-argument-for-making-birth-control-pills-available-over-the-counter/#ixzz1FRsB6ooW

By Bonnie Rochman Tuesday, March 1, 2011

An Argument for Making Birth-Control Pills Available Over the Counter

American women spend about five years either pregnant, trying to get pregnant or postpartum; contrast that with the three decades they spend trying to consciously avoid having a baby.

That data, from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank, points up the need for good birth-control options – and lots of them. As it turns out, birth control has been in the news a lot lately. Planned Parenthood, which supplies contraception for low-income women across the country, is in danger of losing its funding. A new study from the University of California, San Francisco, found that hooking women up with a year’s supply of birth-control pills slashes the rates of abortions and unintended pregnancies. And now, research from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) suggests that another way of ensuring women take their pills is by making oral contraceptives available over the counter (OTC).

Together, these latest developments suggest that the U.S. might want to take a hard look at how women in this country can best protect themselves from unintended pregnancies. (More on Time.com: Saving Maternal Lives – With a Magic Marker)

The caveat: should the Pill be available without a prescription, women need to make sure they’re choosing the most appropriate pill for their particular needs.

Taking advantage of a “natural experiment” along the U.S.-Mexico border, UT researchers found that U.S. women who crossed into Mexico to buy OTC birth control pills are more likely to stay on the Pill longer than women who get pills by prescription at U.S. clinics, according to research published online last week in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

To read the full article, click here: http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/01/an-argument-for-making-birth-control-pills-available-over-the-counter/#ixzz1FRsB6ooW

From the Family Violence Prevention Fund.  See http://www.endabuse.org/content/features/detail/1674/

1 in 4 Hotline Callers Report Birth Control Sabotage, Pregnancy Coercion

February 15, 2011

What may be the first national survey to determine the extent of “reproductive coercion” was released on February 15 by the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF). The survey found that 25 percent of callers to the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported that they had experienced this form of domestic and dating violence.

Reproductive coercion is defined as threats or acts of violence against a partner’s reproductive health or reproductive decision-making. It includes forced sex, a male partner pressuring a woman to become pregnant against her will and interference with the use of birth control. The women who reported this form of abuse said that their male partners either would not allow them to use birth control or sabotaged their birth control method (such as poking holes in condoms or flushing pills down the toilet). Some of the women said they had to hide their birth control.

“Birth control sabotage is a serious form of control that leads to unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections,” said FVPF President Esta Soler. “While there is a cultural assumption that some women use pregnancy as a way to trap their partner in a relationship, this survey shows that men who are abusive will sabotage their partner’s birth control and pressure them to become pregnant as a way to trap or control their partner.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.endabuse.org/content/features/detail/1674/

Thanks to Harriet Mitteldorf for this interview with David Suzuki.  See http://www.commonground.ca/iss/236/cg236_interview.shtml

March 2011
Sustainable activism

A conversation with David Suzuki on his 75th birthday

Interview by Joseph Roberts

Joseph Roberts: How did it all begin?

David Suzuki: We started when the Worldwatch Institute said it’s the turnaround decade. We thought we were only going to be here for 10 years. So we said every dollar we raise we’re going to spend because we don’t have time. Who would’ve imagined that 20 years later we’d still be here and that conditions would be worse.

JR: And it hasn’t turned around.

DS: No. We’ve had five years now of the most anti-environmental government we’ve ever had. We have a leader who claims the economy is his highest priority, proroguing parliament to focus on the economy and yet a leading economist like Sir Nicholas Stern says if we don’t deal with climate change it’s going to destroy the global economy. Our prime minister has never, ever, said this is an important issue affecting Canada and we’ve got to do something.

JR: My concern now is the way global economics is actually speeding up the destruction. With the UN declaring 2011 the International Year of the Forest and we have less than a third of the forest left on this planet, what is to be done?

DS: From my standpoint, I don’t attend international meetings anymore. I went to Rio in ’92 and Kyoto in ’97. And we’ve had, you know, the Year of the Child and the Year of the Ocean and God knows all these wonderful things, but so long as we cling to this economic system, I don’t see any way out of it. As you said, it’s this economic drive that is just trashing the planet.

JR: At universities today, a higher percentage of students are focusing on the so-called ‘financial industries’ and less and less on the sciences and the arts.

DS: My parents were survivors of the depression and the lessons they taught me were, to me, very important. Live within your means, save some for tomorrow, help your neighbour as you never know when you might need their help. Simple lessons. My dad and mom said you need money to buy the necessities in life, but you don’t run after money as if having more makes you a better or more important person. My parents didn’t like to talk about money. They felt there was something about that – that you don’t just obsess over it. Now, we have over 500 billionaires. How can any human being be worth a billion dollars, and at a time when two billion people live on two dollars or less a day? This is an obscenity.

To read the rest of the interview, please click here: http://www.commonground.ca/iss/236/cg236_interview.shtml

Thanks to Jack Alpert for this article.  See http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Oil_fired_grain_fed.html

The Oil-Fired, Grain-Fed Global Food Crisis

Paul Chefurka
February 17, 2011

In other articles I have made the claim that because of our industrial food system, oil, food and population are inextricably linked. I have also claimed that a contraction in the world oil supply would cause a similar contraction in the world food supply, threatening the human population. This article fleshes out those claims a little more, drawing on some of my recent investigations.

Food Systems

According to Wikipedia, a food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items.

Another article gives the percentage of various countries’ total energy consumption that is used by the food system. The estimates range from 10% to 14%. This gives a good starting point for investigating how vulnerable food systems are to oil supply disruptions. Of course, the estimates are for “total energy”. The interesting question for our purposes is, what proportion of the energy used in the food system comes from oil?

After thinking about it for a while I’m reasonably confident in saying that about two thirds of the energy used in the average food system likely comes from oil. The reason is that the heavy energy consumption in the food system comes from the mechanization of production and the transportation of raw materials, raw food, finished food products and waste. Natural gas is used for fertilizer and crop drying, but that only consumes a percent or two of the total energy supply. The rest is electricity for lighting, processing the food and some production processes like irrigation. Estimating that two thirds of the energy used comes from oil seems reasonable to me.

So by picking the middle of that 10% to 14% range and multiplying 12% by 2/3, I conclude that 8% of the world’s primary energy supply is used in the global food system as oil. This is not terribly accurate, but I think it’s in the right ballpark.

However, that 8% isn’t drawn from the complete pool of primary energy, because it only comes from oil. That means that our 8% comes out of the world’s oil supply, not from the total pool of primary energy. The oil supply constitutes only 35% of the world’s primary energy. The necessary arithmetic shows us that the operation of the world’s food supply consumes about 23% of the world’s oil. Almost a quarter of our oil is used to feed us. Or, in Dale Pfeiffer’s language, we eat a quarter of our oil. It seems unbelievable, but there it is.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Oil_fired_grain_fed.html

Thanks to Bob Walker for this OpEd by Jonathan Porritt.  See http://www.24dash.com/blogs/jonathon_porritt/2011/02/28/Million-For-a-Billion/

Published by Jonathon Porritt on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 12:43 pm

Million For a Billion

For those of you who care about population issues, here’s a small thing you can do right now. Sign up to the Population Institute’s “Million for a Billion” campaign petition on www.millionforabillion.com.

Its aim couldn’t be simpler: recruit a million people to help persuade world leaders to boost the total level of international support for family planning assistance by at least $1 billion a year.

Do this against a backdrop where 215 million women in the world today still do not have access to family planning services, or to the right to decide for themselves the number of children they have or when to have them; where there are 75 million unintended pregnancies every year; and where 20 million women die every year resorting to unsafe abortions.

International funding for family planning support has not only shrunk dramatically in terms of the total funds available (family planning represented 55% of the total primary fund for population assistance back in 1995, but in 2008 it accounted for a mere 6% – largely because of the huge increases in funding from HIV/AIDS), but remained far below the minimum targets agreed by governments.
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Thanks to Don Collins for this OpEd by Dick Scaife in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.  See http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/print_724735.html

Don’t defund Planned Parenthood

By Dick Scaife
Sunday, February 27, 2011

My grandmother was a friend and a supporter of Margaret Sanger, one of America’s earliest, most effective advocates of birth control.

I met Sanger several times before her death in 1966 and was impressed by her intellect and her commitment to many issues, not the least of which was enabling every woman to be “the absolute mistress of her own body,” as she put it.

I didn’t agree with everything the formidable Mrs. Sanger espoused. Yet I respected her dedication to making health-care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially to those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medical services.

And I admired her fearless, relentless readiness to stand up for what she believed, despite decades of angry, mean-spirited, often hypocritical attacks on her ideas and her character.

So I am aggravated by the continuing attacks on Sanger and her primary legacy, the Planned Parenthood network that still serves so many Americans today.

Now the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives — urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion — has voted to defund Planned Parenthood.

On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.

To read the full article, please click here: http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/print_724735.html

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-carolyn-maloney/acts-of-outrage-indiffere_b_827574.html

BLOG: Acts of Outrage, Indifference and Arrogance

Date: Friday, February 25, 2011
Source: Huffington Post
Author: Rep. Carolyn Maloney

The current Republican attack on women’s personal liberties, our access to reproductive health services and our right to lifesaving medical care is stunning in its scope, appalling in its indifference, and outrageous in its arrogance. Their proposals go way beyond anything in current law, significantly reducing access to family planning services and making abortion uninsurable. For years, anti-choice advocates succeeded in whittling away at reproductive freedoms, but the current three-pronged attack goes far beyond anything in existing law and is dangerous beyond measure.

First, there is HR 358, which would allow medical providers to decline to treat a woman whose life is at risk if doctors believe the treatment might harm her fetus. Furthermore, if a woman’s condition is so serious that she needs to be hospitalized, the GOP proposal would permit the hospital to decline to perform a life-saving abortion or to transfer her to another facility that will. Some critics are understandably calling this bill the “Let Women Die Act.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-carolyn-maloney/acts-of-outrage-indiffere_b_827574.html