Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

For full article, visit:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece

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In his otherwise perceptive book, “Imagining India,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has sadly got it completely wrong as far as the population problem is concerned.

In a key section of the book, titled “India By Its People,” he says, “As a poor and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s uniquely despondent vision – that greater population growth inevitably led to greater famine and despair.”

For full article, visit:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Editorial/SUBVERSE

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For a start, no sex without birth control, suggests Hans Tammermagi, author and adjunct professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria.

While people try to step more lightly on the Earth by using compact fluorescent bulbs, turning down the thermostat and using public transit, they should also be thinking about the dramatic impact of overpopulation, Tammermagi suggested.

For full article, visit:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=7368236

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In a strongly worded statement, the Vatican defended the pope’s view that condoms aren’t the answer to Africa’s AIDS epidemic and could make it worse. On his way to Africa last month, he said the best strategy is the church’s effort to promote sexual responsibility through abstinence and monogamy.

France, Germany, the United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency and the British medical journal The Lancet called the remarks irresponsible and dangerous. The Belgian parliament passed a resolution calling them “unacceptable” and demanded Belgium’s government officially protest.

For full article, visit:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=7368236

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Hearing on S. 424
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee
June 3, 2009

No New Categories of Immigration Should Be Considered
Until Overall Green Card Numbers Are Dramatically Reduced
(To Meet Goals of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and of
President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development)

Testimony by Roy Beck, Founder & CEO
NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation

I thank the Committee for the opportunity for NumbersUSA to testify about S. 424 and its proposal to create a new – numerically unlimited – category of immigration.

Principles for Considering Immigration Legislation
First, a word about how NumbersUSA analyzes immigration policy.
I am an author and former newspaper reporter who founded NumbersUSA as a non-profit, non-partisan organization in 1996 to carry out the immigration recommendations of two national commissions. We now have 900,000 on-line activist members who support that mission.

The two commissions were:
• President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. It recommended that annual green card numbers be cut low enough to allow the U.S. population to stabilize. Environmental sustainability in this country was seen as impossible if Congress continued to force massive U.S. population growth through immigration.[1]
• The bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (chaired by Barbara Jordan). It recommended deep cuts in immigration to remove the economic injustice that current immigration numbers impose on the most vulnerable members of our national community.[2]
NumbersUSA examines every immigration proposal on the basis of how it would advance or impede the numerical recommendations of the two Clinton-era commissions.

These commissions recognized that immigration policy has been assembled piecemeal without thought to how the total number of green cards affects the overall national community.

Thus, a bill like S. 424 will tend to be examined entirely outside its environmental impact in a time of grave environmental concerns – and outside its economic impact despite our 9% unemployment rate.
But nearly every new adult permanently added to the U.S. population through immigration legislation would be a potential competitor to unemployed and underemployed American workers. And every new immigrant increases the total U.S. carbon footprint and ecological footprint (and, because of increased consumption once they arrive here, increases the global footprints, as well).

Every piece of our complex immigration policy caters to a particular special interest. But the combined effect of all those pieces on our nation’s population growth has profound consequences for the entire national community in terms of the public infrastructure deficit, economic disparities and stewardship over our natural resources.

In many ways, it would make more sense for S. 424 to be reviewed by the Senate committees on Energy and Natural Resources, or on Environment and Public Works, or on Health, Education and Labor. The giant population increases caused by immigration policies have enormous implications for the ability of those committees to reach their goals.

I hope the Judiciary Committee will consider all those implications every time it looks at immigration legislation in this Congress.

Getting From One Million To 250,000
All of the long-term population growth in the United States since 1972 has been due to federal immigration policies. So when we talk about the challenges of population growth in this country, we are almost always talking about the challenges of federal immigration policy

In 1972, Americans chose to reduce the U.S. fertility rate to below the replacement level of 2.1.[3] It has been just below that level ever since. Yet, U.S. population growth doesn’t reflect that at all:
• The 1990s saw the largest U.S. population boom in our nation’s history – much higher than the famous baby boom of the 1950s.[4]
• The fevered U.S. population growth remains similar in this first decade of the 21st century.[5]
• Even the annual number of births is setting all-time records.[6]

There is only one reason why U.S. population trends are the opposite of those recommended by President Clinton’s sustainability commission. And that reason is that Congress has repeatedly overridden the American people’s choice of a stabilizing future and forced massive population growth through a quadrupling of annual green cards since 1965.

Every time U.S. citizens deal with extra costs, congestion, sprawl or other deterioration in quality of life due to explosive population growth, they can thank one Congress after another that has either raised immigration numbers or maintained the new higher levels.

Yet, I’m not aware of a single Congress that stated a goal of increasing U.S. population growth, let alone stated why individual Americans’ lives would be improved by such forced growth. For the most part, the explosive increases are the result of carelessness and unintended consequences while Congress does the bidding of one special interest group after another

The most recent official numerical results of Congress’ piecemeal approach to immigration policies are these:
• 1,107,126 green cards issued to immigrants (2008)[7]
• 725,000 illegal foreign workers and dependents (as an annual average 2000-2007)[8]
• 1,015,000 annual births to legal and illegal immigrants (2005)[9]

Let’s do a comparison on the number over which you have the most control: annual green cards.
Until the first Earth Day in 1970, legal immigration had run about 250,000 a year on average. The most recent average during the 1950s and 1960s was just above that number.[10]

But a succession of congressional actions raised the 250,000 green cards to a million-a-year level by 1990, and it has been there ever since.[11]

In order to meet the sustainability commission’s recommendations of moving toward a stabilized U.S. population, green card numbers would have to be cut back to that traditional level – between 250,000 and 300,000.

Even with that kind of cut, the Census Bureau projects that our population will still increase by around 50 million more people by 2050 (instead of the 130 million if we maintain current immigration levels).[12]

One example of the impact of 130 million more people is our efforts to increase electricity generation from wind. The Department of Energy has announced $93 million in Stimulus money for wind-power development. DOE has a very ambitious goal of wind producing 20% of electricity demand by 2030, after a lot more investment than this initial $93 million. Unfortunately, immigration-driven population growth will add more new electricity demand during that time than all the new wind power added.[13]
A Matter of Profound Environmental Importance for Posterity

Like nearly all of the sustainability issues this Congress will address, the setting of green card numbers is not primarily for those of us living in the next decade. Rather, it is for our children and grandchildren later this century – and for the generations of Americans who will inherit our country long after we are gone.

This was clear in the instructions to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, which was established to find ways “to bring people together to meet the needs of the present without jeopardizing the future.”

It determined that however immigration policy might be serving some narrow interests of the present, the resulting population growth was severely endangering the future.

Addressing this specific issue, the Population and Consumption Task Force of the sustainability council concluded:
“As a matter of public debate, immigration is a sensitive and explosive issue, and both legal and illegal immigration must be addressed with great sensitivity and care in order to advance the debate.
“We acknowledge these impediments to easy and informal dialogue, and we urge that participants take appropriate care so that a reasoned discussion of immigration and the American future can begin.
“We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.”[14]

New Categories Require Multiple Off-Sets
In a nutshell, our concern about S. 424 is that it represents another piecemeal congressional act that would increase the numbers of green cards each year with no regard for the resulting increase in population pressures and costs throughout our society.

That is exactly opposite the direction that Congress should be moving in immigration policy.
Immigration-driven U.S. population growth is making the really difficult tasks of meeting carbon goals, energy goals, infrastructure goals and economic goals close to impossible without fundamentally slashing the American standard of living.

If Congress were in the midst of moving annual immigration toward the 250,000 goal, there might be room for considering bills like S. 424 if each of the new green cards created in a bill was accompanied by a “multiple off-set” that not only would make up for the new green cards but would advance the overall reduction goal.

That is, a bill should provide for cutting three green cards from other categories for each new one issued under the bill.

Unfortunately, though, I have seen no sign that Congress is considering reductions in green cards this year – despite there being 14 million Americans looking for jobs and unable to find one. Rather, news stories are full of quotes from Members of Congress and others talking of giant increases in the number of green cards to be issued over the next few years – quite apart from S. 424.

NumbersUSA and the 900,000 Americans we represent urge you to view S. 424 the way that two national commissions have recommended all immigration legislation be viewed: as a piece of the larger fabric of our national community. By adding green cards without reducing others, S. 424 directly contradicts the recommendations of President Clinton’s sustainability commission and of the late Barbara Jordan’s immigration commission.

Given the larger context of current immigration levels, passing S. 424 would be irresponsible to the environment, to future generations and to the most economically vulnerable members of our national community.

###
________________________________________
[1] The President’s Council on Sustainable Development. http://clinton4.nara.gov/PCSD/Publications/index.html
[2] The United States Commission on Immigration Reform. http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/uscir/
[3] 1972 Data from National Center of Health Statistics. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the United States’ Total Fertility Rate is expected to be 2.05 by 2010.
[4] Perry, Marc and Paul Mackun. “Population Change and Distribution: 1990 to 2000.” United States Census Bureau. April, 2001. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-2.pdf. The United States’ population grew by 32.7 million people during the 1990s, far surpassing the population increase (28 million) of the “Baby Boom” era (1950-1960).
[5] United States Census Bureau. National Population Projections (Released 14 August 2008). http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/2008projections.html. According to the Census Bureau, the United States’ population will reach 310.2 million by the year 2010, an increase of 28.8 million.
[6] Hamilton, Brady, Joyce Martin, and Stephanie Ventura. “National Vital Statistics Report: Births: Preliminary Data for 2007.” National Center for Health Statistics. Vol. 57, No. 12. 18 March 2009. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_12.pdf. The number of births recorded in the United States rose to 4,317,119 (2007) – a 1% increase over 2006. The figure for 2007 represents the highest number of births ever registered in the United States.
[7] Department of Homeland Security. “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2008.” http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/LPR08.shtm.
[8] Camarota, Steven. “Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A profile of America’s Foreign-Born Population.” Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder. November, 2007.
[9] Data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the United States Census Bureau.
[10] Department of Homeland Security. “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2008.” http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/LPR08.shtm.
[11] Ibid.
[12] United States Census Bureau. National Population Projections (Released 14 August 2008). http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/2008projections.html.
[13] Department of Energy. “Secretary Chu Announces $93 Million from Recovery Act to Support Wind Energy Projects.” Press Release. 29 April 2009. http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7358.htm.
[14] President’s Council on Sustainable Development. Introduction to Task Force Report on Population and Consumption. http://clinton4.nara.gov/PCSD/Publications/TF_Reports/pop-intr.html.
Click here to view Roy’s testimony, which includes about half of the written testimony above.
ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA

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America added 106 million people from 1965 to 2006. Demographic experts showed 300 million people living in America in October 2006. They expect an added 100 million by 2035. The consequences grow irreversible and unsolvable.

As population rises, carrying capacity drops. What is “carrying capacity?” For a quick rendition, it means, “The amount resources on a given piece of land to allow long term sustainable human, plant and animal life.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.examiner.com/x-3515-Denver-Political-Issues-Examiner~y2009m6d1

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George is the Executive Director of Vermonters for a Sustainable Population (VSP). The column was published in several Vermont papers. I am sure that if studies were done in other states and countries the environmental data would show similar trends. The most extensive of the three Vermont studies, Disappearing Vermont?, was done by George, who as a layperson gathered the Vermont data in just a few months. That report may be found on the VSP web site at www.vspop.org.

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The Weekly Planet: It’s the numbers that count
By GEORGE PLUMB - Published: May 31, 2009

Dozens of indicators tell whether or not our environment is healthy. For many people the signs are very personal and local, such as being able to walk in the woods and enjoy the songbirds (which are actually declining in number). For others, the indicators are more scientific and global – climate change and rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the last few years three widely different studies have reported that at both the local and global levels – and everything in between – the Vermont environment is not being protected and, in fact, continues to gradually deteriorate. In “Understanding Vermont,” published by the Vermont Community Foundation, 10 of the 11 environmental indicators were pointing in the wrong direction. In “Disappearing Vermont,” published by Vermonters for a Sustainable Population, 23 of 31 indicators were moving in a negative direction. In “Vermont in Transition,” published by the Council on the Future of Vermont, 12 of 21 indicators were deteriorating.

Arguably the most significant indicator is the amount of land developed, because it also affects other indicators – the loss of farm and forest land, additional greenhouse gas emissions due to heating and the number of vehicle miles traveled, habitat destruction, and storm water runoff. Just between the years 1982 and 2003, the years for which data are available, more than 100,000 acres of land were developed in Vermont.

As noted environmental writer Gus Speth, the outgoing head of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, says in his most recent book “The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability,” “But all in all, today’s environmentalism has not been succeeding. We have been winning battles, including some critical ones, but losing the war.” Time magazine called Speth the “ultimate insider” because he has served on several environmental boards.

There are several reasons the environmental movement has been losing the war. The most important is that environmentalists have been focusing on the symptoms of our environmental problems instead of the causes. As just one example, to solve the problem of land development, environmentalists focus on establishing and strengthening laws and regulations restricting development, which is only a partial solution. However, the underlying cause of land development is our cultural insistence on an ever-growing economy, which includes increasing population growth and consumption of natural resources.

With the U.S. population growing by more than 3 million people per year, any improvements in treating the symptoms – such as tougher regulations, cap and trade, improved conservation and efficiency, and alternative energy development – are going to be cancelled out by the sheer increase in the numbers of people. President Obama’s 30 percent increase in fuel efficiency standards of automobiles will be wiped out when the U.S. population grows by 30 percent in the coming decades.

The environmental community is very fragmented. Most environmental organizations focus only on a few aspects of environmental protection. Some issues, such as landscape beauty, are not being addressed much at all. And these various groups don’t seem to be collaborating in any meaningful way to address the root causes of our environmental problems. If environmental organizations could work together and develop a common platform of positions, policies and programs to make real changes, we would have more hope of solving our environmental crisis.

Before citizens join or support an environmental organization they might want to ask, “Is this organization just dealing with the symptoms or is it also addressing the underlying causes? And what specific long-term policies does it have that will actually lead to a healthy environment?

As Gus Speth says, “But it is time for the environmental community – indeed, everyone – to step outside the system and develop a deeper critique of what is going on.”

George Plumb is the executive director of Vermonters for a Sustainable Population and chairman of the New England Coalition for a Sustainable Population. He can be contacted at gplumb@pshift.com

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According to John, they plan as well to develop extensive material for their website related to population, biodiversity, extinction, climate change, etc.
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For Immediate Release, February 26, 2009

Contact: Randy Serraglio, Center for Biological Diversity, (520) 784-1504 (cell)

Center for Biological Diversity Announces Support for
Global Population Speak Out

TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity today announced its support for the Global Population Speak Out, a collaborative effort by scientists, activists, and others worldwide to highlight the issue of overpopulation in efforts to restore the planet’s ecological health. February 2009 has been declared a month of action and communication on this crucial, but often ignored issue.

“For many years now the issue of human population size and growth has been the elephant in the room,” said Randy Serraglio, conservation advocate at the Center. “But overpopulation is really at the root of virtually all of the ecological threats facing our planet, and it needs to be addressed. Species extinction, pollution, resource depletion, and — the biggest threat of all — climate change can all be traced back to unsustainable population growth.”

The Center has won protection for more than 350 species and hundreds of millions of acres of habitat over the past 20 years. But that work could be overwhelmed by the ongoing effects of unsustainable population growth, as too many people compete for too few resources and create too many burdens for already stressed ecosystems. The correlation between human population growth and species extinction has been clearly documented.

Humans now use up to 40 percent of the world’s Net Primary Productivity, a measure of energy from the sun that is converted into life-sustaining resources by photosynthesis. “With one species commanding so much of the available sustenance, it is no wonder so many other species are disappearing,” said Serraglio.

“A whole range of extinctions can be tied directly to the energy, housing, food, and other resource demands of our burgeoning population,” said Serraglio. “The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam’s elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike, dusky seaside sparrow, and many others have succumbed to unsustainable human population growth.”

The extinction crisis threatens to grow exponentially with the onset of climate change, exacerbated by the skyrocketing energy demands of a rapidly growing global populace. “Many of us are working hard to reduce our carbon footprints,” said Serraglio. “But in the end, unless we get a handle on runaway population growth, it may simply become a case of too many feet.”

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In this article, Bob argues that: “… until the world’s population stops growing, there will be no end to the need to squeeze individuals’ consumption of fossil fuels and other natural resources. A close look at this problem is sobering: short of catastrophic leaps in the death rate or unwanted crashes in fertility, the world’s population is all but certain to grow by at least one billion to two billion people. The low-consuming billions of the developing world would love to consume as Americans do, with similar disregard for the environment—and they have as much of a right to do so. These facts suggest that the coming ecological impact will be of a scale that we will simply have to manage and adapt to as best we can. Population growth constantly pushes the consequences of any level of individual consumption to a higher plateau, and reductions in individual consumption can always be overwhelmed by increases in population. The simple reality is that acting on both, consistently and simultaneously, is the key to long-term environmental sustainability. The sustainability benefits of level or falling human numbers are too powerful to ignore for long.”

To post a comment go to http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=population-and-sustainability#comments or write to editors@sciam.com at Scientific American. It’s suggested that you keep letters short (below 150 words) and be sure to include your name, address and phone numbers.
—————————————-

Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?

In an era of changing climate and sinking economies, Malthusian limits to growth are back¬ and squeezing us painfully. Whereas more people once meant more ingenuity, more talent and more innovation, today it just seems to mean less for each. Less water for every cattle herder in the Horn of Africa. (The United Nations projects there will be more than four billion people living in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from half a billion in 1995.) Less land for every farmer already tilling slopes so steep they risk killing themselves by falling off their fields. (At a bit less than six tenths of an acre, global per capita cropland today is little more than half of what it was in 1961, and more than 900 million people are hungry.) Less capacity in the atmosphere to accept the heat-trapping gases that could fry the planet for centuries to come. Scarcer and higher-priced energy and food. And if the world’s economy does not bounce back to its glory days, less credit and fewer jobs.

For full article, visit:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=population-and-sustainability

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April 16, 2009
By Robert J. Walker

Malawi’s rejection of Madonna’s attempt to adopt a little three-year-old girl named Mercy makes for alliteration and good headlines, but it’s the underlying story that really deserves the attention. Mercy is just the unfortunate poster-child for a much larger tragedy.

In Malawi, as in many other sub-Saharan countries, the AIDS epidemic has orphaned vast numbers of children, including many children born with HIV. And while there have been major advances in the treatment of AIDS in Africa, too little is still being done to halt its spread. Unless more is done to promote the use of condoms by sexually active couples and more HIV-positive women are given the knowledge and means to control their fertility, the number of orphans in Africa will continue to rise.

In sub-Saharan Africa about 60 percent of adults living with HIV or AIDS are women. Many of them, quite understandably, do not want to have additional children, but lack knowledge of, or access to, modern methods of birth control. Given a choice, few people bring a child into this world knowing that the child will likely be orphaned at an early age.

While birth control is more prevalent in Malawi than in many neighboring countries, an estimated 27 percent of Malawian women of childbearing age want to space or limit their number of children, but lack the knowledge and means. Giving those women information and access to contraceptives can help to reduce the growing numbers of orphans and improve the chances that those who are already living in orphanages eventually find homes.

During the eight years of the Bush administration, U.S. support for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa has soared, but prevention efforts have lagged. In seeking to prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa, the Administration’s “ABC” approach stressed the A and the B (“abstinence” and “being faithful”) while downplaying the C (use of condoms).

As a result, the administration was slow to integrate family planning services into HIV/AIDS service and prevention efforts have largely faltered, particularly in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus.

Few things are as tragic as an orphaned HIV-positive child, but our failure to support family planning in Africa is part of an even larger tragedy. Over the past half-century, fertility rates have dropped sharply in many developing countries, but fertility rates remain quite high in the poorer areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, sub-Saharan Africa has a fertility rate — 5.4 births per woman — that is the highest of any region in the world. Unless fertility rates drop more rapidly, some countries, like Niger, will triple their population by mid-century.

When African women are not able to decide when and how many children to have, everyone suffers. Unregulated fertility contributes to high maternal and infant death rates. It also means that children, particularly girls, are less likely to go to school. As a result, many African families — and the communities they live in — are not able to break the cycle of poverty.

The world will soon forget about Mercy and maybe even Madonna, but let us not forget Malawi and some of the other African nations that are struggling against great odds to improve the health and well-being of their people. They need our help. That is why supporters of international family planning assistance are hoping that the new administration will more than double the existing level of support in next year’s budget.

Mr. President, have a little mercy on the all the Mercys of sub-Saharan Africa.

Mr. Walker is executive vice president of The Population Institute, a nonprofit organization working to achieve a world population that can live in harmony with the planet. Mr. Walker can be contacted at rwalker@populationinstitute.org.

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