The content on this webpage contains paid/affiliate links. When you click on any of our affiliate link, we/I may get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure for more info -----------------------
Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 12:31 am
Poor people are urged to stay put lest their scurrying to and fro offends Gaia:
The growing number of people who migrated from developing countries to over-populated Western states in search of a better life was damaging the planet and could be avoided, a think-tank said today.
Governments and aid agencies should encourage families to stay put by tackling environmental degradation, such as the spread of deserts, that forces many to leave …
I’d be surprised if “deserts got too big” was a common motivation to leave these places.
In addition, migrants typically increased their ecological footprint – the damage each person inflicts on the environment – by moving from low to high-consuming countries.
The ecological footprint of someone from Bangladesh increases sixteen-fold if he or she emigrated to the US, while that of a Somali citizen rises more than thirteen-times when he or she migrated to Britain.
So it would be massively beneficial, earth-wise, for Americans and British to find new homes in Bangladesh and Somalia. The report’s British authors should set an example by moving to, say, Jambaluul.
UPDATE. Cuckoo comments: “On matters environmental, I note that Tim Flannery (palaeontologist) is described by the Age today as an ‘environmental scientist’. He must’ve been taking night classes.”
On a global scale, he {OPT patron Professor Aubrey Manning} said: “People are in surplus and often those most needed at home are those who leave. A gradual reduction to our population is the only way to secure any quality of life for future human beings.”
Emphasis is mine.
So, alternatively, human beings could just drop dead. That would also address the concerns of the good Professor Manning, him being concerned about “surplus” people and all, I mean.
Pfui! Maybe I’ll listen to these creeps if they hold a lottery during their meetings to see who gets to committ suicide to help out Mother Gaia™.
And if not suicide (which is an extreme measure, I agree), how about moving your arse over to a developing country? YOu know—a swap. Some emigrant can better his life, and these OPT cretins can pick up a shovel to start fixing this tire old Earth. What a deal, eh?
But how many of you OPT characters would ever make such an offer?
[crickets chirping]
‘Bout what I thought.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 05 30 at 01:20 AM • permalink
The ecological footprint of someone from Bangladesh increases sixteen-fold if he or she emigrated to the US, while that of a Somali citizen rises more than thirteen-times when he or she migrated to Britain.
So let’s just leave them there, living in a small ecological footprint, with starvation and disease and sub-standard everything. Yeah, that’s a good idea.
I’d move to these places, but I’d have to take my plumbing and my dishwasher, and my car and my kitchen appliances, and my washing machine and my microwave, and, and, and…
Jeez, Habib, you say it so well!
- #7 Yes it does. His strong but fair stance on illegal immigration had everything to do with reducing Australia’s total ecological footprint and nothing else. The Greens will eventually understand this and should award him a Greenpeace decoration. The kelpie cross with gum leaf cluster at least.Posted by Whale Spinor on 2006 05 30 at 01:54 AM • permalink
- It’s not so much the size of the footprint as the smell- after all, the noxious gases released by manky, soap-free tootsies are a known ozone-depleter and greenhouse generator.
I therefore call for an immediate hippy cull, in the interest of all life on the planet- that should satisfy these Malthusian moonbats, who’ve been predicting that humanity will drown in its own poo for about four centuries so far.
It’s never occured to these dips that the main cause of overpopulation in the third world is lack of development, both industrial and social; in countries where economic and democratic freedoms have flourished, populations hace declined correspondingly, except for the utterly useless and non-productive who procreate on the IV drip of the welfare state.
What say we ship all our excessively consuming bogans to Somalia and the Sudan, and return with some sub-Saharans who’d appreciate the benefits of a first world existence- then we can send a whole shitload of deeply concerned planet cuddlers to re-educate said yobbos and live together in rousseauian splendour in mud huts, flourishing in the bounty of mother Gaiea.
(I’m going to run a calcutta on when they revert to cannibalism; I’d give it a week, when the fatties who’ve been stuffing their gobs with double whoppers in front of Oprah realise the eskies are full of dessicated yams and a diseased meerkat).
- Alright, dammit, just when I thought my “useless people and groups” list was complete I find I have to add Think Tanks to it. Will my list ever be complete?, it already fills an entire toilet roll!.Posted by Daniel San on 2006 05 30 at 02:04 AM • permalink
- Which side of the fence will the Franklin River Fiddler take on this issue?
I’m guessing he will have some doublethinking explanation which has a Bob each way.
Oh wait a second, he is a bob each way.
Fuck
Posted by The (WHMECDM) President on 2006 05 30 at 02:14 AM • permalink
- Where do the funds come from to pay for all these idiots to jack off this crap??? i mean how do these people get cushy jobs, pushing their own looney tunes private political and social horse dung???
does someone not ask periodically what they have received from this mob, for the endowment or funds they have given??? and are they really satisfied with this load of guff??? tell the poor sods to stay where they are and fix the deserts??? i mean what a stroke of genius????
In addition, migrants typically increased their ecological footprint – the damage each person inflicts on the environment – by moving from low to high-consuming countries.
Duh! That’s why they’re leaving, so they don’t have to live in a yurt, drinking from the same stream as the oxen.
Posted by Aaron – Freewill on 2006 05 30 at 02:45 AM • permalink
- It sez: ‘Parts of the planet that have been damaged by climate change, soil erosion and water shortages merely deteriorated further once their inhabitants fled.’
Wait a minute. I thought that the place you moved to deteriorated, and that staying put was better. So how can leaving make things worse?
And I want to know which parts have not been damaged by climate change, too. I’ll have what they’re having.
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2006 05 30 at 02:57 AM • permalink
- Such migration coupled with population growth was undermining efforts to meet the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, the think-tank said.
For God’s sake, stand still! We’re trying to meet our Millennium Development Goals and you keep moving! And stop having children! How can we even think!?
Stupidity such as this also wanted to ban GM crops which would have fed more people and reduced pesticide use which is currently ravaging Africa.
- Maybe third world immigration should be on a 1 for 1 basis: we’ll take one of your low eco footprint people, if you’ll take one of our high eco footprint eco scientists and activists.Posted by AlburyShifton on 2006 05 30 at 03:25 AM • permalink
- Ahhhhh. The satisfaction of being vicious in the name of the good. And if you don’t have enough victims to justify your viciousness, make some. All you have to do is get a hold on the law, just a little toe in the door. Just get them to agree to one premise, and you’ve got ‘em by the short hairs. Move the goal posts expertly enough and some of your victims will leap into their graves on their own. All you have to do is make sure they believe that it is their own fault that they are victims; if only they hadn’t had big feet.
What a racket.
Habib, you have all my admiration. You are spot on, as usual.
The ecological footprint of someone from Bangladesh increases sixteen-fold if he or she emigrated to the US, while that of a Somali citizen rises more than thirteen-times when he or she migrated to Britain.
The real reason his “ecological footprint” in those 3rd-World shitholes is so much smaller is because his life expectancy is so much less.
Something tells me the authors of this taxpayer-funded tripe are fully aware of that fact.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 05 30 at 04:24 AM • permalink
- Did anyone else read that as:
Such migration coupled with population growth was undermining efforts to meet the United Nations’ Minimum Development Goals, the think-tank said.
Posted by drscroogemcduck on 2006 05 30 at 04:49 AM • permalink
- Speaking of moonbat organisations, it seems the Australia Institute is now the Australia Institute for a just, sustainable, peaceful future (or is that AIJSPF?)
Well that certainly makes me feel all cuddly and warm towards anything they have to say.
- And here I thought the problem with all this migration (hold on, people! Stop moving about freely!) was that so many would move north to the US/Canada and Britain that the earth’s tilt would get much worse and the poles would shift. You Aussies need to gather more Somalis and Bangladeshis down there to offset all the tiltiness!
- This guy sounds like a college professor I had who complained about businesses opening factories in Third World countries and the subsequent need for roads to be built there to accomodate the buses needed to transport the workers. She thought, see, that the workers shouldn’t have buses, because then they “wouldn’t get any exercise.” The idea that even a smidgen of the comforts we take for granted here in the US should be offered to people in Third World countries was quite beyond her comprehension.Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 05 30 at 07:13 AM • permalink
- Such migration coupled with population growth was undermining efforts to meet the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, the think-tank said.
What would Somalia be named if all the Somalis left? Best leave them in place to be killed, is this what they are saying?
What the hell kind of ‘think-tank’ is this? They still believe the UN is useful, get Al Gore on the phone, now!
Environmental degradation was seen to be forcing a further 135 million people out of their homes in the future.
What does that mean? In the future year, decade, vague period of designated worry-time? What it says, in its current clumsiness, is that after that next 135 million make their move, that’ll be the end of migration, for ever and ever. (Or so it “was seen.”) And this is called “Breaking News 24/7.”
- Air conditioning for me, but none for thee.Posted by perfectsense on 2006 05 30 at 07:22 AM • permalink
- #26 Andrea,
This guy sounds like a college professor I had who complained about businesses opening factories in Third World countries and the subsequent need for roads to be built there to accomodate the buses needed to transport the workers. She thought, see, that the workers shouldn’t have buses, because then they “wouldn’t get any exercise.”
Doesn’t that just say it all? Did it ever occur to this person that nobody had ceded the right to own life to her? Where the hell do these people get off thinking that they have the right to determine what everyone else is to do, or not do, according to their dictates? Talk about petty tyrants!
We ought to remember that those yahoos at that “Think Tank” were all “taught” by professors just like the one you talk about, Andrea. It shows.
- O/T Why is Expatriate Australian Kirsty Sword Gusmao referred to in hushed and ingratiating tones by the ABC as East Timor’s “first lady”?
The wife of the Prime Minister of Australia is slighted by the Oz msm as is the wife of George W from the world’s most powerful nation.Expatriate Princess Mary is sneered at by the Austrayan press.
But Ms SwordGusmao is attached to a STRUGGLING 3RD WORLD TYPE country which is NOT anglo saxon,not supporting itself and failing -all criteria which makes her a martyr and her country a deserving icon magnet to the media.
At least the Indonesian people did not bring this latest crisis on themselves like the East Timorese.Maybe our troops (if invited) could have been assisting them.
- Building up local economies and improving local environments so that people wouldn’t have to emigrate is actually a good idea. But who’s going to do that? Oh my God, Big Business with its Eeeevil Globalism, that’s who! And removing tinpot dictators, well, that usually has to be done by Imperialist Military Jackboots from Eeeeevil “Democratic” Countries. Oh, woe!
What will these sobsisters cry about when globalism has done its worst, and everybody in the world has a refrigerator and a car (they already have TV sets and cell phones), and nobody is really “suffering”.
- Re #24, ChrisPer:
The update potentially makes him [Tim Flannery] MORE credible on climate change issues.
Any increase in Flannery’s credibility would have to be enormous simply to reach zero.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 05 30 at 09:03 AM • permalink
- o/t Check out Crikey’s expose on how the ABC is “taking its cleaners to the cleaners.”
They question the willingness of Aunty’s NEWS and CURRENT AFFAIRS eg Red Kezza and the Snowcone to tackle the removal of benefits (super and overtime) for the lowly folk who(shudder)clean up the ABC’S mess.
Many staff are from Central America.Many are apparently huge fans of Aunty.
Well O’Brien,Jones and co
WE’RE WAITING…
- Of course what Sam Kinison overlooked was that those starving people had been forcibly trucked into that desert by their government.Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 05 30 at 09:46 AM • permalink
- In short, the government wanted to minimize their ecological footprint by killing them. By that standard, the Khmer Rouge should have been the Khmer Vert.
So Tim Flannery is a palaeontologist?
Can you think of a better profession for an absolute bonehead?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 05 30 at 09:50 AM • permalink
- well why don’t we just pre-empt all this environmentally irresponsible migration by removing the root cause. there’s this cool stuff called zyklon b that’ll do the job nicely & surely there’s a barbed wire surplus somewhere that could be put to good use. but wait, we’ll need skilled labour to build the shower blocks. oh well, all grand plans have a flaw
- Societies that feature honest governments that are respectful of human rights (including property rights) and that support the rule of law and personal liberty (including economic freedom), will generate more reasonable solutions to environmental (as well as other) problems than all the paleontologists of the world lined up end to end. The latter should stick to settling really important issues, such as whether dinosaurs were actually warm-blooded, and the likelihood of a Tyrannosaur being able to beat King Kong in a rematch.
- Those gimp-ass rubber-toothed Tyrannos in that “fight” were either paid off or drugged down. How many times can you bite a gorilla’s arm off and not have it … you know … come OFF!?? Boooo!! Cheaties!!Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 05 30 at 01:30 PM • permalink
- #45, Paco,
Societies that feature honest governments that are respectful of human rights (including property rights) and that support the rule of law and personal liberty (including economic freedom), will generate more reasonable solutions to environmental (as well as other) problems than all the paleontologists of the world lined up end to end.
Paco, this is true if your purpose is to further human life on earth. That they don’t take this proven route, indeed, that they would destroy every vestiage of this proven route, tells you that their purpose is power over man, not nature.
(I know you know this. Maybe someone else needs the obvious explained, however. We get a few like that, no?)
- Manning and his smug ilk may flatter themselves with their own enlightenment but they are really little different from the Nazi eugenicists of the Second World War and the crank ethnologists who preceded them.
Citing Bangladesh reminds me of P.J. O’Rourke’s devastatingly accurate take on people like OPT: just enough of me, far too much of you.
Whatever we might think of immigration or overpopulation or poverty or the environment, none of it can ever justify diminishing the tantamount value of individual human life – yours, mine and that Bangladeshi’s.
A pox on these people and their pronouncements.
(And God help us all if any of them is ever in a position of power or authority.)
Posted by JJM Ballantyne on 2006 05 30 at 03:32 PM • permalink
- Surprising that the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) of Britain didn’t mention one of the greatest migratorial shifts going on in the world today… namely the waves of illegal aliens pouring across the United States’ southern border. That might involve a breakneck lefty flipflop. At any rate, those people are emigrating because of the economic policies of their nations, not because of any environmental degradation.
Or does the OPT just have it in for Africans and Bangladeshis?
- Many people have said similar to this above, but could it be that the small footprint is because they are starving and dying?
Raises to mind the concept of Malthusian Economics – in brief, that wars, disease and famine are good because it keeps a natural check on the total population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe).
- So it would be massively beneficial, earth-wise, for Americans and British to find new homes in Bangladesh and Somalia.
No, that’d be “cultural imperialism”.
Posted by HisHineness on 2006 05 30 at 07:16 PM • permalink
- #53- the only thing being that within a few years ther’d be reliable power, usable roads, stable government and chains of fast food emporiums polluting these pristine rousseauian paradises, with their low life expecatacies and even lower consumer expectations.
Get with the program- mud huts for all! After all, there was no global warming, coral bleaching and mass extinctions before the evil of bronze was inflicted on the planet.
- Maybe Flannery is a paleoecologist. There is such a field of study. And I would just like to say that I have met several very unboneheaded paleontilogists, although Flannery may not be one of them.
(pedantic mode) Paco #45, the question of dinosaur endothermy (warm-blooded is too vague a term to be useful) has been solved, and the answer is no. John Ruben of Oregon State University has studied the matter. All endothermic animals have bones (mammals) or cartilage (birds) called nasal turbinates that support thin membranes which limit water loss to the animals. Without them an endothermic animal would lose around 7 percent of its body weight per day due to water loss as it breathed moist, warm air out of its lungs. Pug dogs, which have lost these bones due to selection for a short snout must drink almost constantly in order to maintain their body moisture. Animals with such turbinates have enlarged nasal passages in order to maintain the volume of air passed to the lungs. Animals that are ectothermic, like crocodiles, do not have nasal turbinates and this enlarged nasal passage.
Ruben has studied very well preserved dinosaur skulls using CAT-scans to measure the sizes and cross-sections of the nasal passages. Dinosaur skulls, for the studied Theropods, have small nasal passage volumes and cross-sections, like crocs, and not large volumes like mammals or birds do. His conclusion is that theropods (carnivorous dinos like Tyrannosaurids) were ectothermic like crocs. Presumably the other dinos were too, since they were evolutionarily related to the theropods. He has also traced the evolution of such nasal turbinates and volume increases in mammal-like reptiles (Therapsids) which developed such structures over a period of about 40 million years to give rise to the mammals in the Triassic period at about the same time that dinosaurs appeared. So dinosaurs were not (most likely) endothermic.(/pedantic mode)
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 05 30 at 11:36 PM • permalink
- Michael Lonie — Ectothermic would also explain the seemingly rapid mass die-offs, since a rapid global cooling, for whatever of the stipulated reasons, would lead to rapid hypothermia, especially since given the enormous ratio of body volume to tissue area, they would need a lot of external heat to maintain a viable metabolism (thus, for example, the massive ‘radiator fin’ on the early dimetrodons.
</pedant bakacha>
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 05 31 at 12:01 AM • permalink
- #55: Thank you, Michael. I was not informed as to the latest word on the subject. That was quite fascinating (seriously). With a sigh, sends tweed jacket with the intellectual-looking elbow patches off to Goodwill. Too many genuinely brainy coves in the world to have any kind of decent shot at faking it.
- Paco,
You’re welcome. Maybe John will write a book about it someday. I tried to convince him to do so but he said writing it would interfere with his work.Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 06 03 at 12:45 AM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Next thing you know they’ll be getting sociology degrees and taking a persons job!