The great divide

[Grant]

I'm developing this topic from a recent link provided by Ed Leaver on a solar thread. Here is the link.

www.thenation.com/article/174437/secret-donors-behind-center-american-progress-and-other-think-tanks#

What intrigued me was a comment that followed an article about bought and payed for think tanks, in this case in particular, one with an environmental orientation. The comment involved a divide two groups have with most environmentalists, groups I have run across from time to time in my reading, conversations and forum wanderings. The issue is illegal immigration and environmentalist silence about it. From my perspective the groups are:

1. Labor groups concerned with political and economic equity, generally considered a positive among environmentalists.

2. Groups particularly concerned with overpopulation, generally understood to be a growing burden on our planet.

Whatever your particular energy, and/or environmental focus is, it has to relate to a wider world and not simply get stuck in its own special cul-de-sac. This commentator is addressing a real concern no matter how much he is stacking the deck. Here's the quote.

tjmurphy55117

My litmus test for honesty and integrity is the immigration "reform" bill. I don't think I have heard one disparaging word against the need for reform, not one, and for me that is a red flag. Just like the build up to the Iraq war, all the MSM went full bore repeating the lies and the justifications from the White House and "think tanks, all seemingly reading from the same program, all in a rush, like there was a limited amount of time to get this started. Now we have immigration reform. We have 8 highly corrupted Senators leading the fight, and yet no one questioned their intensions or motivation. So many of my progressive friends have fallen right in line, dancing to the music like they have not a brain in their heads. All this increased immigration and not one solid protection for American workers, all this legalization and yet not one concern for the low wage American workers who will have to now compete with 11 million (more like 25 million) legalized low skill workers. And who will fill all the jobs that the illegal workers used to fill, new illegal immigrants. This is a numbers game, and the powers that be don't care about the US standard of living they know America is getting older, but we live in the Wall Street world, we don't know balance, only grow, grow, grow. They need more bodies to fight their wars, to fill their hospital beds, their Wal-Marts, their homes...could you imagine an America where we actually had a population decrease, not in Wall Street world, too much money to be made, who cares what principals you need to compromise to get it, profit is the ONLY factor.

[Ed Leaver]

Heh. No good deed goes unpunished. Not sure how deep we should get into US domestic immigration policy on an international forum. After a certain point global warming will force immigration issues upon a lot of host countries. But that environmental groups have not taken an official position on US immigration reform does not prevent individual environmentalists from doing so. And it does avoid an unnecessary distraction that might alienate otherwise would-be supporters. Not that immigration reform is not an important issue, but I personally think it best left to groups for which it forms a more natural and direct focus -- e.g. labor and human rights. Global Warming is the singular critical issue of our time, and I'd hate to see people who might otherwise agree upon common solutions, divided by a secondary issue that is at best tangential. Sorry to put it that way. Its bad enough that environmental groups have to deal with the No-Nukes! Deep Green contingent, which all by itself might ultimately prove fatal. 

But thanks for the thoughts.

[Grant]

Nov 25, 2013 16:20:11 GMT 9.5 Ed Leaver said:

 Not that immigration reform is not an important issue, but I personally think it best left to groups for which it forms a more natural and direct focus -- e.g. labor and human rights. Global Warming is the singular critical issue of our time

Ed, you have two folks who come up to you and one says I'm worried about illegal immigrants taking our jobs and another says I'm worried about overpopulation and its impact on our planet. What are you going to say, "My issue is nuclear power and it has no natural and direct focus on your concerns."? Do you just want to talk to nuclear techno folks? That's going to leave you in a pretty small world. It seems to me you would want the opportunity to take the issue of nuclear power and show how it has a broader relevance.

For instance one response might be "I don't want to see more people fighting over low paying service jobs. I want to see our resources going to providing a future for ourselves and generations to come. Nuclear power provides that avenue. It kills two birds - it provides jobs and a sustainable environment."

Then to move over explicitly to the overpopulation crowd another response might be "It doesn't make any difference what the population is if we are all going to die in a carbon gas fog. So we need nuclear as the principal viable substitute. On the hand you are right, we will never catch up and surpass fossil fuel if we are continually facing a growing population."

It seems to me the nuclear power position naturally inserts itself into a lot of concerns. I don't see the point of keeping the conversation so limited.

[Ed Leaver]

Ah. I mistakenly thought you referred to formally organized environmental groups like Sierra Club, Green Peace, Environmental Defense Fund, which I don't think should necessarily take an official stance on immigration reform. Doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't comment, of course.  As for informal discussions, well yes, I agree with you completely and tried to convey as much. Either way, there have been exactly two proven methods effective at curbing population growth: China's regimented authoritarian policy, and increased standards of living and education. They aren't mutually exclusive of course, but China's implementation appears somewhat unique to that society. Elsewhere, when people know how to limit family size and have sufficient retirement and energy security to afford small families, that's what we tend to choose. 

[Roger Clifton]

On reducing fertility...

Years ago, backpacking in India, I would often be met with a familiar series of questions: How do you do? How many children do you have? Why not? Then who will take care of you when you are old? I would glance around the solemn faces and a chill would creep across me. It was serious for these guys.

Concern for one's own future seems to have been a motive worldwide for having more children. A major, perhaps unintended, consequence of the introduction of old-age pensions in Europe was a collapse in the fertility rate. In a US study:, "an increase in the size of the social security system of 10% in GDP is associated with a reduction in the total fertility rate between 0.7 and 1.6 children" per couple.

[Grant]

At the same time one hears of poor women all over the world crying for birth control access. So many children are unintended. Here is a voice from the USA explaining the circumstances of a lot of "bad" choices.

www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html

[Nuclear]

Migration is just another adaptation strategy. A "world without borders" would be most suited to minimising the negative economic impacts of climate change. A year ago, the Economist ran an article on the issue:

www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21567887-costs-climate-change-can-be-mitigated-if-economic-activity-moves

Messrs Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg build a model economy, and then batter it with different temperature increases to see how it reacts. In their benchmark analysis, they allow people to move around as they like in response to these changes. In extreme scenarios freedom of movement doesn’t make much difference: temperatures reduce global agricultural productivity to near zero, “implying the end of human life on Earth”. But in more moderate scenarios, rising global temperatures improve agricultural productivity in northerly climes. Welfare losses are small because there are big movements of people northward. A relatively small temperature increase (by the model’s standards), of 2°C at the Equator rising to 6°C at the North Pole, causes a shift in the average locations of agricultural and manufacturing activity of about ten degrees of latitude by the end of this century—roughly the distance between Dallas and Chicago, or Frankfurt and Oslo.

Restrictions on movement dramatically increase welfare costs, however. The authors modify the model by introducing a rigid border at the 45th parallel, which runs through the northern United States and across southern Europe, with roughly 1 billion people living above the line and 6 billion below. The model finds that rising temperatures actually benefit the northern section of the globe. Agricultural productivity grows and northern manufacturers enjoy more trade with the throngs that mass just south of the border. Welfare in the south falls, by contrast, by about 5% on average relative to the no-warming case. The model is simplistic, of course, but it suggests that limits on migration have a big effect on the costs of global warming.