The Oil Drum | Green Jobs

100 comments on Green Jobs

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

| Show without comments | PDF version

joemichaels on March 22, 2008 - 11:07am

I really respect the drive and vision people have about changing the nature of business systems to protect the environment and create a sustainable future but until people attack the root of the problem we are simply digging a deeper grave. Human population growth.

Thomas Malthus said almost two hundred years ago:
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

Consider the case of the International Planned Parenthood movement in Mexico. They made a valiant effort to establish clinics in the 60's and 70's and the conservative politicians in league with the Catholic Church pulled it out by the root and basically told the population to be "fruitful and multiply", which they most certainly did. Now we wonder about a nation that encourages illegal immigration to relieve some of the misery that their population overshoot has brought on themselves.

How do we get population growth under control without becoming a fascist state? If we don't address this then the three sisters, Famine, Pestilence and War will.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

tstreet on March 22, 2008 - 1:45pm

Our local group in Estes Park, Sustainable Mountain Living, is providing a series of lectures to the town on peak oil,population, global warming, and localization. Last week, we had John Feeney, who has written on TOD, speak on population. The talk was well attended, but unfortunately mostly by people who are well past child bearing age. In any event, he clearly reminded me that if population is not reduced significantly, all our other attempts to become more efficient and cut back on energy and resource use will be for naught.

Dieoff will occur if we don't find a way to cut way back on births. The only uncertainty is exactly when this will occur. Thanks for bringing this issue up.

I in no way am trying to detract from or ridicule those who are trying to find alternatives to fossil fuels. But we still need to keep the population issue at the forefront whenever possible.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

jokuhl on March 22, 2008 - 4:43pm

tstreet;
We had a sustainable development discussion in Portland Maine yesterday, with the Mayor and the most recent State Energy 'czar' (!!??) in attendance. Keynote by [Charlie Stephens
Adjuvant Consulting, Oak Grove, Oregon ] , who spoke very directly about PO, Rail Efficiencies, etc..

His comment when he was posed the population question was first, that the best effects we've had on fertility rates are happening where educational and international efforts are raising the status and education of women in their societies, citing Mexico's fertility going from around 6 down to 2.6 after such changes (another poster at Drumbeat? today said the Church had cancelled out such gains.. not sure which is right.)

His second was the incongruity of the US consumption of 25% of the gross energy, with 4%(?) of the global pop, and so that for him this discrepancy was actually his priority.

I don't dismiss the importance of Population overall, but I wonder if the US Birthrate would make this our key issue in terms of Stateside changes needed.

Bob Fiske

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

joemichaels on March 22, 2008 - 8:05pm

I was the poster that cited the Catholic Church shutting down Planned Parenthood Centers in Mexico during the 60's and 70's. That was when their fertility rate was almost 10% annually. Even if we could herald the "good news" of 2.5% that still means a net gain annually of more than 3,000,000 people. Even at a 2.5% annual fertility rate it takes only 28 years for that population to double.

We better make that fence high...

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FuturePundit on March 23, 2008 - 3:52pm

We need to drastically cut back immigration and only let in high skilled engineers and scientists.

Also, we need to fund more research into birth control methods.

Also, we need to shift our foreign aid more toward birth control. Poor women in the Third World should be able to get free contraceptives and should be taught family planning.

Also, girls should be encouraged to stay in school since the greater the number of years of education the fewer babies women have. The poor teen girls should have their high school education funded and get free lunches in Africa and other super poor places.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

jokuhl on March 23, 2008 - 5:25pm

'only let in high skilled engineers and scientists...'

Cause they will take jobs that most Americans won't (train for).

BTW, will that wall help to keep OUR engineers from leaving?

Bob

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FuturePundit on March 23, 2008 - 6:51pm

Where would our engineers go? Where in the post-peak world will be better off? France maybe?

I can tell you I'm not going to China for the same reason I do not smoke cigarettes.

Jobs we won't train for: I can say as someone who has a lot of software developers reporting to me that the limit isn't how many people will get training but how smart the average person is. I have a very hard time using someone with less than 120 IQ because they can't follow the complex chains of thought and can't picture all the interacting pieces. Mind you, there are simpler forms of software development like web page scripting. But for the stuff I do I need smarties.

Some of the best software developers I know do not have C.S. degrees. One of the absolutely best ones I know never went to college. Training? Thinking is the hard part.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 23, 2008 - 5:34am

" But we still need to keep the population issue at the forefront whenever possible."

I think just making it a part of the discussion would be a big improvement. What will probably end population growth is a lack of resources (not just oil, but coal and natural gas and probably water and minerals). In the 1980's in the San Francisco Bay Area they had two years of drought. In the second year they put a moratorium on issuing building permits. That is, for a brief period of time the beaurocrats saw a relationship between population and a resource. They realized that adding more people to the area would cause an even greater decrease in the amount of water each person could use (at the time there was some limitation on yard watering and on using a hose to clean the driveway). Once oil production begins declining, people will start to realize that each and every immigrant, each and every new born, means that the remaining oil must be divided into even smaller junks. And that the remaining coal and natural gas will be even less able to meet the electricty and heating needs of the entire population.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 23, 2008 - 5:25am

"How do we get population growth under control without becoming a fascist state? "

Our population control would be in pretty good shape had not Teddy Kennedy and his team gotten Congress to turn on the immigration spigot once again in 1965. Now it appears that the immigration valve can only turn in one direction.

Would it be a fascist state to end immigration? Would it be a fascist state to, instead of giving a tax deduction for children, give a tax increase? Would it be a fascist state to, insteading of giving a tax deduction for all children, only give one for the first two children a woman has?

Imagine if someone came up with various ways to reduce oil/natural gas, and coal consumption in the United States by 33% without any changes at all in the current lifestyle, including the type of car driven, size of house lived in, light bulbs, used, etc. Seems like a pipe dream, and yet if we went back in time and just kept population constant from the time oil production peaked in the United States, we would be using 33% less fossil fuels in this country today, without any sacrifice in lifestyle.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

urbangardener on March 23, 2008 - 10:44am

The fascist method of reducing population is to 1) vilify and marginalize a certain segment of the population especially one identified by non-majority race, foreign immigrant status and poverty and 2) create separate laws for them, reducing their rights to property, equal paying jobs, and freedom of movement 3) create a virtual slave labor class out of them and 4) ethnic cleansing, forced relocation, and so-called 'final solution' state violence.

Some of those methods are already in progress here: Is it Fascism yet?

Simultaneously, a fascist state would do everything it could to domestically increase the majority race, including reducing the rights of majority race women to limit their offspring by limiting birth control and abortion access; publicly celebrate majority race women who have had double digit numbers of offspring; and offer tax breaks for having children.

Those methods are already in progress: Is it fascism yet?

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

tstreet on March 23, 2008 - 11:11am

I think we live in a fascist state quite apart from whether or not certain views on illegal immigration are signs of fascism.

Regardless, all attempts to reduce population, whether internally or through immigration restrictions should be applied across the board regardless of the race or ethnicity of the person having the child or the person immigrating.

In any event, we have a world problem and cannot solve the population problem by just focusing on the United States. Some European countries, fearing a loss in population, have pro natal policies with mixed motivations. There is an element of racism there since part of the push to have more "native" children is a response to immigration of non-native or non white persons. Having children to try to boost one's own race or ethnicity is a self defeating, stupid, and dangerous policy. We all sink and suffer from overpopulation.

One big concern is that population reduction will decrease the ratio between young income earners and old retirees. That is a concern but is dwarfed by the results of a world population grown beyond its carrying capacity and entering an era of overshoot and mass death. That is a "solution" too, but clearly not solution preferred by most of us.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 23, 2008 - 7:54pm

If it's racist to encourage native births in order to counteract the immigrants of a different race YOU ARE ALLOWING TO COME IN, then surely you would admit that the most racist countries on the planet, are those like China and India, which don't even allow other races in at all.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

maram on March 24, 2008 - 11:13pm

Hello FiniteQuantity,

I am not sure why you include India in that. You see, there is absolutely no race called Indian. If you have travelled to India, you will know this. Every racial feature on this planet can be found in the populace of the sub-continent. There are millions who cannot be distinguished from Africans, there are millions who can easily melt into the crowds of south-western China, there are millions who will not look out of place in Spain or Italy. And the vast majority falls somewhere in between all these. Even within the same family, siblings may look like they are from different "races"!

As an Indian, when I first came to Singapore to work more than a decade ago, I was puzzled by the Immigration form which had the field "Race". I wondered what I should write: "Dravidian", "Indo-Aryan", "Mixed", or just plain "Human"? I found out later that they expected me to write "Indian". And, by the way, they expect all white-skinned people to write "Caucasian" - how about that?

Anyway, the sad thing is that all newspaper articles in Singapore about racial issues start with stories about "Indians". I have written time and again to editors and authors, as I am replying to you now, that there is no single race called "Indian". I have never got a reply (although two of my letters related to other issues have been published in the Straits Times here).

I suspect the reasons for other nationalities finding it difficult to enter India are totally different and not connected to "race" :-)

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 25, 2008 - 12:30am

I have definitely seen Indians who appeared to have a lot of the Mongoloid race in them. But I don't know that I have seen any that looked like they were 100 percent Mongoloid. Well, maybe one. But I have not seen one who looked like he was Negroid. I have seen very dark skinned Indians but they did not have the hair or facial features of the Negroid race. When I was a child there was some class where we were taught that there were three races - Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid (this thinking may have changed). Indians were supposed to be Caucasoid, but I would definitely agree that there is Mongoloid in the mix as well. And if you say there is Negroid as well, then they cannot be ridiculed for having an immigration policy that is biased against races other than their own.

I was actually being facetious when I made my original statement, trying to rebut some charge of the US being racist for some reason. To me China and India are obviously too overpopulated for a politician to even remotely justify immigration. However, I may be wrong about that assumption as China appears to have abandoned its "1 child" policy. Given how long ago they instituted it, with only 1 child per woman, by now their population would have shrunk. With 2 (or is it 2.1) per woman it would have stayed even. And yet, their population is increasing. Someone I know with relatives in China says that the recent increases in prosperity there has caused the government to believe that it's OK for the population to grow again. If their unemployment can get low enough, and their standard of living high enough, you might see some politicians or businessmen over there calling for immigrants from some poorer country. I don't know what Indias official policy is on their large population. If they are cornucopians they too may try for immigrants if the standard of living gets high enough and the unemployment rate low enough.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 24, 2008 - 4:37am

"The fascist method of reducing population is to 1) vilify and marginalize a certain segment of the population especially one identified by non-majority race, foreign immigrant status and poverty and 2) create separate laws for them, reducing their rights to property, equal paying jobs, and freedom of movement 3) create a virtual slave labor class out of them and 4) ethnic cleansing, forced relocation, and so-called 'final solution' state violence.

Some of those methods are already in progress here: Is it Fascism yet?"

Can you point out what of that paragraph you claim is in progress in this country? One of the problems with talking about population control is that those against it will try and squelch debate by playing the Hitler card.

"Simultaneously, a fascist state would do everything it could to domestically increase the majority race, including reducing the rights of majority race women to limit their offspring by limiting birth control and abortion access; publicly celebrate majority race women who have had double digit numbers of offspring; and offer tax breaks for having children.

Those methods are already in progress: Is it fascism yet?"

The same right wing politicians that are against abortion are also in favor of immigration and most of them are even in favor of illegal immigration. There just is not any unified group against legal immigration, and hardly any resistance to illegal immigration. Just about everyone cheers births and large families and have since the beginning of time. Calling the US, a country that loves immigration more than any other in the world, and is happy to increase its population in the face of pending resource shortages, fascist, based on the right pushing for abortion and longstanding tax credits for children, just doesn't work for me. Bush would love to be dictator and has no problem curbing individual rights. But make no mistake about it - he wanted to sponsor another amnesty for illegals in a big way. Conservatives do not believe in conserving. They are cornucopians and population growth is nothing to them. They know that it keeps wages down and see that as the only consequence. Only a minority of them are against illegal immigration. Which is why you saw no crackdown on employers who hire illegals during a period when Republicans controlled Congress and the Executive Branch.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

ChrisN on March 24, 2008 - 4:24pm

How do we get population growth under control without becoming a fascist state?

Last week I attended a lecture by Mary Evelyn Tucker, a founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology and a member of the Yale faculty with joint appointments to the Divinity School and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her talk began with a statement of the population problem, then went on to discuss some of the work that theologians are doing to re-integrate religion and ecology with a focus on sustainability.

I thought it was a fascinating talk. Progressive thinkers across the spectrum of religion are becoming more and more aware that if their traditions do not update themselves and become strong advocates for value-centric thinking in sustainability, that they face their own irrelevance and obsolescence.

Those who are interested in this angle might want to check out this essay: Daring to Dream: Religion and the Future of Earth by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Engineer-Poet on March 24, 2008 - 6:20pm

How do we get population growth under control without becoming a fascist state?

False dichotomy.

The flood of immigrants into the USA is a threat to the standard of living of most of the population, and has cost not a few lives. This is the sort of threat which, combined with the demonization of those who dare to voice their concerns, drives people to extremism. If you want to eviscerate the threat of fascism, seal the border and send all the illegals back home. The collective sigh of relief will deflate the extremists overnight, and the demand for workers will eliminate the idle hands who become brownshirts.

For a sobering view of what will happen if we fail to reverse the ill-advised 1965 changes, see Immigration By The Numbers.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

FiniteQuantity on March 24, 2008 - 9:59pm

I was gonna say "great presentation" until it occurred to me that he was still advocating immigration. Around 175,000 I believe it was. So if California builds 1 school a day to adapt to the current immigration, it will be OK to build 1 every 5, 6 or 7 days? Why any immigration at all. His own chart showed that even with no immigration after 1965 the US population would still be peaking in 2030. He seemed to put a good connection between wages and smaller immigration. Imagine how good wages and working conditions would be with no immigration. I agree with him immigration must go down, I disagree on how low it should go. For some reason he also did not mention or include in his numbers, illegal immigration which is at a bare minimum, 300,000 a year.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.