Thanks, Bhuban da
On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 5:24 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Ram
>
> Please find it here below.
> Regards
>
> bhuban
> Too many people for our overburdened planet
> Sean O'Grady's "The more people come to the UK, the better it is for us
> all" (1 July) beggars belief.
> Why would we think it better to create energy shortages, resource
> shortages, lowered quality of life, a housing crisis, lowered standard of
> living, more air pollution, grid-locked traffic, bio-diversity loss, and a
> dozen other calamities caused by increasing population pressures?
> For many decades there has been a wilful blindness – almost a taboo – in
> recognising that relentless human-population growth is one of the
> pre-eminent problems we face. In 1950 world population was barely over 2
> billion; in October this year it will hit 7 billion.
> In most countries today existing populations are not living environmentally
> sustainably, yet if current birth rates persist, the United Nations
> Population Division warned in March 2009, our population will exceed 11bn by
> 2050.
> Governments will be struggling with millions of unemployed and hungry
> people attracted to violence and extremism.
> Most environmental organisations tell us that if only we each reduced our
> environmental demand, population growth would not be a problem. But our
> economic system, predicated on growth, is driving us in the opposite
> direction.
> If governments won't talk population, then they are not serious about
> cutting emissions or managing food and water supplies.
> The more crowded we become, the more governments will police our behaviour
> and restrict our activities. We still have a choice; the world badly needs a
> grown-up, rational discussion of the population issue.
> Brian McGavin, Wilmslow, Cheshire
> Sean O'Grady gives a classic example of just what is wrong with economic
> thought today.
> Economists, the high priests of modern political discourse, cannot escape
> the fantasy world they have created. First he sneers at countries with
> "lousy demographics", by which he means those with the gently declining
> populations which optimists hope will contribute to a levelling off of the
> suicidal level of human numbers by the middle of the century.
> He then states that the bigger our future generations are, the better it
> will be as they will pay more taxes and therefore be better able to service
> our debts. Under such logic this new generation as it ages will need an even
> larger one to follow and this in its turn will have greater numbers yet to
> contend with.
> Just how many such exponentially increasing generations can this stubbornly
> finite, resource-poor and ecologically damaged planet cope with? You do the
> maths, Sean, you're the economist.
> Steve Edwards
> Haywards Heath, West SussexEthiopia faces its worst drought for a decade
> (report, 4 July). The UN now classifies large areas of Somalia, Ethiopia,
> Djibouti and Kenya as in a crisis or an emergency.
> The International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell is right in saying:
> "Through no fault of its own, the Horn of Africa is experiencing a severe
> drought caused by the failed rains".
> But according to the World Bank, since 1960 the population of Somalia has
> grown threefold to 9 million; Ethiopia fourfold to 80 million; and Kenya a
> massive fivefold to 40 million.
> Such increases are clearly unsustainable, especially in the face of the
> climate change now occurring.
> Those major charities that have refused to acknowledge the need to
> accompany their food-aid programmes with family-planning initiatives have
> conspired in creating the scale of the tragedies now unfolding in the
> poorest parts of the world.
> These are the fruits of past political reticence to recognise the need to
> restrain and reverse population growth in both the (poor) developing and the
> (high-consumption) developed worlds alike.
> Alan Stedall, Birmingham
> Sean O'Grady's "the more, the better" paean to immigration begs the
> question why bother with border controls ("Migrants can put the Great back
> in Britain", 4 July).
> Admittedly, O'Grady and his fellow globalists would keep controls, of a
> sort, as long as the CBI is allowed to continue to dictate a lax immigration
> policy. Hoovering up expensively trained professionals from poorer countries
> via a points-based system is nothing to be proud of, nor is the creation of
> a low-wage economy via an influx of unskilled immigrants.
> Mass immigration is less an inevitable feature of modern life and more an
> addiction.
> Yugo Kovach, Winterborne Houghton, Dorset
> Sean O'Grady would be well advised to consider the fate of Bernie Madoff,
> currently languishing in an American jail for defrauding investors, when he
> tries to convince us that we need more and more people coming into the world
> to support more and more people requiring pensions as the get older.
> Sir David Attenborough, in his speech to the Royal Society of Arts earlier
> this year, masterfully described such flawed thinking as "an ecological
> Ponzi scheme".
> Katherine Scholfield, Roborough, Devo
>
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