Dear polymaths, I just wrote about this at length elsewhere, but I wanna know if you agree with the following statement about “world hunger”:
Humanity did solve the,problem of world hunger thanks in large part to Norman Borlaug. And now, governments in the developed world are deliberately re-creating it,
(Here’s what makes ME think so: obesity is now a worse problem worldwide than hunger. Yes I know hunger is still endemic inAfrica and “Southern Asia”, which I reckon means the tip of India, but it’s largely the result of logistics problems caused by conflict.
And, there is no effing way we can go on feeding most of the world population pretty successfully if we eliminate the use of fertilizers. People in government MUST know these things. So why are they hellbent on turning the car around and driving us into the ditch of mass starvation? It can’t be “for the planet”: Borlaug pointed out that far, far more land remained forested instead of being cleared for agriculture because of the high-yield techniques he invented.)
In the last ~30 years, crop yield has tripled near my town of birth. This is due to genetic seed, fertilizer, herbicide and advances in equipment and methods (seed spacing, gps, etc). I don’t know the contribution of each, but the big three have to be fertilizer, genetic seed, and herbicide. All three are under attack.
Technological advancements such as growing meats in a lab may offer a better way, but it is not smart to burn the bridge before you have a new one built. It seems that tptb are burning the two critical bridges necessary to maintain the world population. Energy and food.
In the late 1960s, just as the Green Revolution was beginning to kick into high gear and a few years before the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, there was a wave of anxiety about population growth and its environmental and economic consequences, amplified in the popular sphere by Paul Erlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. That same year, Erlich and others founded the group Zero Population Growth to advocate for population limiting policies to avert the mass famine Erlich predicted for the immediate future:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….
At the time a figure widely bandied about was a world population of around 500 million being the maximum sustainable without humans taking the entire ecosystem of the Earth into their hands and managing it artificially. (World population at the time was around 3.5 billion, compared to around 8 billion today.) I don’t know the origin of the 500 million figure, how it was arrived at, and whether, for example, it envisioned getting rid of the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere (which is the goal of those attempting to restrict the production and use of artificial fertiliser today). But it was repeatedly cited by those advocating abolition of industrialised agriculture and “factory farms”.
Recently, I have heard that 500 million population goal being cited once again, both by those in the jackal bins of the Green movement and by their opponents who say that the massive die-off of the human population that would imply is not just the inevitable outcome of the Green agenda but its unacknowledged goal.
What is certain is that this is profoundly anti-human agenda, and there are people within the Green movement who:
Wouldn’t mind seeing the human population reduced to 500 million.
Foolishly assume with will be among those who remain.
So it sounds like—broadly—you do agree.
At the same time Ehrlich was writing his apocalypse now book, (1968) Borlaug was at work on the Green Revolution. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. ANd because of him, we ARE now feeding 8B people pretty successfully.
And governments around the world including ours are now actively trying to REVERSE that success.
In fact, from a supply and demand standpoint, we have completely eradicated famine. The only reasons people are going hungry today are wars, destructive government policies, or insane ideologies (such as North Korea). The Earth produces so much food the Americans use maize to fuel their automobiles.
Would add to this that a world where there is more CO2 in the atmosphere is, on balance, going to grow anything green quite a lot faster. Matt Ridley made this point several times (source). Here is the opening of one of his pieces from 2015 - the entire argument is informative.
France’s leading television weather forecaster, Philippe Verdier, was taken off air last week for writing that there are “positive consequences” of climate change. Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of mathematical physics and astrophysics at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, declared last week that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are “enormously beneficial”. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, said in a lecture last week that we should “celebrate carbon dioxide”.
Are these three prominent but very different people right? Should we at least consider seriously, before we go into a massive international negotiation based on the assumption that carbon dioxide is bad, whether we might be mistaken? Most politicians today consider such a view to be so beyond the pale as to be mad or possibly criminal.
Yet the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions are not even controversial in scientific circles. As Richard Betts of the Met Office tweeted last week, the “CO2 fertilisation effect” — the fact that rising emissions are making plants grow better — is not news and is discussed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The satellite data show that there has been roughly a 14 per cent increase in the amount of green vegetation on the planet since 1982, that this has happened in all ecosystems, but especially in arid tropical areas, and that it is in large part due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions.
Wouldn’t destructive government policies and insane ideologies go hand in hand or be one in the same? You may have a crazy ideological view point, but without the levers of power to implement them, you cannot threaten me with starvation.
By insane ideologies, I was thinking of things like Stalin trying to starve the private landowners into submission during the collectivisation of agriculture, Mao’s adopting Lysenko’s crackpot ideas about agriculture, or North Korea’s mindless quest for autarky (“Juche”) whatever the cost to the population. But governments can implement policies that lead to famine while implementing policies adopted with the best of intentions but without thinking through the second and higher order effects. For example, subsidies for one crop at the expense of another replaces local knowledge of farmers on the land with decrees from above and may result in misallocation of resources and potential crop failure due to monoculture. Bread price controls to keep urban populations from rioting can put domestic farmers out of business, replacing their production with cheap imports. But then you get a bad crop year, or falling local currency, or sanctions and now there isn’t enough to feed the urban population and the lid blows off. This process was the spark that set off the “Arab spring” in a number of countries in the Maghreb and Near East.
Martin Luther reformed Western Civilization in 1500s, explaining corrupt Roman Catholic indulgence system (where people would literally pay cash to help dead loved ones escape purgatory and enter heaven).
Isn’t ESG / green new deal a similar system – except substitue sustainability for indulgence, and it claims to save FUTURE GENERATIONS instead of past ones?
The ESG mob seem to be geniuses – until enough people realize they have been duped.
Yes it seems humans have a tendency to construct societies where a corrupted elite use cultural institutions to manipulate the masses in pursuit of money and/or power.
Idk, are people really being duped? I’ve studied various cultures, fairly small isolated groups,the world being вs it was then, which “decided” to kill themselves off. I mean I’m sure if you asked each individual why he or she hd chosen not to breed, they wouldn’t say that, they’d cite some reason personal to each. But the completely foreseeable result was cultural annihilation.
I think these decisions, the effect of which will inevitably be to annihilate global human culture, are comparable. We DO now have. “Global village”—complete with global village idiots.
The kind of psychological phenomena, nay, techniques, which lead to mass suicide , like Masada, Heaven’s Gate, Waco, Jonestown—are now being employed globally. “We’re trapped on this burning planet! We’re alone, no help is coming. All hope abandon and die virtuously, faithful even unto death.”
Uh, Waco was an execution carried out by our friendly neighborhood Federal Government assholes. Say what you want about the Davidians, but they were not hurting anybody, they were minding their own business, and then the Feds got their panties in a twist because of guns, guns, guns. And the child molestation was BS.
Yes, but I was talking about the accusations that the Davidians were molesting children. That is BS and there is no credible evidence that this was happening. I don’t think that became a cause for the ATF/FBI until well into the siege. But yes, the only people in Waco who harmed children were the monsters of the Federal Government.
In the most recent (2022-08-06) Radio Derb, John Derbyshire discusses (starting at the 19:34 mark, after you start playing, set the cursor to that position) a column by The Z Man in Taki’s Magazine on 2022-08-01, “The Valley of Greta”.
This discusses the Nongqawuse episode of 1856–1857 among the Xhosa tribe of Eastern Cape in South Africa in which a young prophetess of that name urged her people to destroy all their crops and kill all cattle, saying the spirits of the ancestors had told her that if they did the European settlers would be swept into the sea and the Xhosa would refill their granaries and fields with better cattle. This gripped the people, who slaughtered between 300,000 and 400,000 cattle and dutifully burned their crops.
The prophecy said that on February 18, 1857 the Sun would turn red and the Xhosa would be rewarded. This did not, in fact, occur. A devastating famine ensued, which the British estimated reduced the Xhosa population from 105,000 to less than 27,000, a die-off of around 75%.
Nongqawuse suffered no consequences for her vision’s killing off three quarters of the members of her tribe. After a brief stay with the British, she lived on a farm where she died in 1898 at the age of 57. The valley where she claimed to receive the prophecy is still called Intlambo kaNongqawuse (Valley of Nongqawuse).
Then, as now, they just make it up as they go. After Hillary blatantly illegally shared all the top secret documents on her home-brewed server then erased them all during an investigation (scores, if not hundreds are in federal prison for doing just that), the FBI is suddenly breaking down Trump’s door and cracking his safe over “classified materials”. What a disgusting joke. Washington is not merely a swamp. It is an ever-ripening, mephitic cesspool. The Norks would likely be doing us a favor if they could sterilize it. If anyone suggested to me 20 short years ago that I would despise the US government as I do now, I would have thought they were insane.
Same here. To think that system that I once revered as the best arrangement to secure liberties is nothing more than a smoke-and-mirrors mechanism to enslave humans at the behest of other humans. You are correct: the cleansing forces of Russia, China, or the Norks would be a welcomed entity.
Hee Hee, no pun intended) do you agree?