Love for Life

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

Link to this posting: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article63503...

"The way I think we should get there
is have a voluntary one child per family for the next hundred years…
like they do in China now."
Ted Turner, father of 5.

One Response to “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”

1. Steven Earl Salmony Says:
July 8th, 2009 at 11:14 am

Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.

Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in their rates of human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.

Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.

Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.

From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.

In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.

We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.

Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.

For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.

Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.

To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.

If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.

According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.

Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.

Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.

The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.

Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.

Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.

Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.

Thank you.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Link to this posting: http://www.populationmedia.org/2009/07/02/billionaire-club-in-bid-to-cur...

A plague of poor people - disgusting!

Quote:
[They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist...]

that gives me a sickly feeling in my stomach

Quote:
[This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers]

the very existence of billions of "poor people" is indeed nightmarish if you are a billionaire - it's like a plague of rats encroaching on the manor farm

Quote:
[Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.]

If that doesn't work then we fall back on PLAN B.

Quote:
[Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,”]

this is a revealing admission - so the fact that the "secret" meeting has now been leaked must lead us to "paint them" as an alternative world government?

Link to this posting: http://www.911oz.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=25083

Ben Wattenberg has done tremendous work trying to overcome the claim that the world population is ever increasing. In the New York Times in 2003 he wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/opinion/08WATT.html

Now, in a new report, United Nations demographers have bowed to reality and changed this standard 2.1 assumption. For the last five years they have been examining one of the most momentous trends in world history: the startling decline in fertility rates over the last several decades. In the United Nations' most recent population report, the fertility rate is assumed to be 1.85, not 2.1. This will lead, later in this century, to global population decline.

In a world brought up on the idea of a "population explosion," this is a radical notion. The world's population is still growing ? it will take some time for it to actually start shrinking ? but the next crisis is depopulation.

The implications of lower fertility rates are far-reaching. One of the most profound is their potential to reduce economic inequality around the world and alter the balance of power among nations.

The United Nations divides the world into two groups, less developed countries and more developed countries. The most surprising news comes from the poorer countries. In the late 1960's, these countries had an average fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman. Today it is 2.9 ? and still falling. Huge and continuing declines have been seen in countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and (of great importance to the United States) Mexico.

The more developed countries, in contrast, have seen their fertility rates fall from low to unsustainable. Every developed nation is now below replacement level. In the early 1960's, Europe's fertility rate was 2.6. Today the rate is 1.4, and has been sinking for half a century. In Japan the rate is 1.3.

Even before that in the WSJ he wrote: http://www.aei.org/article/13654

Now, however, the U.N.’s new proposal acknowledges that fertility is falling more rapidly than expected in some big, less developed countries with “intermediate” levels of fertility (2.1 to 5.0). These include India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh and the Philippines. (China, at 1.8 is already below replacement level, in part due to coercive family planning policies.) The U.N. concludes that the less developed nations are heading toward a fertility rate of 1.85, down significantly from the 2.1 of earlier projections. This would yield a maximum global population in the 8 billion to 9 billion range. . . .

Actually, I think even the new 1.85 figure is still too high, and that by 2050 we will see a substantial population decline. I believe the slow decline the document speaks of will snowball, as happens in exponential arithmetic. . . . .

Nicholas Eberstadt largely repeats Ben Wattenberg's points here: http://www.fpri.org/ww/0505.200407.eberstadt.demography.html

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Blogger pops1911 said...
It sounds like they should start by castrating themselves - we don't need these people to reproduce! Get rid of their genes ASAP.
5/24/2009 6:52 PM

Blogger Jan said...
I believe pops1911 thinks he is agreeing with you.
5/25/2009 3:25 PM

Blogger Wayne Conrad said...
Pops1911, Yuck.
I once heard Jerry Pournelle say that orbiting power stations were the cure to overpopulation, because wealthy people have few children and you can't have wealth without cheap energy.
5/28/2009 6:15 PM

Blogger Luis Carlos said...
I live in one of those "underdeveloped" countries, Brazil, actually, and, well, before telling overpopulation is not a problem, you should take a look in what´s happening here, our florests got decimated, our rivers polluted to the point of becoming sewers, our animal life almost extinct...

one could say its due to the faster development and expansion of factories, but it´s far from true

our production is pathetic, in fact, california itslef produces more, far more than my entire country

all this pollution and deforestation is a result of people reproducing like rabbits and occupiyng land in a chaotic way

sorry for my poor english

Link to this posting and comments: http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2009/05/billionaire-club-in-bid-to-curb.ht...

If Humans Are a Virus, Then What Is the End Game?
Global warming cult fronts as camouflage for depopulation agenda
By Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

If humans are a virus upon the earth, as we are increasingly being told to believe by cultural and academic kingpins, then what else can the end game be other than a deliberately coordinated policy of mass population reduction?

From the teachings of "Dr Death" Eric Pianka, to German film fest cartoons, to New York Times best selling books, we are being saturated with the idea that humanity itself must be culled in order to save mother earth.

The eugenics movement never went away, it simply re-packaged itself to be more palatable to an increasingly skeptical public and its primary camouflage now fronts as the global warming doomsday cult.

The Pope recently jumped on board the global warming bandwagon during a UN speech when he asserted that man-made climate change should be accepted by the Catholic Church as a "moral cause".

As writer Alexander Cockburn (a liberal, not a right-wing Neo-Con) described earlier this year, at the end of the tenth century as the millennium approached, the Roman Catholic Church concocted a nice little scam to make vast profits on people's fears and apprehension about the future by selling papal indulgences.

In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached," writes Cockburn. "Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide."

"Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves."

Now the global elite have co-opted the environmental movement and the population control agenda to give birth to what the Bilderberg Group describe as a "post industrial revolution," which in layman's terms translates as a global economic crash, another great depression and the total evisceration of the middle class by means of lowering living standards and creating artificial scarcity of natural resources.

The end game is no longer hidden, the utopia of the grand architects is a vastly reduced world population by means of forced sterilization and insidious programs of genocide. Don't take our word for it, let the global elite themselves tell you what they plan to do.

"A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."
Ted Turner, in an interview with Audubon magazine.

"I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist.... I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus."
Prince Philip, in his Foreward to If I Were an Animal; United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd., 1986.

"In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."
Prince Philip, Reported by Deutsche Press Agentur (DPA), August, 1988.

"I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the 'cull' to the size of the surplus population."
Preface to Down to Earth by HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1988, p.|8.

"Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable."
Sir Julian Huxley, first Director General of UNESCO, 1946-1948.

"The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
Margaret Sanger, outspoken atheist and socialist, founder of the Voluntary Parenthood League in 1914, and responsible for opening the first birth control clinic in the United States in New York City.

"It is now apparent that the ecological pragmatism of the so-called pagan religions, such as that of the American Indians, the Polynesians, and the Australian Aborigines, was a great deal more realistic in terms of conservation ethics than the more intellectual monotheistic philosophies of the revealed religions."
Press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on the occasion of the ``Caring for Creation'' conference of the North American Conference on Religion and Ecology, May 18, 1990.

"To keep global resource use within prudent limits while the poor raise their living standards, affluent societies need to consume less. Population, consumption, technology, development, and the environment are linked in complex relationships that bear closely on human welfare in the global neighbourhood. Their effective and equitable management calls for a systemic, long-term, global approach guided by the principle of sustainable development, which has been the central lesson from the mounting ecological dangers of recent times. Its universal application is a priority among the tasks of global governance."
United Nations Our Global Neighborhood 1995

"I reject the idea that humans are superior to other life forms. . . Man is just an ape with an overly developed sense of superiority."
-- Paul Watson, director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a founder of Greenpeace

"Under Socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not the character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner. . . ." [This is compassionate liberalism.]
Fabian Socialist Bernard Shaw in his Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, 1928.

Link to this article: http://loveforlife.com.au/node/6709 and http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2007/260907_end_game.htm