arth Worst-case scenario: There is no solution. Overpopulation is going to drive us off a cliff. Even worse, seems nobody really cares. Nobody’s working on a real solution. No one has the courage. Not U.N. leaders, scientists or billionaires. No one. It’s taboo. All part of a conspiracy of silence. But denial is killing us. Any real solutions? Or do we all just wait
for wars, pandemics, starvation to erase billions? Wait in denial? Is that the sound of the sixth great species extinction dead ahead? Will killing, disease, poverty solve Earth’s biggest problem, the problem no one talks about? Meanwhile, Big Oil’s marketing studies keep telling CEOs like Tillerson the truth about the inconsistent behavior of irrational humans living in denial. How we just keep telling ourselves we’re recyclers, green, love hybrids, eat organic. Why? Because we just keep buying Chevys, Jeeps and Teslas, keep buying Big Oil
stocks for retirement, keep stocking up on carbon polluting products, because our subconscious secretly endorses Big Oil’s strategy. As Tillerson told Charlie Rose: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do,” making “quality investments for our shareholders.”
lderly
10 million people in the UK are over 65 years old. The latest projections are for 5½ million more elderly people in 20 years time and the number will have nearly doubled to around 19 million by 2050. Within this total, the number of very old people grows even faster. There are currently three million people aged more than 80 years and this is projected to almost double by 2030 and reach eight million by 2050. While one-insix of the UK population is currently aged 65 and over, by 2050 one in-four will be.
The pensioner population is expected to rise despite the increase in the women’s state pension age to 65 between 2010 and 2020 and the increase for both men and women from 65 to 68 between 2024 and 2046. In 2008 there were 3.2 people of working age for every person of pensionable age. This ratio is projected to fall to 2.8 by 2033.
Much of today’s public spending on benefits is focussed on elderly people. 65% of Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure goes to those over working age, equivalent to £100 billion in 2010/11 or one-seventh of public expenditure. Continuing to provide state benefits and pensions at today’s average would mean additional spending of £10 billion a year for every additional one million people over working age.
hildren even Bill McKibben’s 350.org global team. The U.N.’s 2,000 scientists know overpopulation is Earth’s only real problem.
What’s wrong? Everybody on Earth is in denial about our biggest problem ... population growth. Too many new babies, a net of 75 million a year. And we’re all closet deniers — leaders, investors, billionaires, the 99%, everybody. Yes,
Get it? Earth has only one real problem, there’s the one main dependent variable in the scientific equation. But we refuse to focus on it. So, yes, even scientists are science deniers too. They know population growth is the killer issue, but are avoiding it too. Thousands of scientists have brilliant technical solutions to reducing the impact of
global warming. But avoid the root cause. They keep solving the dependent variables in their climate-change science equation. But population growth is the cause of the Earth’s problem, not the result. Stop, shift, focus on the real problem. Stop focusing on the dependent variables. Your scientific method makes this clear ... we are making too many babies. Population’s out of control. And that’s the world’s No. 1 problem. But we’re all in denial. So nobody’s dealing with the world’s biggest problem.
olution ?
Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population. Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population’s
birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including high or increasing levels of poverty, environmental concerns, religious reasons, and overpopulation. While population control can involve measures that improve people’s lives by giving them
greater control of their reproduction, some programs have exposed them to exploitation.v Worldwide, the population control movement was active throughout the 1960s and 1970s, driving many reproductive health and family planning programs.
xygen Our global population would require the equivalent of 49 billion trees to sustain the oxygen levels humans required. So, are there enough trees for that? NASA has made an approximation of the number of trees on Earth based on satellite images and their guess is the world currently holds about 400 billion trees,
which is plenty more than needed. However, keep in mind that humans are not the only air-consumers on Earth. Besides other wildlife, natural and artificial fires (think internal combustion engine) are major consumers of oxygen. In fact, it is claimed that the oxygen content in our atmosphere is declining at 4 ppm per year,
which equals a loss of 0.00002% oxygen per year. Luckily, the amount of oxygen already stored in the atmosphere is very large and 90% of all living biomass on Earth are oxygen-producing plant matter, whereas most of our oxygen comes from deforestation-proof oceans.
esources
World population is expected to grow another 1 billion in just 12 years, creating unprecedented demand for food, water, energy, and employment. Population growth is expected to be most rapid in the 49 least developed countries, which will double the size from around 900 million today to 1.8 billion in 2050. There were only1 billion humans in 1804; 2 billion in 1927; 6 billion in 1999; and 7.2 billion by 2013. UN forecasts a range from 8.3 billion to 10.9 billion people by 2050, with 9.6 billion as the mid-projection. Population dynamics are changing from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility, with an increasingly elderly pop-
ulation worldwide. The world’s fertility rate has fallen from 6 children in 1900 and 5 in 1950 to 2.5 today. If fertility rates continue
to fall, world population could actually shrink to 6.2 billion by 2100, creating an elderly world difficult to support. Today life expectancy at birth is 68 years, which is projected to grow to 81 by 2100; with advances in longevity research, this projection will increase. About 20% of the world will be over 60 by 2050, and 20% of the older population will be aged 80 or more. Some 20% of Europeans are 60 or older, compared with 10% in Asia and Latin America and 5% in Africa.