Are environmentalists cowards on immigration?

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 1:33am

Unfortunately it is not, and this is not only by looking at the serious environmentalists groups but at scientific organizations.

Sucks for the nativists. Of course going forward if they were environmentalists we should had seen already a followup with current carbon control emission plans to be recommended to be used locally; alas, that still seems to be missing from any of their sites.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 1:36am

Actually, as you’ve demonstrated, the only reason it’s not openly discussed is the same reason you couldn’t praise capitalism under Stalin. It’s not politically acceptable. I get that.

My point is that from an environmental perspective population growth is an issue one easy way to address it is via immigration.

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 1:43am

Nonsense, the nativist groups are still there operating, if they stick to immigrants I will not like it, but they have a right, what they did not have the right was to expect that hijacking the environmentalist movement and even the scientific one would work.

A moot one, and for that many are glad.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 1:46am

Yes, as I’ve said, for non-environmental reasons.

The second voiceless group consists of indigenous non-human species. The Nature Conservancy’s comprehensive new book “Precious Heritage” – foreword by Harvard conservation biologist E. O. Wilson – depicts the high correlation between U.S. endangered species and areas with rapid, immigration-driven, population growth, including California, the Southwest and Florida. It is not hard to see exploding human populations eating up land that indigenous species have lived on for countless millennia.

This is quantified in a recent analysis by environmental/resource planner Leon Kolankiewicz and public policy analyst Roy Beck, titled “Weighing Sprawl Factors in Large U.S. Cities.” This report, and two others devoted specifically to California and to Florida, show dramatically that massive human sprawl in the Southwest and Florida is due not to poor urban planning, but rather almost entirely to rapid population growth.

The connection to immigration? Here in California, for example, analysis of our state government and U.S. Census Bureau statistics indicates that about 90 percent of California’s population growth during the 1990s was due to immigrants and their children.

The third voiceless group is people and other creatures not yet born who have no control over decisions being made today. An excellent analogy is China. In the 1950s and 1960s the Chinese government encouraged high fertility which peaked at 6.5 children per woman in the mid-1960s. This irresponsible policy caused China’s population to surpass 1 billion by 1980.

One consequence is the Draconian one-child-per-woman policy instituted around 1980. Thus, present and future generations of Chinese families are paying the price for previous shortsighted government policies. Rapid population growth cannot be turned off like a faucet and the Chinese population is projected to continue growing for at least another 30 years, at which point it will be about 1.5 billion, in spite of the present harsh fertility policies.

Current immigration policies are propelling the United States to a 22nd century population of over a billion. This will leave Americans then in the same nasty situation as the Chinese are in now. High fertility or overimmigration, the outcome – too many people – is all the same.

http://www.susps.org/ibq1998/discuss/article_bh_200107.html

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 2:00am

A moot site too.

(Nothing new from them for several years, it seems that they are done already.)

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 2:13am

The arguments of Zuckerman remain valid, as do the comments of EO Wilson. Why is it so important to you that immigration never can be revised? Do you feel this way about borders generally?

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 2:24am

I’m already on the record of supporting more border protection and immigration reform.

I must be a Wizard then, I did not need to use environmentalism magic to do that. If you are still painfully missing the big point, attempting to force environmentalism to deal with immigration is just a waste of time when in the end the proponents of the scheme are not planning to do any follow ups on the main issue. They do a nice talk, but they are not planning to do anything at all about the huge carbon emissions component of the issue.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 2:29am

I’m talking about environmentalists who are also comitted to the issues you refer to.

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 2:36am

Where? And let the record show that you have not linked to any current efforts that show that the groups you cited last are doing anything about the carbon emissions.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 3:11am

The Sierra Club are concerned with carbon emissions, no?

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 3:33am

The where was also referring to where are the navitist groups you just cited active in at least complaining about the do noting congress critters.

If you think the sierra club is not reporting and demanding action, you are wrong.

http://alleghenysc.org/?p=2364

You are still avoiding the rest, lets have something from the groups you cited doing even a report complaining on what the congress critters are not doing regarding emissions.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 3:36am

I said that they were didn’t I? Re-read my comment. That doesn’t get them off the hook for ducking population stabilization. As Lester Brown commented in 2006 when the US population hit 300 million:

Sometime this month, the U.S. population is projected to reach 300 million. In times past, reaching such a demographic milestone might have been a cause for celebration. In 2006, it is not. Population growth is the ever expanding denominator that gives each person a shrinking share of the resource pie. It contributes to water shortages, cropland conversion to non-farm uses, traffic congestion, more garbage, overfishing, crowding in national parks, a growing dependence on imported oil, and other conditions that diminish the quality of our daily lives.

With births exceeding deaths by nearly two to one, the U.S. population grows by almost 1.8 million each year, or 0.6 percent. Adding nearly 1 million immigrants per year brings the annual growth rate up to 0.9 percent, raising the total addition to 2.7 million. As things now stand, we are headed for 400 million Americans by 2043. (See data at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update59_data.htm.)
U.S. population growth contrasts with the situation in other industrial countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Japan, where populations are either essentially stable or declining slightly. In virtually every industrial society where women are well educated and have ready access to jobs, they have on average two children or fewer.

More people require more of everything, including water. In our highly urbanized society, we fail to recognize how much water one person uses. While we drink close to a gallon of water each day as water, juice, pop, coffee, tea, beer, or wine, it takes some 500 gallons a day to produce the food we consume.

The U.S. annual population growth of nearly 3 million contributes to the water shortages that are plaguing the western half of the country and many areas in the East as well. Water tables are now falling throughout most of the Great Plains and in the U.S. Southwest. Lakes are disappearing and rivers are running dry. It has been years since the Colorado River, the largest river in the U.S. Southwest, reached the Gulf of Mexico.

As water supplies tighten, the competition between farmers and cities intensifies. In this contest, farmers almost always lose. Scarcely a day goes by in the western United States without another farmer or an entire irrigation district selling their water rights to cities like Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or San Diego.

The seafood appetite of 300 million Americans is also outgrowing the sustainable yield of its coastal fisheries. Long-time seafood staples such as cod off the New England coast, red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, and salmon in the U.S. Northwest are threatened by overfishing.

In the United States, more people means more cars. And that in turn means paving more land for roads and parking lots. Each U.S. car requires nearly one fifth of an acre of paved land for roads and parking space. For every five cars added to the U.S. fleet, an area the size of a football field is covered with asphalt.

More often than not, this land being paved is cropland simply because the flat, well-drained soils that are good for farming are also ideal for building roads and parking lots. Once paved, land is not easily reclaimed. As environmentalist Rupert Cutler once noted, “Asphalt is the land’s last crop.”

The United States, with its 226 million motor vehicles, has paved some 4 million miles of roads–enough to circle the Earth at the equator 157 times. In addition to roads, cars require parking space. Imagine a parking lot for 226 million cars and trucks. If that is too difficult, try visualizing a parking lot for 1,000 cars and then imagine what 226,000 of these would look like.

More cars also translates into more traffic congestion. Americans are spending more and more time sitting in their cars going nowhere as freeways and streets become, in effect, parking lots. As cities sprawl, commuter distance lengthens.

Longer commuting distances and more congestion en route combine to increase the time spent in automobiles. In 1982 the average motorist experienced 16 hours of delay; by 2003 this had virtually tripled to 47 hours. Car commuting time is increasing in nearly every U.S. metropolitan area. “Rush hour” everywhere is becoming longer as commuters attempt to beat it by leaving work early or delaying their commute until traffic eventually wanes.
The costs of increasing congestion and longer commuting times are high. Traffic congestion in the United States in 2003 caused 3.7 billion hours of travel delay and wasted 2.3 billion gallons of fuel. The total bill for all of this was $63 billion.

Some corporations have begun to consider congestion costs when deciding where to establish a new plant or office building. They are concerned about both the effects of traffic congestion on their employees and the costs for the company itself when the movement of raw materials and finished products is slowed.

More people mean that not only are our home towns more crowded, but so too are the “get away” spots where we go for relaxation. National parks, wilderness areas, and beaches are seeing more visitors each year. U.S. national parks sometimes have to turn tourists away. In 1906 when Yosemite National Park was young and when we were a far less mobile population, the park had 5,000 visitors. Today, more than 3 million people (and their cars) visit the park each year.
More people also usually means more garbage. New York City, for example, generates 12,000 tons of garbage a day, a flow that requires 600 tractor-trailers–fully loaded–to leave the city each day headed for remote landfills in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio. Trucking garbage to ever more distant landfills makes us more dependent on distant sources of oil.

As population grows, so does energy consumption. The United States, richly endowed with oil, has largely depleted its petroleum reserves within two generations. The use of oil has exceeded new discoveries in the United States for some 25 years. As reserves shrink, U.S. production falls and imports climb, helping to drive up world oil prices. And as population increases, so do the emissions of the Earth-warming gas carbon dioxide.

Given the negative effects of continuing population growth on our daily lives, it may be time to establish a national population policy, one that would lead toward population stabilization sooner rather than later. As noted earlier, almost all other industrial countries now have stable or declining populations. Perhaps it’s time for us to stabilize the U.S. population as well, so that we never have to ask whether 400 million Americans is a cause for celebration.

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 3:44am

I reread it, you are clearly avoiding facing the fact that they are not doing anything useful now where is counts: they should be demanding the ones they helped elect to move on the emissions issue, they are indeed just fake environmentalists.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 3:49am

They should be, but the Sierra Club and US environmentalists should also be focussing on the population issue in the US. The question I’ve been asking is, why have they recently shied away from it. The answer appears to be due to non-environmental reasons (ie. political).

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 4:08am

Not really.
http://www.sierraclub.org/population/domestic_planning.asp

http://www.sierraclub.org/population/

We already know you believe that, end of that history. But as the saying goes, you are entitled to your opinions but not the facts.

This is not part of a belief, this is what it can be confirmed, and so far it is clear that no. While the Sierra Club is also looking at the population (and in passing, the one for the immigrants) and the emissions issue. Your side is only doing lip service to the emissions part.

As I said before, what about any article, blog, post from the nativist sites you use as sources taking on the critics of the EPA? Or complaining for them blocking carbon emissions controls?

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 4:18am

What is this “your side” bullsh1t? I am talking about environmental concerns generally. Please keep up.

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 4:30am

So you are denouncing sources like SUSPS? Good to know.

Incidentally, I think you confused the replies, over here the item we are looking for is to see what, if anything, sources like SUSPS are doing **today **about the carbon emission issue, since the Sierra Club can do population and carbon emissions (The whole package), what is wrong with your sources or the movement that you are constantly referring to?

The answer so far: they are just showing all that they are not really environmentalists and the carbon footprint issue is a sham.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 4:34am

Ok…um…your comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

What I’m saying is that population growth and sustainability is an issue that any environmentalist should logically be concerned with.

Again, perhaps you wish the US to have the population of India?

GIGObuster · June 20, 2011, 4:51am

And I think you are having trouble understanding because it is showing that the Sierra Club is doing both.

An they are showing a concern for the carbon footprint.

No, as you insist on missing, you are only now ignoring the cites, there are other ways to control the population at large.

So lets clarify the last part:

The answer so far from you is that: sources like SUSPS are just showing all that they are not really environmentalists and the carbon footprint issue for them is a sham.

The Sierra Club can look at population control now **and **it calls to action to deal with congress for not doing anything regarding the carbon emissions side. You are not capable of producing any cite that shows SUSPS or other source like that, doing even a token gesture to tell congress now to do something about carbon emissions.

This is, once again, a demonstratively way to see who is an environmentalist and who is not.

Chen019 · June 20, 2011, 4:55am

Not in terms of the US population - it has dropped the ball on that issue.

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Are environmentalists cowards on immigration?

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