Feel free to continue quoting Lester Brown if you wish, but you’ll have to remember that he’s not a greenwasher, so he’s not always going to say the things you want to hear. I can quote him as well:
[QUOTE=Lester Brown in Plan B 4.0]
In addition to 33 countries with essentially stable or declining populations, another group of countries, including China and the United States, have reduced fertility to replacement level or just below. But because of inordinately large numbers of young people moving into their reproductive years, their populations are still expanding. Once this group of young people moves through their high-fertility years, however, these countries too will be reaching population stability. The 29 countries in this category contain some 2.5 billion people.
[/QUOTE]
Great, so what? The US has the highest level of growth amongst the industrialised countries. Look at the Pew data.
Of course, that could be ameliorated by revising immigration levels.
Of course it has.
Except for Australia, all the other industrialized countries in the world are ancient by comparison. America is the one that has never yet gotten near to full-up.
Except for the minor business of running out of water 
Of course it will be great once the US has a population similar to that of China or India. That will be a great day for environmentalists.
I don’t really care about either US environmentalism or immigration. I don’t live in the USA (or even North America) anymore, so if you all want to keep building cities in deserts or diverting scarce water resources to subsidize agribusiness, knock yourself out. No skin off my ass.
However, as alluded to by elbows above, Americans use a hell of a lot of energy. It’s my understanding that the question of AGW is closely linked with energy usage patterns. Wikipedia cites a 2003 study that shows the US with one of the world’s highest per capita energy consumption rates (7794.8 kgoe/a). By contrast, the current top four countries which contribute to US immigration (Wiki cite), Mexico, China, the Philippines, and India, have rates of 1533.2, 1138.3, 1524.9, and 512.4, respectively. It would seem, therefore, that looking ONLY at the issue of AGW, that the global situation is made worse by every immigrant who moves from a low-energy consumption country to the USA. A similar dynamic would apply within Europe, where I now live, in the case of - for example - immigrants moving from sunny Greece (2698.6) or Italy (3127.2) to snowy Sweden (5764.8) or Finland (7218.1).
I asked for a cogent (i.e., fallacy-free) summary of the argument, rebutting the initial impression that one side was calmly presenting facts and the other side was lashing out with personal attacks. I recognized that this is the Pit, and the side using personal attacks is well within the scope of the forum’s purpose, but I was curious. My own intuitive sense is the the claim that immigration is (or should be) a major factor of concern for environmentalists is a weak claim, but I hadn’t given it an in-depth analysis.
This is not an argument remarkable for its cogency. It uses argumentum ad hominem (we cannot rely on the “nativist” citations), ad misericordiam (“…it attacks people who are suffering…”) and ad populum (“… it’s out of touch with the realities of changing demographics, and it’s terrifically unpopular.”)
I remain unconvinced by Chen019’s arguments, but this is the most pathetic response I can remember to a request for a cogent rebuttal.
Try to internalize this point: it’s utterly irrelevant to the truth of your claim if the opposing side is championed by Casey Anthony, David Duke, Idi Amin, Papa Doc, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Pointing out how evil your opponents’ motives are is not proper argument. Stop doing that.
(At least, stop doing it in response to a request for a real argument – I recognize that your collection of fallacies finds a ready home here in the Pit.)
Is there a GD thread on this topic?
Chen – question for you:
Let’s assume I agree with your plan – we impose a reasonably strict set of immigration controls. What is the scope of enviromental impact we should expect to see, both within the US and abroad? That is, presumably the people not immigrating have some measurable deleterious effects on the environment where they remain, and presumably that should be counted as well, yes?
First line of the OP.
Thanks. Not sure how I missed that, seeing as how it was so cunningly hidden.
That is one long-ass thread.
Yep.
Now, Bricker, you already know that the pit is precisely to roast people that have no cogent ideas, as the link shows, there are times when pig headness and the history and the background of a guy like Chen has to be taken into account.
As there was already a link to the GD thread, you are protesting too much. And even when this is the pit what you are doing there is cherry picking.
Perspective is the biggest failure from Chen, scientists involved in climate change and sustainability do not include immigration as an issue to deal with the ecological footprint of people. And it is because it is beyond the scope of what they are doing. Other experts already noticed that dealing with the immigrants would not make a dent (again by taking the big picture into account).
It should be noticed that and the link to the global warming people and sustainability experts was also already linked here.
Even when Chen gets sources that are not from the nativists there are perfect examples of cherry picking.
Not if those immigrants act to lower the US average by consuming less than the average (which it seems they do). Yes, they are no longer counted in the even lower home country’s numbers, but the US numbers are so overwhelmingly out of whack that lowering them should take priority over maintaining the home countries’ status quo (which is all removing them does - it certainly doesn’t change the HC’s percapita numbers, but can change America’s).
And there’s the knock-on effect of the rest of the world often following US trends in lifestyle. If sustainable living were the new American Dream, the rising Chinese and Indian middle classes might have a reduced impact.
N.B.: You, as an individual American, cannot help much there by changing your “lifestyle.” You can recycle, you can get around by foot/bike/carpool/bus – but you’re still consuming a lot more goods than you realize, and their production and, more importantly, their distribution (almost certainly by truck) uses a lot more energy than you realize. And there’s just so much of this country (my own Florida, to start with) that is barely habitable without electric-powered climate control!
I acknowledged that in my request and again in my subsequent responses.
Also acknowledged in the next post that I missed the link – which I have now found. But I don’t agree that my examples above were cherry-picked.
As magellen’s post 312 in the GD thread mentioned, this claim is not particularly relevant; you yourself acknowledged that studying other things besides climate change, particularly local issues, was a valid approach.
This observation, on the other hand, is highly relevant. It points to a flaw in Chen’s reasoning – he (so far as I can tell) derives one “average use” figure for Americans, and then uses that figure to extrapolate increased consumption as a result of new immigrants… when the fact may be that the new immigrants don’t use resources at the average rate, but far below it.
Seems to me this is the point to state clearly and then seek a rebuttal, if one exists.
I’m not sure if that is Chen’s reasoning (I’ll let him address that), but I just wanted to point out that there two things to keep in mind. One is that immigrants, whatever their initial behaviors, move toward being the average American in their wants, desires, consumption, etc. Second, even if immigrants were to somehow keep their carbon footprint low through out their lifetime, it is still a net increase to both the U. S. and globally. For the U.S., it’s the footprint of one extra person, how ever small their footprint. Globally, it’s the increase of someone who was living with a smaller footprint now living with a larger one.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that from (not going to ask for a cite in a pit thread), unless you’re just figuring that many of them arrive poor and thus have less to spend on HDTVs and Hummers. Even so, once they assimilate, that wouldn’t really apply anymore. Also, see BrainGlutton’s point below.
That’s kind of my point - they’ve moved from a low-consumption country to a high-consumption one.
Yes, but the brutal math of the equation is still: per capita consumption x number of people = total consumption. Lowering US per capita energy consumption is certainly a worthwhile goal, but in the mean time, as the US population grows, so does its total energy consumption - more or less linearly.
No argument from me on that point, though given how low those countries (especially India’s) per capita rates currently are, even if their citizens were satified at only consuming energy at, say, half the US rate, that would still entail a massive increase in overall global energy consumption.
BrainGlutton makes an excellent point:
“You, as an individual American, cannot help much there by changing your “lifestyle.” You can recycle, you can get around by foot/bike/carpool/bus – but you’re still consuming a lot more goods than you realize, and their production and, more importantly, their distribution (almost certainly by truck) uses a lot more energy than you realize. And there’s just so much of this country (my own Florida, to start with) that is barely habitable without electric-powered climate control!”
If GIGO has the Straight Dope here sussed, then Chen is the sort of person for whom the label “useful idiot” should have been invented.
That would explain why it was sitting completely empty before the onset of electricity…no, wait.
If you could change this one, single, deeply cherished belief, in America, you wouldn’t have to worry about immigration, or one child policies, in my opinion.
You’d think, when you hear this, all the countries clustered near the equator would be virtually empty, like other unlivable areas, like deserts and mountain tops, and yet, somehow, some of the poorest nations, and millions of people, manage to muddle through, working, living, raising families. How do they do it, I wonder?
“Yeah, well I’m not giving up my air conditioner!”, ranks right up there with, driving a Hummer in my books.
Of course. My point is that in terms of the environment and sustainability in the US, population stabilization is a sensible option. This is something suggested in the Clinton sustainability taskforce report. Lester Brown makes a similar point in relation to the US population reaching 300 million and the prospect of it increasing to 400 million and beyond.
I’ve acknowledged that low wage migrants are unlikely to consume as much as higher earning citizens. However, over time & subsequent generations are they going to adjust to american norms? Are they going to remain static in their consumption?
Also, in terms of consuming things like water that is something you can’t avoid regardless of SES.
Florida? It practically was. Florida’s population in 1940 was 1.8 million – that sounds like a lot, but this state is bigger than England – and it’s more then ten times that now. Pre-AC, most of the population lived well north of Orlando.
Back in the 1950s, my Mom went to Hillsborough High School, the only one in the county then, and the bus went all around the county north of the incorporated City of Tampa, all farms and orange groves as it was, and picked up a total of six students. Today northern Hillsborough County is all burbsprawl and there are at least three public high schools there alone. Without AC, that didn’t happen.