Study Shows Connection between Population & Carbon Emissions

Here is a link to a study done in Brazil that that links population growth and carbon emissions. Isn't time we realized this connection and structured our tax and immigration policies to help us achieve the emission reduction goals the rest of the world expects us to achieve? We need to implement a cap and trade policy on the number of children a woman can have. If she wishes to have more that the replacement level of about two children, then she and her partner must purchase credits from those who wish to have fewer.

On the immigration front, we could begin by limiting the number of legal immigrants each year to no more than 200,000, exclusive of foreign students, temporary migrant farm workers, and tourists. Of course, we must also take the necessary actions to secure our borders and locate, identify and process those illegal aliens who are already here. Only those who it can be shown are essential to our economy should be allowed to stay.

We need to put our economists to work to figure out what we must do to achieve a soft landing for our economy while we are in the process of stabilizing our population through the above measures.

Copenhagen Fails - Omits Discussion of Population

Previous studies on the determinants of carbon dioxide emissions have primarily focused on the
role of affluence. The impact of population growth on carbon dioxide emissions has received less attention.
A new paper takes a step forward providing such empirical evidence, using a data set of 93 countries for the
period of 1975-1996. The paper has following findings. (1) Population growth has been one of the major
driving forces behind increasing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide over the last two decades. It is
estimated that half of increase in emissions by 2025 will be contributed by future population growth alone.
(2) Rising income levels have been associated with a monotonically upward shift in emissions.

Thus, without increasing costs dramatically by imposing strict controls on emissions, much could be accomplished by just stabilizing our population.
__________________________

The New Test

Too many people!!!

The science of causality is an art of probability. For example, there are few scientists who will say "Smoking will kill you," but it's widely known that smoking will increase your probability of getting cancer or myriad other cardio-respiratory disorders. You might smoke 3 packs a day and live to be 100, but it's far less likely than if you quit smoking, ate right, and excercised.

Anthropogenic (people-caused) climate change is no different. We can't predict fully what the effects of dumping gigatons of carbon into our atmosphere will ultimately be because we don't yet fully understand how the climate functions. But just like you can't predict in your twenties whether those two packs a day will kill in your 50s or in your 90s, the correlation between smoking and illness, or the greenhouse gases we release and climate change, is strong enough to suggest that the most prudent option for our health would be to quit. Similarly, if people produce pollution, the prudent option is to stabilize population in the U.S. an in the world at large.

But consider that most of these fossil fuels are from ancient life. We know that the world was significantly warmer in the past, based on evidence of fossil fuels at the polar regions, suggesting that life was once abundant in these frigid extremes. We also know, based on geological evidence, that the atmosphere was much richer in carbon dioxide in those ages, as much as 6 times more carbon, suggesting a correlation between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. It stands to reason, then, that if the fossil fuels we are burning now are essentially composed of that ancient atmospheric carbon, coverted to organic matter by photosynthesis before being trapped in sediment and fossilized into fossil fuels, then we are basically taking all that stored carbon and putting it back in our atmosphere.

The fact is, we don't really know exactly what this will do to our planet. But we do know, from the fossil evidence, that there is a definite link between carbon dioxide concentration and climate: historically, the more CO2, the higher the average global temperature.

Is this a hypothesis we really want to test?

Raindrop