By Steve Sailer
12/03/2009
The President is about roar off to Copenhagen in his personal 747 jumbo jet to raise awareness, in a December 9 speech, of how carbon emissions lead to Climate Change — the cause formerly known as "Global Warming".
But while the President gears up his campaign for Climate Change awareness in Denmark, a Population Change anti-awareness campaign has long been in full swing in America.
The acid test of the sincerity of Climate Change activists: do they publicly demand a U.S immigration moratorium to keep carbon emissions from increasing?
A few environmentalists pass this test proudly. For example, Californians for Population Stabilization has started a new ad campaign. Their press release says:
"The campaign recognizes immigration as the number one factor driving U.S. population growth and makes the point that when immigrants settle in the U.S. their energy use quickly becomes Americanized. As a result, immigrants' carbon emissions skyrocket. The result is a quadrupling of immigrants' carbon footprint compared to the amount of carbon emissions they produced in their home countries."
Mexicans don’t illegally immigrate to avoid starvation. The average life expectancy in Mexico is over 76 years. Instead, the major motivations for sneaking into America include: the hope of owning a big truck or SUV; and to have more kids than you could afford to have in your own country. The current total fertility rate in Mexico is 2.34 babies per woman per lifetime — versus 3.7 babies among immigrant Latinas in California.
But, alas, the vast majority of those who claim that carbon emissions is the overwhelming issue of our age fail this test of good faith flatly.
On the other hand, their dishonesty doesn’t guarantee that they aren’t right about carbon and global warming. Global warming true believers seem, on the whole, like the kind of people who would be more likely to be right about something for bad reasons than for good reasons.
As you may have noticed from the above, I normally don’t have much to say about climate change. I’m sort of an agnostic.
I know enough about statistics to realize how much effort would be required for me to develop an opinion worth expressing. Nor is it obvious that, even if I invested years of work, I would be able to add much value to the discussion.
After all, both sides in the debate over anthropogenic global warming debate are lavishly funded.
Thus the participants have much to lose if the numbers don’t come out the way they want. This is demonstrated by the Climategate scandal, in which a skeptical whistleblower leaked embarrassing emails from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
I do instinctively admire much of the Burkean-sounding rhetoric used by Climate Change activists: "sustainability"; cautiousness about the future; a concern for the long-term impact of millions of small action; a regard for the welfare of posterity.
Yet why are those Climate Change insights so seldom applied to the question of Population Change?
So I've decided to devote my time to Population Change. It’s an issue that is at least comparable in long-term importance to Climate Change. The changing makeup of the population has far-reaching ramifications that deserve well-informed public discussion. But, of course, that’s not a fashionable view on either the Left or the corporate Right.
Unlike with Climate Change, there’s almost no debate over the numbers with Population Change. The government collects voluminous statistics about the present that are, at minimum, good enough for government work, and make plausible demographic projections about the future.
Nor do I have to worry much about my rivals in the Population Change debate. While the other side enjoys unlimited access to the media, it simply prefers demonizing to debating.
Quantifying what you can see with your own eyes makes you a bad person these days. A nice person, one who believes in climate change, has faith in the power of things unseen.
To serve my country, I just have to have a thick enough hide to withstand rage-filled respectable conduits of the reigning dogmas screaming "How dare you?" at me.
Mostly, I just have to dare.
Moreover, the data, both governmental and academic, merely confirm what’s visible to anyone with eyes to see. In contrast, the scariest prediction of Al Gore and Co. — that the ice caps will melt, causing the seas to rise and inundate us — is not at all obvious from just using your eyes.
I went for a walk on a Southern California beach recently, and couldn’t see any evidence of the ocean level rising.
That doesn’t mean ocean levels aren’t — or at least won’t start — rising Real Soon Now. But it does mean that it’s not at all obvious.
And, as Sherlock Holmes pointed out, you have to notice the dogs that aren’t barking.
For example, are California surfers complaining that rising seas are wiping out beaches, or deepening the water over underwater reefs that cause famous breaks like the Pipeline in Orange County?
Not that I’m aware of.
Are rich, white liberal environmental activists who live on the beach in Malibu, such as David Geffen, fleeing to the High Desert?
No.
Walking the beach recently after a rain shower, I didn’t notice any For Sale signs on the zillionaires' homes forty yards from the surf. Indeed, in California, home prices have proven much more resilient in direct proportion to how close they are to the ocean’s edge, while they've plummeted in the high and dry Inland Empire.
This is not to say that there’s nothing to worry about from Climate Change. Yet what people seem to actually be affected by, as demonstrated in real estate prices, is Population Change.
The Mortgage Meltdown is closely linked to population change. For example, the correlation for the 20 biggest California metropolitan areas between minority share of subprime mortgages in 2006 and foreclosure rates in 2009 was a stratospheric r = 0.89.
California has already been inundated, fiscally, by the rising tide of population change.
But only evil people like me are aware of that — and dare to tell the rest of America.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.