Children Of Men, Part 2  

The subject of population is one which tends to get a lot of attention in peak oil and other "limits to growth" focussed areas, and one I like to go on about at length as some of you may have noticed previously. My personal view is that by and large the overall trends look fairly good, and there are few things that dismay me more than doomers talking about the need to reduce the population.

Some parts of the world already face declining populations, sometimes due to too much of a good thing (the combination of economic development, women's education and easily accessible birth control that we see in western Europe and Japan) and sometimes for more unpleasant reasons (totalitarian controls, war, hunger, disease, environmental pollution or simply a cost of living that discourages having children).

The Guardian has an interesting report on gender imbalances in the far north - "man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic" - which would seem to be a bad example of hitting a limit on population growth, but not the sort of overshoot that the doomers worry about.

Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).

The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their investigation across the most acutely affected communities in Russia, Greenland and Canada to try to discover the size of the imbalance in Inuit communities of the far north. In the communities of Greenland and eastern Russia monitored so far, the ratio was found to be two girls to one boy. In one village in Greenland only girls have been born.

The scientists measured the man-made chemicals in women's blood that mimic human hormones and concluded that they were capable of triggering changes in the sex of unborn children in the first three weeks of gestation. The chemicals are carried in the mother's bloodstream through the placenta to the foetus, switching hormones to create girl children.

Lars-Otto Reierson, executive secretary for Amap, said: "We knew that the levels of man-made chemicals were accumulating in the food chain, and that seals, whales and particularly polar bears were getting a dose a million times higher than that existing in plankton, and that this could be toxic to humans who ate these higher animals. What was shocking was that they were also able to change the sex of children before birth."

The sex balance of the human race - historically a slight excess of boys over girls - has recently begun to change. A paper published in the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences earlier this year said that in Japan and the US there were 250,000 boys fewer than would have been expected had the sex ratio existing in 1970 remained unchanged. The paper was unable to pin down a cause for the new excess of girls over boys.

The Arctic scientists have discovered that many of the babies born in Russia are premature and the boys are far smaller than girls. Possible links between the pollutants and high infant mortality in the first year of life is also being investigated.

Scientists believe a number of man-made chemicals used in electrical equipment from generators, televisions and computers that mimic human hormones are implicated. They are carried by winds and rivers to the Arctic where they accumulate in the food chain and in the bloodstreams of the largely meat- and fish-eating Inuit communities.

The first results of the survey were disclosed at a symposium of religious, scientific and environmental leaders in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, yesterday, organised by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I, which is looking at the effects of environmental pollution on the Arctic.

Dr Reierson said the accumulation of DDT, PCBs, flame-retardants and other endocrine disrupters has been known for some time and young women had been advised to avoid eating some Arctic animals to avoid excess contamination and possible damage to their unborn children.

I wonder if the excess of girls in the north will match the excess of boys in single-child policy China in future ? Or if the Chinese environment will deteriorate to the point where the choice is between having a girl and having no child at all instead of the choice between a boy and a girl ?

The International Herald Tribune has a "Letter from Europe" on "Russia's demographic crisis".

It is a tragedy touching millions. Sixty years after World War II, Russians are dying younger in peacetime than their grandparents did under Stalin. They are having fewer children, and many are falling mortally ill from alcohol-related diseases. The alarming trends have accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, despite the unprecedented growth of the Russian economy, which is expected to increase 7 percent this year, fueled by high energy prices. Russians who should be reaping the benefits of such growth are not.

"A terrible demographic crisis is taking place," said Nikolay Petrov, a specialist on Russian society at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "Over the next 20 years, Russia will need 20 million immigrants to compensate for the labor shortage. This is the first time in which the population and labor force are declining together. It will have an enormous impact on Russia's economic and strategic ambitions."

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has only recently acknowledged part of the problem by promising more money for mothers who have a second child. Petrov said the root causes - cardiovascular diseases caused by alcoholism and smoking - were not being tackled. Since 1992, Russia's population has fallen 3 percent, to 143.8 million from 148.7 million. Other countries have experienced sharp declines over the same period - in Bosnia, the war reduced the population by 10 percent, while emigration sapped the populations of Armenia and Kazakhstan. In the case of Russia, domestic and social reasons, not war or emigration, are draining the country of its people.

"The drop in population in Russia is unprecedented among industrialized countries," said Patricio Marquez, lead health specialist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank and one of the authors of a new study, "Dying Too Young in the Russian Federation." Life expectancy of Russian men is below 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985 and 63 years in the early 1950s. They are also living 16 years less on average than their male counterparts in Western Europe and 14 years less than Russian women because of their lifestyle.

A report by the World Health Organization showed that heart disease, aggravated by alcoholism and tobacco, account for more than 1.2 million deaths - nearly half the total - each year. Alcoholism, too, is one of the main reasons for road traffic accidents and injuries at the workplace. While alcoholism affects fertility, demographers said, the trend toward increased female infertility is also caused by abortions and the increase in HIV-AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections.

The consequences may thwart Putin's strategic ambitions. Since coming to power in 1999, he has sought to resurrect Russia as a great global power. Thanks to high energy prices, Putin has paid off Russia's debts. He has used the energy revenues to build up a stabilization fund, now standing at $150 billion, to act as a buffer against domestic and global currency turbulences or to supplement pensions. He said last year that he had plans to diversify the economy to make growth less dependent on energy and commodities.

Internationally, Putin has promoted Russia's political and economic interests, opposing independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo and U.S. plans to deploy part of its missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. He is also investing in the armed forces and defense industry. These ambitions require money, which Russia has, but also people and skills, which Russia lacks. "I am not sure the Kremlin has acknowledged the impact of the demographic trends for realizing these ambitions," Petrov said. "For instance, there will be a serious shortage of army conscripts. Yet the necessary military reforms have not yet been introduced to deal with this." Russia's internal security could be jeopardized as well. Marquez said: "Russia is a vast country with very long borders. Some of the border regions are being depopulated. Who is going to defend the borders?"

The economy, too, will suffer. "There is a big shortage of skilled labor," said Alexander Lehmann, senior economist and specialist on Russia's macroeconomy at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. "In 2007, Russia's labor force reached a peak of 90 million. It will be 15 million fewer by 2020.

On the flip side, the time for encouraging rapid population expansion is long past - The Australian has an article on a sacked German TV star who foolishly expressed admiration for Nazi "values" which touched on German wartime population policy (an ugly combination of encouraging German population growth while actively depopulating other people). To be fair to this stupid person, based on the article it sounds like she was just mouthing typical conservative platitudes which Hitler also used, rather than praising Hitler himself.

SHE was Germany's favourite newsreader - a blonde, blue-eyed television star who became a campaigner for old-fashioned femininity. Now Eva Herman has fallen from her pedestal - she has been sacked for praising Hitler's policies towards women, families and motherhood. The Nazi years, she said, while presenting her latest book, The Noah's Ark Principle, were a cruel time. They had, though, a redeeming quality: they celebrated family values. "There were the good things, too, that is to say the values, the children, the mothers, the families, the solidarity ..."

Within hours, Herman, 48, was dismissed from state television. She has lost her talk show with immediate effect and her position as the presenter of the quiz program Did You See ...?

Part of Herman's appeal to viewers was her campaign for a return to old-fashioned femininity. In an earlier book, she pleaded for motherhood to be respected by society. Feminists accused her of trying to recreate the traditional German values of "children, kitchen and church". The far Right seemed to agree. An organisation run by the Austrian nationalist Freedom Party invited her as a speaker - she cancelled at the last minute - and she is celebrated by far-right blogs.

This time, Herman seems to have gone too far in blurring the boundaries between traditional German virtues and Nazi policies. "This is the worst I have heard in a long time," the German Jewish novelist Ralph Giordano said. "Frau Herman should realise that the distinguishing feature of the Third Reich was not the way it treated mothers who were supposed to produce cannon fodder. The distinguishing feature was the use of the gas chambers."

Herman said: "You have to see my remarks in context. This is not about Hitler's values but about basic human values which were abused in the Third Reich." Under the Nazis, mothers who bore four healthy children were awarded a medal, the Mother Cross. Pregnant "Aryan" mothers were given generous maternity leave in the 1930s but primarily to free up work for the male unemployed. Children were encouraged in order to create the army of the future and to populate the captured territories in Eastern Europe.

"Whoever knows me and reads the book will be aware how deeply I reject left- and right-wing extremism," Herman said. Her central thesis is that women have been forced to deny their true nurturing nature by the social pressure to succeed in the workplace. This in turn has robbed men of their sense of manhood and is contributing to Germany's very low birthrate.

The Age has an interesting article on one part of Europe with a growing population - the booming UK - "Welcome to a brave new Blighty — where globalisation rules".

A HUGE experiment is under way in Britain, one not all the locals like, though it seems to be doing many of them good. It is the transformation of the country into one of the most open, globalised nations in the world.

New figures show that last year a record 574,000 people came to Britain to live — nearly 1 per cent of the population. Australia, by contrast, took in 130,000 migrants last year — 0.65 per cent of its population. And Britain is a much smaller island. What's more, Britain's figure does not count the 600,000 workers from Eastern Europe who have arrived since 2004, turning the lingua franca of farms, building sites and cafes into Polish. Catholicism may soon be Britain's most popular form of worship again, after nearly 500 years in the sin bin.

But British immigration is countered by emigration. Last year a "staggering" 385,000 people left the country for good, according to Brits Abroad, a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research. One in 10 Britons now lives abroad, a diaspora twice as large, proportionally, as the Australian one. Nearly 700,000 Britons live in France, 800,000 in Spain; only Australia has more (1.3 million). Low-cost airlines and £10 flights have sparked a continental real estate boom in Britain. TV shows spruik the benefits of buying apartments in Bulgaria.

No wonder Britain has the world's busiest airport — Heathrow. One in five of all international flights lands in or leaves Britain, as 90 million people make journeys in and out of the country each year. The Brits Abroad report calls Britain the crossroads of the world. The driver, as ever, is money. Jobs are pulling people in; new wealth is luring people out. As Prime Minister Gordon Brown never tires of saying, Britain's GDP per head was bottom of the G7 (now G8) group of nations when Labour took power in 1997; today it is second.

Although the fruits of the boom are by no means equally distributed, it is still dizzying change in a country where, a mere 40 years ago, two-thirds of people defined themselves as working-class. The cockney flower seller on our street corner takes her annual holidays in Dubai. Britain has probably liberalised its economy more than any other European country. While France has fought to keep its big industries in French hands, Britain has let them go. The 200-year-old P&O shipping company was bought last year by the Dubai Government. The Chinese own Rover, the Germans Bentley and Rolls-Royce.

In the home of the industrial revolution, since 1997 manufacturing has fallen from 21 to 14 per cent of GDP, compared with 22 per cent for the whole European Union. The Brits hardly make anything any more. Instead, they do a lot of trading and talking. Dominated by education, tourism, business services and above all, finance, the economy seems to run on air.

Several studies, including one commissioned by worried New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, show London is poised to overtake New York as the world's financial capital. The Brits have become expert at handling other people's money. And with few questions asked. From 2002, as the US tightened its rules on financial disclosure and directors' responsibilities after Enron and other corporate scandals, money has fled the US for less regulated, looser London.

Similarly, relaxed tax laws have turned Britain into a tax haven for the world's wealthy. The country now has 68 billionaires, three times as many as four years ago. Only three of its 10 richest people were born in Britain. Prominent among the arriviste rich are the Russian oligarchs, fugitives from Vladimir Putin, who are snapping up country estates, and reportedly a fifth of all houses sold in London worth more than £5 million ($A12.3 million).

Their purchases have fuelled a dangerously overheated housing market. Britons are deep in debt: last month it was reported that the value of debt from loans and credit cards had for the first time passed the value of GDP. It could all still end in tears. Government spending on redistribution has kept rising inequality in check but that would change if the economy turns down.

Change has produced much fretting about national identity and whether Britain will hold together. Traditionalists lament a new vulgarity, a cashed-up and boozy hedonism, especially in London. Certainly the capital is pulling away from the rest of the country. Like New York or Hong Kong, it is becoming a city state, separate from the hinterland and sometimes distrusted by it. In the next decade, 80 per cent of all immigrants are expected to go to London, where a third of the population is non-white. By contrast, the non-white population of Britain as a whole is only 8 per cent, about the same as in Australia. You don't have to drive far into the countryside before black and brown faces virtually disappear.

Immigration may be the country's most volatile issue.

For years there have been warnings of an imminent anti-immigration backlash. In polls voters regularly put it near the top of their concerns. Yet for all that, the issue never seems to gain enough momentum to significantly shift government policy. The Conservatives ran hard on big cuts to immigration in the 2005 election and lost. No doubt the rate of immigration will vary over time. But people flow is probably a permanent feature of modern life, too important to the economy and human needs to be stopped. That seems to be one of the lessons of Britain's relatively sudden, but deep, embrace of globalisation.

Now by and large I found the transformation of London from the often dismal, unhappy place it was when I first lived there (1992) to the booming modern city of today a good thing (and you'll certainly never hear me criticising the "boozy hedonism" of the place), however the contrast between London and much of the rest of the country is vast (and was even back in the early 1990s). If the economy does fall into a hole at some point (especially the doomer vision of resource scarcity without successful adaptation) the "Children Of Men" vision of immigrant rejection may not be too far off the mark.

The Times has an article on Tory political candidate and prominent environmentalist Zac Goldsmith ("You’re going green ...or else"), who is standing her election in one of my old homes, the green and leafy London area of Richmond. The Goldsmiths are an interesting bunch - while I'd agree with everything Zac says in this article there are persistent accusations of at least "a whiff of ecofascism" following the family around - see here, here and here. Hopefully he sticks with the positive ideas outlined in the article and doesn't turn into something out of some of the grimmer visions of the future...

‘The world my children will live in will be very different,” says Zac Goldsmith, father of three, staring into the middle distance. “The way we travel will change and the way we build and communicate. But I think the changes will be good. I’m optimistic for the first time in my life.”

Two years ago the multi-millionaire former editor of the Ecologist magazine considered his mission thus: to wake people up to climate change: “Now, that has been done. There are sceptics but people know about the issues. Before the last election I was asked why the environment was so low down the agenda. You couldn’t say that now, it has completely changed.”

I had never met Goldsmith before but I had read plenty of descriptions of this golden boy of the green movement. He is clever, rich and good-looking (his sister is Jemima, former friend of Diana, Princess of Wales and ex-wife of Imran Khan). I expected the former Etonian also to be languid – he was expelled for possession of dope – but instead I am taken aback by his oomph. Dressed in a sharp blue suit, he sucks furiously at roll-ups and shoots off ideas so fast that I can barely keep up. We meet in a garden overshadowed by Conservative HQ on Millbank, central London, to talk about the forthcoming Quality of Life review that Goldsmith, Tory parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park, Surrey, has prepared for David Cameron. His co-chairman on the review was John Gummer, the former environment minister. They took advice from a huge range of individuals and groups, from Greenpeace to EDF Energy. “We cast the net wide,” says Goldsmith.

The full report will be published on Thursday, so this is something of a warm-up. Goldsmith, although not yet a professional politician, sticks to his brief with only minor wobbles and what he really wants to talk about is energy. Many geologists believe that global oil supplies are approaching peak volumes. Some say they have peaked already, that we will never produce more oil than we do now. Meanwhile, global demand shoots up and up. Pessimists predict severe and unending economic depression as demand exceeds supply. “Peak oil informs everything,” says Goldsmith. “People ought to know about that, but they don’t. When it’s going to peak or if it’s happened already I don’t know, but if oil ran out tomorrow we would be stuffed. We depend on it for everything.”

Goldsmith’s review aims to tackle this grim situation by means of several painless measures: “We have not imagined policy ideas that are going to be repugnant to people.”

I nod, reassured. For instance, since much energy generated at power stations is lost before it reaches our homes. Goldsmith and Gummer propose to encourage a system of micro generation by introducing a “feed-in tariff”, rewarding households and businesses that install renewables so they can generate their own power. “Under the German system anyone generating electricity from solar PV [photovoltaic], wind or hydro is guaranteed a payment of four times the market rate for 20 years. That reduces the time it takes to get the money back and makes it a more attractive investment. Freiberg, in Bavaria, has only 200,000 people but generates more solar power than the whole of Britain.”

The report also has ideas for encouraging energy efficiency: “That is key. It’s easy to raise standards on new homes but that is a tiny part of the puzzle. You can get 33% savings with a little expenditure on a house. You have a variety of ways to do that, but because this is likely to be disruptive the best time to make those changes is when homes change ownership. “And that can be done by offering an incentive on stamp duty. When you sell your house and you know you will get reduced stamp duty you will make the necessary improvements. It’s a no-brainer. “We should be incentivising the right decisions. We want to make this stuff obvious without pissing people off. There has never been a greater appetite for green solutions. We have to get it right or people will turn off.”

That is what is happening with biofuels, I suggest. “Biofuels have potential, they can be good, but only secondary biofuels such as unwanted chip fat or corn stalks or vegetable waste. Primary biofuels grown specifically for fuel are terrible. If you covered every acre in the US you would produce 10% of the fuel requirement and the carbon saving would be only 2% or 3%.” And nowhere to grow food.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, Goldsmith affirms, but too often people think it’s the other way round: “From the point of view of the environment the market has been disastrous, because carbon does not appear on bottom lines. But if you tax carbon effectively you will change people’s behaviour.” He tells me with palpable excitement about a huge construction company that has reduced landfill enormously because executives feared they might soon be hit by a huge landfill tax: “We have a big emphasis on the market in our report and the role of the government is to understand the market. Without government intervention we wouldn’t have fixed the hole in the ozone layer.” ...

Goldsmith has put a lot of work into this report and exerted considerable influence, despite being unelected. So why be an MP? And will he bow out if Cameron ignores his recommenda-tions? “I’d be happy if only half of it was accepted. I have done all kinds of campaigning and raised dosh and lobbied and tried to identify the best campaigns. But because the Conservative party were brutalised at the elections [not least by the wrecking tactics, in 1997, of his late father Sir James and his Referendum party] it started them thinking about things from scratch. I am genuinely excited by the opportunity David Cameron has opened up.”

Goldsmith originally put himself forward for East Hampshire, a safe seat, but the night before the selection panel he changed his mind. “I didn’t know East Hampshire. One of the problems with politics is that it’s not local enough. People get parachuted in with no feeling for the place and it’s wrong. I wrote to them telling them I couldn’t do it.” Richmond Park, where he grew up, was different. He put himself up and was accepted. The great thing about running for parliament, he says, is that he can even effect change as he goes along. He has spoken to about 25 schools and funded a ground-breaking postal ballot of residents to fight a proposed supermarket. ...

What about nuclear power? “I make no secret of my position. If there is a future for nuclear power it has to be without government subsidy. We make clear that you must show you can afford the decommissioning and waste disposal before you start. I’m happy with that.”

Links:

* The Guardian - Greens need to grasp the nettle: aren't there just too many people?. No.
* The Australian - Ebola Kills 160 In Congo
* TreeHugger - Colbert Does Bjorn Lomborg
* Crooked Timber - Chaos Hawks And Quagmires
* Newsweek - Rating Petraeus's Report to the Hill
* ICH - "We're Dealing with a Christian Taliban"
* RI - No One Saw the Carny Go. Personally I think Ron Paul is a good guy (as I do Kucinich for that matter), regardless of some of the people trying to push his bandwagon along - and even if you don't like his free market politics, in the case of the Republican candidates he's by far the lesser of 10 or 11 evils (how many antiwar and pro-civil liberties politicians can you name that were really fascists ?). But I'll award points for the Green Day song and the rare return to something approaching the quality (remember - its tinfoil) of days gone by for the post and a few of the comments (some of which get on-topic for this post if you trudge through them far enough).