We are working to bring more graphics and make the paper more pleasing to read, and that process is underway as you will see in our centerspread story on our ageing global population. We are also going to have a redesign in the new year to make the paper a little easier to read. But the downside of making the paper more [...]
By Paul Tuns One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias (Portfolio, $37, 267 pages) Matthew Yglesias is a policy wonk and political commentator for the left-wing Vox website. His new book, One Billion Americans, could have been a good and important contribution to American discourse, adding to the dearth of serious, or at least ambitious, ideas. Yglesias makes [...]
11,000 scientists have signed onto an article declaring that “the world population must be stabilized – and, ideally, gradually reduced,” because a “climate emergency” threatens “the fate of humanity.” Written by the Alliance of World Scientists and full of alarmist, apocalyptic language, the article was published today in BioScience. “Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 [...]
There are many definitions of the cynic. The one I choose for this article describes the person who is hostile toward the past that he knows and hospitable toward the future that he does not know. The clearest example of this form of cynicism about which I am aware belongs to a former colleague of mine who shall remain anonymous: “Marriage is [...]
Pro-life groups are sounding the alarm that the United Nations is, in the words of Campaign Life Coalition’s global policy and research coordinator Emily Price, who was present at the 63rd Commission on the Status of Women, “being dishonest and making a complete mockery of national sovereignty and the legitimate process of consensus-building.” At the beginning of the commission, a draft document contained [...]
We recently reviewed Population Bombed: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Changein these pages (“Persistently incorrect population worries,” October), in which authors Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak argue that concerns about the environment are always -- always -- accompanied by the desire to control reproduction. Put another way, the solution to real or imagined environmental challenges inevitably includes depopulation control measures [...]
Population Bombed: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Changeby Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak (Global Warming Policy Foundation, $15.99 pb, $7.75 Kindle, 259 pages) Worries about over-population are a seeming constant in debates of world issues, returning regularly to stoke fear about the rising number of people inhabiting the planet. Earlier this year, Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The [...]
Despite evidence to the contrary, population control advocate Paul Ehrlich maintains that the Earth cannot support 7 billion people. This month marks the 50th anniversary of biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, in which he famously and incorrectly predicted it was a “near certainty” that humanity faced imminent demise because over-consumption of resources would result in “hundreds of million of [...]
A group of African women joined forces with the Holy See and pro-life groups during the United Nations conference on women last month to denounce Western donors for pushing contraception and abortion on African women who don’t want it. “Africa has been picked on,” noted Nigerian-born Obianuju Ekeocha, founder of Culture of Life Africa, during a panel at the two-week UN CSW62, [...]
There is a new book out by Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians is Not Enough (Penguin, $27.95). In brief he argues Canada has too much land and too few people. In some ways he is counter-intuitive, saying that more people are necessary for Canada to become an environmental leader. Typically, more population is seen [...]
Statistics Canada revealed 2016 census figures on “families, households, and marital status” that showed a record number of Canadians are living alone. One-person households comprise 28 per cent of households, the most common type arrangement. The next most common are couples with children (26 per cent) followed by couples without children (26 per cent). Lone-parent families make up nine per cent of [...]
Last month, Statistics Canada released its statistical portrait of the country with the first population numbers since 2011. There are now precisely 35,151,728 Canadians, at least on Census Day, May 10, 2016. As the Stats Can release notes, that is about ten times as many Canadians as there were when the first census was taken in 1871 when there were 3.5 million [...]
Praised a leading environmentalist, Maurice Strong favoured de-population policies. Maurice Strong, the Canadian often credited with mainstreaming the environmental movement, passed away Nov. 28 at the age of 86. He was praised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an “internationally recognized environmentalist and philanthropist” and a “global pioneer of sustainable development who left our country and our world a better [...]
There are currently 7.3 billion people sharing the Earth, and the 2015 Revision of the World Population Prospects issued by the United Nations Population Division estimates that there will be nearly four billion more people by 2100. Media coverage was typically dismal about the news the UN estimates there will be a world population of 11 billion by the turn of the [...]
National Affairs Rory Leishman Given the dramatic drop in birth rates throughout most of the world over the past 50 years, it is amazing that so many doom-and-gloom academics still cling to the false and pernicious notion of global overpopulation. Prominent among these persistent doomsayers is Stephen Emmott, professor of computational science at Oxford University. In his recently published and [...]