Vital Pro Life News

From http://lifenews.com/nat2681.html

Worldwide Population Growth Has Been a Plus for the Environment

Email this article Printer friendly page

by Joseph A. D'AgostinoOctober 22, 2006

LifeNews.com Note: Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the Population Research Institute.Opponents of population growth almost always cite environmental concerns, and this week's media coverage of America hitting 300 million in population was not an exception. I have written recently about other myths connected to population growth, from suburban sprawl to immigration, and this week it's time to talk about the environment.

Environmentalists' big problem is that by almost every measure, the environment of the United States has gotten cleaner in recent decades as her population increased by 50%. Our population hit 200 million in 1967 and 300 million last Tuesday. In those 40 years, America cleaned herself up quite well. At the same time, the supply of natural resources has expanded, not contracted, as new discoveries and new technologies outpace resource consumption.
Keep in mind that ever since Protestant clergyman Thomas Malthus in the late 18th Century, doomsaying prophets have predicted that, due to the increasing human population, the world would soon run out of some resource, causing mass deaths and social collapse. When Malthus launched his jeremiads, the world's population was approximately 1 billion. Today,it is over 6.5 billion, and we are still waiting for the extinction of any crucial natural resource.
Consider the following evidence for an ever-cleaner environment and more abundant natural resources:

* In 1982, half of our nation's ozone monitoring stations detected levels exceeding the federal health standard. Twenty years later, only 13% did.
* Wrote Joel Schwartz in the Summer 2003 issue of Regulation, "Between 1981 and 2000, carbon monoxide (CO) declined 61%, sulfur dioxide (SO2) 50%, and nitrogen oxides (NOx)14%. Only two among hundreds of the nation's monitoring locations still exceed the CO and SO2 standards. All areas of the country meet the NOx standard. For all three pollutants,pollution levels are well below the EPA standards in almost all cases."
Indications are that our air has continued to get cleaner in the last three years. Emissions from cars and SUVs less than ten years old have dropped to a fraction of older cars' levels. As older cars get junked and government-mandated clean technologies are implemented, car and SUV emissions are expected to drop by a further 90% over the next 20 years. Breathe deep.
* Water has become similarly cleaner, and the United States' drinking water is generally considered the best in the world. (I am not claiming that our water supply is free of pollution, just that it is cleaner than it was 30 years ago.) Reports the EPA, "The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 has helped our citizens enjoy one of the safest and cleanest water supplies in the world. .

. . In the last 30 years, we have significantly increased the number of individuals and communities receiving water that meets public health standards. More than 273 million people receive water from 53,000 community water systems. There has been a three-fold increase in the number of contaminants regulated under the Act since it was passed in 1974. Close to 92% of the nation's water systems provide drinking water that meets all public health standards, and state and federal regulators are working to ensure that all systems meet standards."
* Worrywarts now emphasize that America's Western states could run out of water if population growth continues. It's true that Western water, currently cheap even in most desert regions, could become modestly more expensive over time as demand increases. But running out is highly unlikely. California can prepare for growth in demand from 8.8 million acre-feet annually today to the expected 11.4 million acre-feet in 2020. For example: "It is anticipated that another 162 [water] recycling plants will come on line this decade. These projects, which are mostly in southern California , are expected to produce up to 1 million acre-feet of recycled water annually by 2020," says the Water Education Foundation. Desalination plants, though expensive, could always provide more water for California and other Western states near the coast.

* Proven oil reserves are at an all-time high of 1 trillion barrels. Far from running out, we keep finding more of it. And in North America alone, there are an additional 2.3 trillion barrels of oil in shale and other forms currently too expensive to use. Technology may soon make them economically viable. Plenty of alternatives to petroleum currently exist, from liquefied coal to diesel from agricultural waste. And nuclear power is still there, ready to provide an almost inexhaustible supply of power for any purpose if people ever get over their hang-ups about it.
* World food production is so efficient that many governments, including our own, spend billions of dollars a year to pay farmers not to grow food in order to prevent a food price collapse. Barring some unforeseen blight on world agriculture, there is no chance of the world's being unable to feed itself. Famines today are caused by distribution problems, usually produced by war or deliberately inflicted by corrupt governments to enhance their own power.
What of that massive political movement known as global warming, today's fashionable secular substitute for the Biblical apocalypse?
Bored of combating everyday environmental problems such as mercury in seafood andhormones in drinking water, environmentalists invented something much sexier: The imminent destruction of Earth unless you do what we say! Why trudge to local land-use meetings to lobby for preserving open space when you can preach the salvation of the world like an Old Testament prophet? One gains so much more social importance if people think you have the answer to averting Armageddon.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but global warming theology produces the same practical results as the socialism Western leftists have been forced to abandon: An immense increase in the power of the political/regulatory class and an immense reduction in the standard of living of ordinary people. Why have so many scientists jumped on the bandwagon? Contrary to popular myth, scientists are just as venal and fallible as anyone else, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

As Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 9, 2004, "Politics distorts science, particularly environmental science, because 99.99% of those sciences' financial support comes from the federal government. Scientists distort science because their careers depend on the money they bring to their university or theirlaboratory. Both the employees of the academy, and the academy itself, must support a political process that results in the exaggeration of threats. In competition for a finite federal outlay, scientists present their particular issues (global warming, cancer, AIDS) in the most urgent light possible, threatening societal ruin if their work isn't funded."
And why wouldn't federal bureaucrats want to hear evidence of a massive crisis that massively enhances their own power and budgets?
I've written about global warming hysteria before, so I will restrict myself today to noting the following:

* The Earth's climate is always trending warmer or cooler at any given moment. There is no genuine evidence that any current warming trend (if one even exists) falls outside the range of natural climatic variation.
* According to global warming hysterics' own studies, there is no correlation between when the bulk of man-made greenhouse gases were put into the atmosphere and warming. In fact, temperatures declined for decades during at least one of the most intense periods ofindustrialization.
* Proponents of the Kyoto protocol, which would decimate the standards of living of the common peoples of America and Western Europe, themselves admit that it would have no significant effect on stopping warming. They want something far more radical and which would have to apply to the whole world to work.

* The Western world continues to transfer its industrial capacity to the Third World. China and India, which together have over one-third of the world's people, are rapidly industrializing and aren't going to stay mired in poverty no matter what Western political hacks and theirbought-and-paid-for pointy-headed experts say. Reducing the world's overall greenhouse gas emissions is impossible. Instead, it is as certain as such a thing can be that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise for decades to come, even if Al Gore becomes President of the United States--unless affordable technologies that allow unfettered industrial development but prevent greenhouse gas emissions are invented and then adopted by the Third World.
* In the 1970s, it was fashionable to worry about "global cooling," supposedly caused by man-made pollution in the atmosphere blocking out the sun's energy. Fifteen years later, media-favored experts starting talking about global warming supposedly caused by man-made pollution trapping in the sun's energy.
There is no correlation between population growth or population density and environmental degradation. Instead, wealth correlates to environmental degradation and then improvement.
When a country begins to develop, her environment suffers. But when she has reached a certain level, between $3,500 and $15,000 in per capita income, her environment begins to improve as people can afford (and demand) cleaner technologies. And then the wealthier they get, the cleaner their environment becomes.

That's why ultra-poor subsistence-level areas, Western Europe, Canada, and the United States all have the cleanest environments. Getting China, India, and other developing countries over the wealth hump is the surest way to improve the world's environment. Preserving America's economic and per capita wealth growth is the best way of continuing to improve ours.


_____________________________


From http://lifenews.com/nat2680.html

Population Reaches 300M But Overpopulation Concerns Don't Exist
Email this article Printer friendly page
by Jonah GoldbergOctober 22, 2006
LifeNews.com Note: Jonah Goldberg is the editor at large of National Review Online. As I write this, America’s population reportedly has passed the 300 million mark. The most remarkable aspect of this landmark event is how unremarkable it really is.“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”That was D. H. Lawrence daydreaming about population control. He was hardly alone. During the so-called Progressive Era, “enlightened” social planners were convinced that overpopulation was the gravest problem facing Western society. That’s why Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”
George Bernard Shaw, a thoroughgoing eugenicist, believed that the “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.” H. G. Wells smiled at the prospect that the “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people” will “have to go.” In America, Wells’s onetime girlfriend, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued that birth control was essential to stem the rising tide of the unfit. Leading feminists, Progressive economists and legal theorists shared a similar vision. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who concluded in the case of Buck v. Bell that the state had the power to forcibly sterilize “defectives,” believed that forced population control was at the very heart of Progressive reform.
The Holocaust diminished the popularity of eugenics, but the panic over overpopulation endured. Paul Ehrlich, author of the scaremongering “The Population Bomb,” predicted in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, roughly 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve or otherwise meet their doom in the “Great Die-Off.” Inspired by such fears, Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of coerced birth control — i.e. “compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion” — throughout much of the world.Today, overpopulation anxieties pale by comparison to years past. But simply because people aren't proposing mass murder and forced sterilizations — or predicting that twice the population of California will starve to death in a country where obesity dwarfs hunger as a health concern — hardly means current anxieties are reasonable.These days, overpopulation is primarily a hang-up for environmentalists, though suburbanites and feminists occasionally whine about it, too. And an important part of the argument has changed. While before, Progressives were worried about the “muck” at the low end of the global population, they're now vexed by the fat cats at the top.

Americans consume more of the earth’s resources, they complain, and produce piles more greenhouse gasses. At the environmentalist fringe, there’s even a growing movement to convince eco-friendly Americans to voluntarily reduce or eliminate their own reproduction in order to ease the strain on Mother Nature. Since the political orientation of your parents is the single best determinant of your own politics, you can expect a lot fewer environmentalists in a couple decades if this idea catches on.What unites today’s worriers and those of yesteryear is their common allegiance to Malthusianism. The British economist Thomas Malthus argued that population will always outstrip available resources. And he was 100 percent wrong. Because people are, in the words of Julian Simon, “the ultimate resource.” Given the right policies, intellectual and economic productivity trumps biological reproductivity. “Between 1820 and 1992,” Ronald Bailey writes in Earth Report 2000, “world population quintupled even as the world’s economies grew 40-fold.” Productivity matters more than other statistical measures because it demonstrates we’re doing more with less. That’s why, for example, starvation is a political disaster, not a natural one. There’s literally too much food in the world.

There’s also plenty of land left. You could move the entire world population inside medium-sized homes and they’d all fit inside Texas, yielding a population density similar to that of Paris. Today’s Malthusians still look askance at economic productivity, believing that it’s better to limit growth at a “sustainable” rate, which means consigning billions of poor people to lives that threaten the environment (poor people treat their environments like expendable resources rather than priceless luxuries) and, worse, threaten their own lives. It’s more enlightened than dreaming of a giant gas chamber, to be sure. But that’s got to be small solace for those trapped at the bottom.

______________________________

From http://lifenews.com/nat2682.html

Pro-Abortion Activists Try to Rewrite History on Susan B. Anthony
Email this article Printer friendly page

by Marjorie DannenfelserOctober 22, 2006
LifeNews.com Note: Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a political action committee dedicated to supporting pro-life candidates.
Liberal scholars and pro-abortion advocates recently told Women’s eNews, an independent news organization originally founded by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, that they are out to “reclaim” the legacy of one of America’s most famous suffragists, Susan B. Anthony.
Gloria Feldt, the former head of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, reportedly stated, "There's absolutely nothing in anything that she (Anthony) ever said or did that would indicate she was anti-abortion."

An op-ed appearing in the New York Times last week said of Anthony, “She cast her vote always for tolerance, acting from a simple conviction: ‘For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.’ The bottom line is that we cannot possibly know what Anthony would make of today's debate.”
Really?
Then how do Feldt and the author of the New York Times column explain an 1869 article published in Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, which denounced abortion as “child murder” and went on to say “No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death.”
Liberal scholars are now claiming Anthony didn't write the article.
The new claim by pro-abortion activists that Susan B. Anthony was not pro-life doesn't pass the straight-face test. Anthony's own words speak for themselves – she called abortion ‘child murder.’ I don't know how anyone can read that and somehow think Anthony would today defend abortion on demand laws that have taken the lives of over 40 million unborn children since 1973.

The idea that, if you don't like what someone said, to simply claim they didn't say it, is taking political spin to a whole new level. This latest attempt to distort the facts surrounding abortion is further proof the pro-abortion lobby is on the defense. They have reverted to rewriting history.
To see other early feminists in their own words, click here: Pro-life statements of early suffragists.

_____________________

From http://lifenews.com/state1907.html


"Values Voters" Have Two Big Pro-Life Votes This Election Season
Email this article Printer friendly page
by Janice Shaw CrouseOctober 22, 2006
There are two big-ticket, values-voters issue campaigns in the upcoming midterm election. The ramifications of the outcomes for the two issues would be hard to overestimate.
Some previous threats to the nation's moral and ethical standards have been imposed by judicial fiat of tyrannical liberal judges legislating from the bench, but not this time. Two great moral issues of election 2006 will be determined at the polls and it is the people's voice that will determine the outcome.

Tragically, far too many values voters are blasй; many remain clueless to the far-reaching ramifications of the vote on these issues.

Vote No on Missouri’s Amendment 2

This amendment merges cloning and embryonic stem cell research. It has been called a Trojan horse because it's structured to hide the true purpose and details. The multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign highlights the supposed cures from stem cell research—carefully obscuring the distinctions between adult stem cell research (with proven results in medical use) and embryonic stem cell research (not even promising research results yet).
Even more disturbing is that private funding from owners of one research institute guarantees that institute millions in public funds.

Further, the amendment is advertised and promoted through lies and distortions; the selling of the bill contradicts the provisions that are incorporated in the bill. Those who are supporting the amendment are misleading the voting public at important points.
The headlines say that Amendment 2 bans cloning, but the small print makes cloning a constitutional right.

According to the Missouri legislation, embryonic implantation is fine as long as the intent is not to produce life. In other words, the proposition makes it acceptable to farm eggs—a procedure that preys on poor and vulnerable women by subjecting them to super-ovulation procedures with huge potential for harm to women's health.Many pro-life Americans believe that this five-page proposition is at the front line of the pro-life battle; that the number of abortions today is a fraction of the potential destruction of life from passage of this amendment. Estimates are that 43% of Missouri residents call themselves “evangelical.” If all were values voters who knew the details of the bill, it would go down in flames.

Vote Yes on South Dakota's Referred Law 6

In South Dakota, values voters face a similar distortion of the facts. That state's Referred Law 6 protects unborn life along with women's health. The opponents of the law claim that it lacks provisions for: 1) rape and incest victims (note that less than 2% of abortions in South Dakota have been due to rape or incest), 2) covering medical care for women who have been assaulted, 3) won't allow abortion to save the life of the mother, and 4) leaves doctors vulnerable to law suits when they are conducting legitimate medical procedures on women that result in a pre-born baby's death. All four claims are false.
The law protects women and doctors in the instances mentioned previously. More importantly, it recognizes that abortion hurts women. The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion reviewed more 3,500 pages of scientific research, collected affidavits from 2,000 women who had undergone abortions, and interviewed 54 experts to conclude that abortion has lasting, devastating effects on women's lives.

Values voters can't miss the importance of the issues in these two states.
A look at a corporate corollary could be instructive. Remember Enron, Arthur Anderson and the five or six other giant companies who no longer exist or are a shadow of their former selves? What contributed to their downfall? Was it competition from similar companies or influences from sources outside the company? Of course not. Their destruction came from inside, from within, from the moral values that were discarded when they conflicted with the selfish needs of those in authority.
Executives chose egos and income over morals and values. Those destructive forces from within those companies brought them down, landed the executives in jail, and hurt—and in some cases destroyed—tens of thousands of other people in the process. Why? Because they didn't want to operate from a moral base of integrity and honesty; they ignored honesty and fairness to recklessly pursue their own profit.

The moral decay from within brought them down.
Two states face a similar choice in less than three weeks. Will the people vote for what is right or choose to ignore the ramifications and follow the popular and politically correct path?