An ecological deficit is when the ecological footprint of a population exceeds the biocapacity of the area available for that population. A national ecological deficit means that the nation imports biocapacity through trade, depletes the national ecological wealth or emits carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere. An ecological reserve exists when the biocapacity of a region exceeds the ecological footprint of its population. (See: footprintnetwork.org)

Apart from Russia, the ecological reserves of the other large areas still green on the map are being rapidly destroyed by the population explosion there and by immigration. In just over half a century, the ecological reserves of Argentina and Sweden have halved, those of Canada have fallen to 1/3, Brazil, Bolivia and Mongolia to 1/4, Australia and Colombia to 1/5, Peru and Namibia to 1/6, Madagascar to 1/7, Congo and Angola to 1/10, and all of these only because of population growth, since the per capita ecological footprint has not increased.

Since intensive agriculture about 10,000 years ago, larger populations have meant greater power, so population boomers (half a millennium ago, e.g. Western Europeans, until the 20th century) usually swarmed over and destroy areas with populations that were in balance with nature.

The rapidly worsening overloading of the Earth is now threatening the very existence of humanity and all living things. The only chance is to reverse the population explosion, liberate women. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth..” (Gospel of Matthew 5,5) But where the population is finally declining, the invasion and exploitative pressures of the still exploding majority of the world threaten.

How can a non-overpopulated region protect the ecological values of its territory from the aggressive, population exploding majority of the world?

Machines and weapons can change the balance of power so that population size is not such a decisive factor. This eased the power push for reproduction in the 19th century. Until then it was in the interests of all kinds of power to overproduce people, to have lots of vulnerable and therefore cheap workers, birthing machines and soldiers. The “surplus” did not cause much trouble for the powers, it was destroyed by famines, epidemics, wars.

The abundance of fossil energy has brought such “development” in health, agriculture, etc., and thus an accelerated population explosion, that overproduction has become a threat to the powers that be. (More and more rebellion of slaves, revolution, freedom struggle, workers’ movement, women’s movement, unemployment, etc.) Therefore, overpopulation has long ceased to be an interest, but the brainwashing and heartwashing that has been forcing religious-cultural-social reproduction for millennia is deeply rooted in the collective psyche. Therefore, humanity is too slow to wake up to the devastating consequences of overpopulation. Fortunately, more and more enlightened groups of global capital (e.g. Gates, Warren, Rossmann) are putting interests of longer-term survival ahead of the short-term profits from the population explosion, and therefore support the human right to contraception.

The last hope for wildlife, and thus for humanity, lies in those areas that are not yet ecologically overburdened and can protect themselves from overpopulation (caused by population growth and/or immigration), and from the exploitative onslaughts of the world’s overpopulated majority.

Population explosions are always aggressive, since their main purpose is to produce human material (slaves, cannon fodder, birth machines), to take over as much of the future generations as possible and as quickly as possible (i.e. the race for population).
– Aggressive first and foremost with their own daughters and women, whom they keep in breeding stock, otherwise they would not be able to explode,
– secondly, agressive with their children and their poor, whom they keep in slavery, otherwise they would not be able to supply the exploding population,
– thirdly, agressive with the wildlife in their territory (“Get rid of anything you can’t eat or that doesn’t feed your food” – Daniel Quinn),
– fourthly, agressive with other peoples from whom they want to plunder new resources to exhaust.

The first point can save the life on earth: liberating women by the secret weapon of contraceptives (IUD, implant, inject) that can be hidden from those who force reproduction. Support the professional organisations that help hundreds of millions of people without contraception!

Gyula I. Simonyi

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For a quarter of a century now, Gyula I. Simonyi, president of the BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation, has been giving lectures under this title. If we use fossil energy, we will get fried, if we don’t, we will starve. What is the way out of this deadly dilemma?

According to the Hungarian Encyclopaedia of Environment (published in 1993 and 2002), the Bokor Eco-Group, the acronym behind BOCS, began to address the global crisis in 1975. Climate awareness education was added to their repertoire in the context of the 1992 World Conference on the Environment in Rio. In 1994 they were sent the 1,000-page World CO₂ Trends Report from the USA. Below is a paper by Gyula I. Simonyi.

Economic actors can do more than politics

Unfortunately, the climate catastrophe has only worsened in recent decades. This graph shows that the plethora of climate conferences and major international treaties have failed to break the frightening pace of human carbon dioxide emissions growth.

Moreover, it is not just CO₂ that is driving the Earth’s climate crazy, but a wider group of green house gases (GHGs). This includes nitrogen, fluorine and other compounds, and their impact on the atmosphere is expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e). But since the other main contributor to the GHG group, methane, is also a carbon compound, the term carbon neutral is more commonly used than the more accurate climate neutral.

Carbon dioxide dominates emissions in industrialised countries, so climate movements tend to point to industry as the main culprit. But if we look at the overall climate impact, non-industrialised countries also have a significant detrimental impact, e.g. through rice paddies, fertiliser, livestock, population explosion, rising consumption by the widening middle classes, etc.

Quota or credit? Pollution permit or real prevention?

The Kyoto Protocol, launched in Rio in 1992, concluded in Kyoto in 1997 and entered into force in 2005 with ratification by a sufficient number of countries, established a carbon quota and a mandatory market for the world’s major GHG emitters. In Hungary, more than one and a half hundred companies, mainly power plants, are covered. They have to measure and report their emissions and if they do not have enough allowances in a given year, they have to make a mandatory purchase.

Carbon quotas should not be confused with carbon credits. A quota is a free political atmospheric pollution (emissions) permit, of which there are fewer and fewer every year. It is traded by countries and companies on a mandatory market registered with the authorities. Hungary used to have a surplus because the Kyoto baseline date is 1990, and the country’s emissions have fallen significantly with the industrial decline since the fall of communism.

Carbon credits, on the other hand, are a verifiable form of emission avoidance, prevention, reduction and sequestration. The results of countless projects (forest conservation, non-fossil energy, family planning, energy saving, etc.) have been evaluated by independent experts. The certified avoidance, reduction, sequestration of emissions is equivalent to one credit per CO₂e tonne. These credits are held in registries, from which companies, organisations and individuals who voluntarily strive for carbon neutrality can take them to offset their emissions. The voluntary market is the subject of an annual global report, which is now available online and up-to-date.

Issuers are liable to mitigators for the damage they cause

Voluntary carbon neutralisation is in fact the most sensible way of applying the “polluter pays” principle. Money flows from the emitters to the preventers, reducers and sequestrators. This payment really compensates their emissions. It’s like when a factory replaces its lighting with LED bulbs, so they use less electricity, but anyway some emission remains. They have to offset this remainings, for example, by the retrofunding of an already evaluated project that replaced street lighting in a village with LED bulbs and thus reduced electricity use, i.e. emissions.
The word “credit” means credit because the work has already been done, the costs have been advanced. The emitters owe a debt to those who mitigate the damage of their emissions. The purchase of the credit is the post-project financing, which project owners can use to do further climate mitigation work. Another meaning of the word “credit” is trust, but here there is no need for up-front trust, as it is a proven result of work already done.

You can’t carbon neutralise at the cost of a booby prize, it’s greenwashing. One tonne of CO₂e emitted is currently estimated to cause between USD 120 and 180 in social damage. Although the market price of quotas and the carbon taxes levied in some countries do not reach this amount today, polluters must at least mitigate a significant part of the damage caused. Companies, organisations and individuals should not use cheap greenwashing to lie about carbon neutrality, but should actually pay the international market price for quality carbon credits.

Carbon offsetting can’t be done by promises (e.g. planting trees)

Planting trees to neutralise carbon is a common misconception. They estimate in advance how much carbon will be sequestered in ten to twenty years by the trees they plant. But it will only be possible to assess how much carbon the tree plantation has actually sequestered in ten to twenty years, and the credits verified as having been generated can only be used for carbon neutralisation in ten to twenty years’ time.

Of course, tree planting and, in particular, much more efficient forest conservation, has many benefits. But it is only suitable for carbon neutralisation under specific commitments and conditions. The carbon credits generated by planting and forest conservation can be destroyed later, depending on the fate of the forest. This is why it is called “endangered credit” and the revenue generated when it is used for carbon neutralisation is called “carbon mortgage”. This is because, when the credit is destroyed, this revenue (which is in fact a loan) must be used to buy a carbon credit to replace the destroyed one.

Carbon sequestered in forests and soils is threatened by a number of hazards. In addition to non-origination (in the case of tree planting) and cutting, in the event of felling, drying, forest fires, flooding, pests, rotting, damage by game, etc., the CO₂ sequestered is released back into the atmosphere. In such cases, the carbon credits used for carbon neutralisation are destroyed and the carbon neutralisation is invalidated. If, in 20 or even 50 years, the CO₂ sequestered in the forest is released back into the atmosphere, this is not climate protection.

An organisation that carbon neutralises by deforestation and tree planting must therefore assume a perpetual obligation, which is passed on to the future owners/maintainers of the forest, to replace from other sources the carbon credits already used for carbon neutralisation but which are destroyed as the forest’s CO₂ balance is reduced, i.e. to carbon neutralise the negative carbon balance and CO₂ emissions of the forest.

The five steps of carbon neutralisation

Step zero is, of course, to make the decision.

The first step is to calculate the carbon footprint of the company, organisation, person or event, for example. This can be done by anyone, for example by using the calculator on the BOCS website, which has forms for entering data on buildings, transport, internet use, waste, diet, lifestyle choices and even pets.

The second step is the potential reduction of emissions. Going through the items in the calculation can give you a number of ideas for streamlining your company’s operations in ways that can reduce emissions and even costs.

There is often considerable scope for reducing emissions, as shown for example by the current savings in gas consumption in Europe. The Human Development Index (HDI) is the most widely used measure of the quality of life in society. This is a number between 0 and 1, above 0.7 is considered high, above 0.8 very high. Some countries can achieve a very high HDI of 0.8 with two-thirds of the Hungarian ecological footprint. This shows that it is possible to save up to a third of consumption without compromising quality of life, through innovation and by reducing waste and carelessness.

Reducing emissions can often be said to be “money thrown in”. For example, using less energy can also reduce costs. This reflection also helps to prepare for the climate crisis and the risks from GHG emissions.

The third step is to buy carbon credits to offset the emissions we have not yet been able to reduce. We can do this bit by bit, starting with just carbon neutralising your company’s website, or your fleet of vehicles, or a key product. The latter could be because we are a supplier and our products are required to be carbon neutral, or because the customers of a particular product are particularly climate conscious.

The fourth step is to communicate our carbon neutrality to all stakeholders, both externally (customers, clients …) and internally (managers, employees, owners …). This can not only improve public perception and increase market results, but also the loyalty of employees and business partners, and the satisfaction of investors with our sustainability reporting.

The fifth step is to make carbon offsetting a part of the annual routine and to look forward with a calmer conscience to better compliance with any future government measures or tender requirements.

Last but not least, it feels good to have done something significant for the future of ourselves and our loved ones. It will be appreciated by young people, children, future generations and the whole living world.

Gyula I. Simonyi, BOCS Civilization Planning Foundation

The post Should we get a heat stroke or starve instead? appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

UPDATE: The BOCS Civilisation Planning Foundation is one of the main signatories of a similar letter to COP28!

NEW COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FAMILY PLANNING IN FACE OF CLIMATE CRISIS

National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable

San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.

The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:

• Is human-rights centered
• Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
• Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights

On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.

Here are the facts:

• The most effective way to address many of the impacts on our environment and other species, like climate change, is by choosing smaller families. It’s up to 20 times more effective than changing diet or forms of transportation.
• By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime.
• Better family planning is the best way to reduce inequality. Other interventions alone are simply too late.

Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalised human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”

Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model. 

Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.

Source: Fair Start Movement | Carter Dillard | 27 Okt. 2021

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Forty-eight years ago I led an 18-month study at MIT on the causes and consequences of growth in population and material production on the planet earth through the year 2100. “If the present growth trends … continue unchanged” we concluded, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”

To illustrate this conclusion, we published a set of 13 scenarios generated by World3, the computer model built by my team. In those scenarios major global indices, such as industrial output per capita, typically stopped growing and began to decline between 2015 and 2050.

The current epidemic does not prove we were right.

When climate scientists are asked if a particular storm proves their theory of climate change, they point out that a model of long-term continuous change can not predict, nor be corroborated by a short-term discrete event. There have always been catastrophic storms. But, the climatologists point out, increasingly frequent and violent storms are consistent with the climate change thesis.

World3 is a model of continuous interactions between population, resources, and capital over the long term. In the context of 200 years, the COVID-19 pandemic is a short-term, discrete event. There have always been plagues, but increasingly frequent and violent epidemics are consistent with the limits to growth thesis.

There are two main causative links.

First, the explosive growth of humanity’s population and economy has stressed natural ecosystems, lowering their capacity to self-regulate, and making breakdowns such as epidemics more likely. In the recent past global society has been confronted with MERS, Ebola, Zika, SARS, and H1N1 plus major outbreaks of measles and cholera. And now we have COVID-19.

Second, growth in consumption has forced us to use resources more efficiently. Efficiency is the ratio between the output we want and the inputs required to produce it. Common measures of efficiency are, for example, miles per gallon, years of expected lifespan per dollar of health care, or bushels of wheat per gallon of water. Raising the efficiency of a system permits one to use fewer inputs per unit of output. In itself, higher efficiency is typically good. However, raising efficiency inescapably lowers resilience.

Resilience is the capacity to experience an interruption in the supply of a required input without suffering a serious, permanent decline in the desired output.

Humanity lives on a finite planet that started with a fixed amount of each resource input. To support population and economic growth, consumption of the planet’s finite resources has increased. As a result, the resources have been continuously depleted and deteriorated. The fertility of agricultural land, the concentration of mineral ores, the quality of surface waters, and the populations of marine fish are among thousands of indicators that show the long-term average quality of resources is declining.

Producing ever greater output from ever diminishing inputs has forced production to become more and more efficient. However, even enormous technological advance has not altered the fact that consumption deteriorates resources. It has merely reduced the rate of deterioration by reducing the rate at which we use resources to produce each unit of what we want.

The tradeoff between efficiency and resilience is confronted by every sector of society.

Car companies have shifted to just-in-time manufacturing. That reduces the cost per car of maintaining inventories but forces entire car factories to shut down when the single, highly-efficient factory producing a part they continuously need is interrupted. Agricultural production has shifted to large mono crop plantations for food, timber, and fiber. That reduces the cost of labor and capital per ton of output but increases crops’ susceptibility to a single pest or a disruption in normal weather patterns.

The incentive to raise efficiency has been spurred by the fact that those who can produce and sell the same output with less input generally make greater profits. As a result, over the past century, there has been wholesale abandonment of resilient systems in favor of efficient systems – larger scale, less diversity, lower redundancy.

The profit motive has been a major force shaping America’s health care system. There has been a relentless effort reduce personnel levels, eliminate “unnecessary” stocks of supplies, and shift drug production overseas —all to reduce costs i.e., make the system more efficient.

Many have profited by optimizing the health system to be extremely efficient in its use of inputs. Now we all are paying the costs for the resultant loss of resilience. COVID-19 has shown how quickly interrupting some inputs, such as masks, can cause drastic declines in essential outputs, such as the quality of health care.

Slowing growth in population and in consumption of materials and energy will not eliminate the problem. But it would reduce the pressure to increase efficiency and leave more possibility for increasing resilience.

About Dennis Meadows
Dennis Meadows is emeritus professor of systems policy and social science research at the University of New Hampshire, where he was also director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research. In 2009 he received the Japan Prize for his contributions to world peace and sustainable development. And the 2019 award from the German Foundation for the Promotion of Culture. He has authored ten books and numerous educational games, which have been translated into more than 15 languages for use around the world. He earned his Ph.D. in Management from MIT, where he previously served on the faculty, and has received four honorary doctorates for his contributions to environmental education.

Source: Chelsea Green Publishing

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SUBJECT: Future of humanity 2019

Dear Representative Mr/Mrs,

We are writing You with a clear goal, which is to secure the future of humanity. For this, we are asking three things of you, as you are in such position of power that you could do these.

– The first is to break the taboo, and start featuring the problem of overpopulation and ongoing population growth (in both developed-, and developing countries) at climate conferences.

– The second is to restructure your ODA (Official Development Assistance) spendings so that 10% of it goes to contraception aid and sexual education, as opposed to the current average of 0.1%, as this is the most cost-effective form of aid, and the most effective climate strategy.

– And the third is to make contraceptives free for the user in your own country, as this is the only real way of securing the human right of contraception declared in 1968.

Justification:

1) The World Watch Institute emphasises the importance of stabilizing human population already in its 1987 State of the World report. See: https://www.popline.org/node/348424

2) David Attenborough, patron of Population Matters (est. 1991) made a documentary back in 2009 about the profound environmental impacts of rising human population.

See: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/how-many-people-can-live-on-planet-earth/

3) In 2014, Hans-Peter Kohler and Jere Behrman found that on a global basis, each dollar invested in addressing women’s need for family planning yields an average benefit of $120 (with an estimated range of $90 to $150), which is a massive return on investment.

See: https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/population_assessment_-_kohler_behrman_0.pdf (p.6.)

4) In 2016, Starbird et al. found that investing in family planning is the key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4982245/

5) The 2017 book Project Drawdown lists Education of Girls and Family Planning as inseparable approaches to mitigating climate change, and together they outrank all other proposed actions. See: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/women-and-girls/educating-girls

6) In 2017, Wynes & Nicholas found that having one less child is by far the most effective individual climate protection strategy ever proposed, yet government recommendations tend to miss it. (Note: continusously supporting the prevention of an unintended pregnancy has the same effect.) See: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

7) The money is at your disposal, it just goes to something else. Meeting the needs for modern contraception and maternal and newborn care in the developing world would cost $53.6 billion See: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017

However, only a third of what the OECD countries alone spend on ODA ($146.6 billion) would be enough to finance this. See: http://www.oecd.org/development/development-aid-stable-in-2017-with-more-sent-to-poorest-countries.htm

We would like to highlight the fundamental factor, whose consideration the future of humanity depends upon. This recommendation of the Club of Rome was written in 1972. We would already be late by 47 years if we started to realize it today:

„Given the finite and diminishing stock of nonrenewable resources and the finite space of our globe, the principle must be generally accepted that growing numbers of people will eventually imply a lower standard of living – and a more complex problematique. On the other hand, no fundamental human value would be endangered by a leveling off of demographic growth.” – Club of Rome, 1972

Keeping quiet about the problem of population, and treating it as a taboo has a number of deep psychological reasons, although they tend to appear in various guises (e.g. religious, cultural, political, economic, etc.). And even when the reasoning behind it is purely economic, it suggests a fundamentally flawed economic framework, as infinite growth is impossible in a finite environment. We need to transcend these antiquated notions in order to have a future!

We wish you every success in your future work, from Hungary, along with 7,6 billion humans.
We offer our decades of expertise in this field for a successful cooperation.

Looking forward to your reply!

Yours Faithfully,

Gyula István Simonyi, BOCS Foundation („Global education since 1975”, Encyclopaedia of Environment, 1993, 2002. „Climate awareness raising since 1993”, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, TN, USA)
Gabriella Törteli, GREEN EARTH Movement
Sztella Nóra Kántor, TZM Hungary
László A. Rampasek, ClimeNews News Portal

Budapest, 2019. February …

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