The New Population Bomb

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If you read my chapter in World War III called "Demographic Madness," you'll see that I spent two months treading on the void [laughs], pursuing the labyrinth of data from all the key sources and computed the discrepancies that you alluded to in the beginning of this conversation. There are a number of discrepancies. Some of them are absolutely approaching absurdity.

You get organizations like the US. Census Report that, on their left hand, are predicting a population for the United States late in the next century of 315 million, and on the other hand are suggesting 500 million. In the United States, if you consider the GOP mood swings with respect to environmental regulation and protection of our basic life support systems like water, like air, like soil with a certain percentage of minerals and nutrients having not washed away, then you recognize that the rate of consumption and the rate of affluence in this country, multiplied by 500 million consumers, is catastrophic because we are, in fact, accounting for something like 25 percent of all energy on the planet as it is, and yet we are 5 percent of the planet's population. So you look at that discrepancy, you multiply it by a few hundred million more consumers in the next five decades, and I foresee that we are going to probably have to counter a severely deteriorated environment with a severe loss of democratic principles in the sense that we will have to initiate laws and regulations that a lot of people are going to be very unhappy with. Limitations on basic freedoms will have to be drastically reduced because there will not be enough clean air and water to do whatever you want to do. But I don't see any other way, and that's the tragedy of these numbers. An exploding population will gradually trigger responses by politicians who, in fear of catastrophe, proclaim, declare, initiate reform... make laws that might be tyrannical. This has happened in Indonesia, for example, where the population of 200 million is predicted to nearly double despite 30 years of effort at control. And in the mean time ...our laws are doing the best they can to encourage destruction on a global scale.

 MEN: Encouraging worldwide plunder? How ...and why?

Tobias: Okay. Where are we going to get the wood for our houses? Well, we can't just bully our way into the Indonesian rain forest, because we've been promoting ourselves and touting ourselves as conservationists around the world. We started doing that at Rio five years ago. So where are we going to get the wood? Ah. GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. We will be big supporters of the GATT. Okay, with GATT, suddenly we, and many other powerful nations are now encouraged by the tag line "global free trade" to basically go in and rape and plunder those forests that the government now sanctions. We're going to need that lumber. And so they lessen the stringency of their regulations pertaining to the size of the tree, the minimum size of the tree that can be cut down.

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