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By Eric Ruark, Research Analyst
The political elite have jetted to Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) taking place December 7-18, 2009. While being ferried around in limousines, munching on caviar sculptures, and generally emitting a huge carbon footprint, they are in the midst of discussing how the rest of us must be forced to drastically reduce our own standards of living in order to reduce global warming.
If one buys the premise of anthropogenic climate change, then one also has to accept that that there are two ways to reduce this cause and effect. The first is to reduce consumption and emissions per capita. The second is to reduce the size of the world’s population, especially in developed countries where per capita emissions are disproportionately high. So one has to ask: if President Obama is serious about ending global warming why does he support growing the U.S. population by tens of millions of people through immigration over the next decade, admitting those whose carbon footprint will be greater in the U.S. than it would have been in their home countries?
The Copenhagen conference is not about U.S. immigration policy, but it is precisely because of our immigration policy that the United States can not provide any real leadership on environmental issues. While the rest of the world looks to us to set an example, we can only provide bad precedent. Given the opportunity to stabilize our population and to work toward a sustainable future, our approach has been to grow our population by 80 million over the last thirty years and to put the United States on course to reach a billion people by century’s end.
The U.S. population is rising faster than any other developed nation and our per capita energy consumption is the highest in the world. This is environmentally and economically unsustainable, but the few who reap the financial benefits of U.S. immigration policy have funded politicians who push for amnesty and continued mass immigration at the expense of the American people.
Many Americans are skeptical about the claims being made at Copenhagen, and the release of e-mails hacked from computers at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit have only added to this growing skepticism. It’s not that Americans are not concerned about the environment; it’s that they mistrust blatant political posturing and resent the dearth of responsible and capable governance.
The first step toward a responsible environmental policy would be to recognize the environmental impact of U.S. population growth, and to understand that our fixation on economic growth no matter the cost to the environment is a grave error. Despite what politicians in D.C. may say, we can not continue to grow at an unprecedented rate and preserve the environment for future generations. This is simply not possible. We have to make a choice.
We do not have to accept the doom and gloom forecasts of Al Gore, and certainly should reject his push to circumvent our democratic process so that he can “save the planet.” We can, however, affect real and lasting change by ending our rapid population growth due to mass immigration. Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has reminded President Obama that any agreement signed in Copenhagen would not be binding on the U.S. unless approved by Congress. As American citizens we can use the same democratic process to send members to Congress who will put the interests of American citizens first and foremost, and who will finally stop giving given lip-service to environmentalism and instead enact polices that actually protect the U.S. environment.
During the first class of a graduate level environmental education course, students were to rank, from a list of 50 environmental issues, the most critical issue that negatively impacts the environment. Lack of education, air pollution, water pollution, etc. were included along with increasing population growth. I remember ranking increasing population growth number 1. This was indeed the most critical issue. Politicians refuse to provide a vision to address how immigration...let alone illegal immigration...should be regulated. The environmental education course was given at the University of Maryland in 1988.
As the new US Administration and Congress begin to tackle immigration reform, they will again be faced with the weighty question of how large should America’s population be in the future. Should America’s population continue to grow indefinitely, perhaps doubling to 600 million by the end of the century? Clearly, any answer to this vital demographic question has serious and far-reaching economic, political, social and environmental consequences for America as well as for the international community of nations. Read the full study at Yale Global Online.
Bonnie Erbe, contributing editor at US News & World Report and host of PBS's weekly news analysis program To the Contrary, looks at the impact of immigration on our nation’s environment. Watch the video below or check out our video section in the right sidebar of our home page for this eye-opening segment.
This hidden camera footage from the U.S. - Mexico border by the Center for Immigration Studies shows the environmental harms of illegal border crossing.
Our population has experienced an aggressive growth over the past 25 years which has had a direct effect on traffic gridlock, urban sprawl, and wide swings in a variety of economic statistics, the latest being the recent subprime mortgage crisis.
How will your quality of life be affected when the population goes from 306 million at present to 438 million (Pew estimate) by 2050? Will your children have a better or worse environment than you? Will they have a better or worse quality of life?
Tell us what you think in this week's poll: Will the increase of the U.S. population from 306 million at present to 438 million in 2050 improve or worsen the quality of life of average Americans?
