Paul B. Farrell Get email alerts

The coming Population Wars: a 12-bomb equation

Published: Sept 29, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET


Can Gates' Billionaires Club stop these inevitable self-destruct triggers?



ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- So what's the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that'll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that -- if not solved soon -- renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the "Billionaires Club" knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the "home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan," reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was "given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an 'umbrella cause' that could harness their interests."

The world's biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren't even trying to solve the world's overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth's population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the United Nations.


Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

"One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse," warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

Other voices are darker, shrill: "We're past the point of no return." "It's already too late." "The end is near." As with Rome's collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it "WWIII: The Population Wars." A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that "climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues" Population unrest would then create "massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes." And "by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening ... an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life." War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond's 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: "More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources ... There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the 'demographic bulge' with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people." And if the "bulge" stops for any reason, game over. Economic "growth" ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond's equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: "Official [U.N.] projections say the world's population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion." Still, that's 23% more than today's 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called "the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment." Why? Population's the new "third-rail" for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we'd need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America's population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: "There are 'optimists' who argue that the world could support double its human population." But he adds, they "consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it's current impact." And yet, that's exactly what happens with "all third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards."


"What really counts," says Diamond, "is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment," the "per-capita impact." First-world citizens "consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World." So the race is on: "Low impact people are becoming high-impact people" aspiring "to first-world living standards." The American dream is now the global dream.

Warning: The "Impact Multiplier" will drive the global "WWIII-Population Wars" equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond's masterpiece, "Collapse," the two key variables are what we call the "Over-Population Multiplier" and "Population Impact Multiplier." Now let's closely examine Diamond's other 10 variables that are driving our "WWIII-Population Wars" equation:

3. Food

Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They "have collapsed or are in steep decline" forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The U.N. calls the global food crisis a "silent tsunami." Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day.

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