There's too many of you others!

There is too little energy and too much pollution, say the Zero Population Growth preachers, because there are too many people. And whenever you meet the energy-stranglers, sham-environmentalists, anti-nukes, techno-phobes, no-growthers and regulators, the ZPG preachers cannot be far in front.

What they share with their brethren in this bag is not just their miraculous knowledge of what is good for you, but above all, a total disregard for the facts.

In 1957, the US fertility rate began to decline from a peak of 3.76 and then plummeted at a rate that left the demographers gasping. A decade later, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb; when the birthrate continued to plummet, he published a textbook with shockingly obsolete data. It was instantly embraced by all pseudoscientists in academia who preferred Ehrlich's humbug to the figures published by the US Bureau of the Census. "If present trends continue..." they lectured after the trend had reversed. (If trends continued forever, Ehrlich would now be wearing a tighter doublet and carrying a heavier sword.)

In May 1973, the fertility rate crossed the Zero Growth level (2.11) on its continued downward slide. The population exploders kept exploding. It has now dropped below the level where not even immigration (at present levels) would save the population from eventual decline. The population exploders are founding new ZPG chapters.

When confronted with the hard evidence, they respond with the sophistry so characteristic of the entire ecological brotherhood. "The US population is still expanding." (Of course it is, for the people already born will live some 70 years but perhaps the anti-nukes can shorten the time.) "The decline of the birthrate is the merit of the ZPG campaign." (It is, naturally, ZPG's merit that the sun will rise tomorrow; but how did they make it rise 10 years before they appeared on the scene?)

The student of energy issues will do well to watch the poopulation exploders, for they were the early birds in the anti-energy flock and provide many clues to it. Have The State interfere with what is one of the most personal decisions, and it can interfere with anything else. The statement "Several coercive proposals deserve serious attention, mainly because we may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means" does not come from any SS Obersturmfuehrer, but straight out of Ehrlich's textbook.

The credo of the population controllers is, in so many words, "There's too many of you others."

And the environmentalist eyewash about "Spaceship Earth" all too often means that those who travel first class want to keep the other passengers in the lower decks.