Progressives for Immigration Reform (whose events Labor MP Kelvin Thompson has attended) has been described as a vehicle to influence liberals and progressives with the anti population growth and anti immigration message.

According to the Anti Defamation League "New Images Reveal Racists Attended Progressives for Immigration Reform Conference" http://blog.adl.org/civil-rights/new-images-reveal-racists-attended-progressives-for-immigration-reform-conference

Leah Durant also helps develop the image of PFIR, much like the "Toorak Times" of Melbourne did with it's unpalatable racial views in the 1970s and 80s, the 'Babette Francis' strategy to legitimise their message......

Imagine 2050 state that Phil Cafaro has been described by a colleague (+ a commenter here) as "liberal environmentalist" but many sincere environmentalists avoid him including authors he cites such as Ian Angus who describe PFIR as "racism in a fancy green wrapper". http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2013/03/07/cis-head-defends-fringe-population-control-leader/

Cafaro also blogged for NumbersUSA, another Tanton network organisation, whose head Roy Beck visited Australia earlier in 2013 to meet with the Irwins at Australian Zoo. Numbers USA has also come under the microscope for it's connection to John Tanton but when questioned by Congressman Cannon (Rep - Utah) some ducking and weaving, goes on, from the Southern Povery Law Center:

" Congressman Chris Cannon of Utah was bearing down. He'd questioned Roy Beck, head of the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA, three years earlier, and he hadn't felt that he got straight answers then. Now, in the March 24, 2004, hearing before the immigration subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Cannon was trying once again to pin down Beck's relationship to John Tanton, the racist founder of many of the nation's key nativist groups."

http://www.splcenter.org/publications/the-nativist-lobby-three-faces-of-intolerance/numbersusa-the-grassroots-organizer

This suggests that the public message and face of these groups may be different to the inner message or philosophy which can be very opaque. It's not to say their members do not care about the environment, but many may not realise the background and inner workings like cults where the "truth" is only known by the inner circles

Poirot
The usual accusation levelled at the IMF, World Bank is of heartless neoliberalism. I doubt they’d ever press for a program of economic development that relies on subsidies and handouts.

Geoff
“'you don’t get it” isn’t an argument; it’s not worth responding to.

Malthus, on the other hand, proposed an entirely logical argument that is properly scientific – it is testable against the evidence, and falsifiable. It has been tested against the evidence, and falsified. He assumed that any increase in the capacity to produce food would be matched by an increase in population, so sustained improvement in living standards are not possible:

“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind”

- Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population

In the more than 200 years since he published his Essay, population has expanded but food production has risen faster still. Malthus wasn’t ahead of his time, he was just wrong. I focus on food production and living standards because that what Malthus proposed, and I quoted real per capita GDP because you said real living standards stopped rising in about 1970. To call me a preoccupied with growth for providing the evidence to refute an argument that you raised is a bit rich.

Thank you, Andras Smith. Now we know where Malcolm got his spin doctoring idea from.

But you have got a problem, mate. Because nearly everyone in Australia can appreciate the dangers of overpopulation, and if people like you accuse us racists of being the only ones who are doing anything about it, then you are giving us a lot of prestige among our own people.

Keep it up.

And thank you again for supporting the racist position.

Rhian,

Geoff of Perth was referring to environmental overshoot, discussed here

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010

Environmental overshoot is when renewable resources are being used up faster than they can be replenished (essentially what the Indians are doing with their ground water). It is just like running through an inheritance or lottery winnings. Eventually the money is gone, and the spendthrift has to face reality. Societies can be locked into overshoot because addressing the problem requires cutting back on production and past population growth has seen to it that people will starve if that happens - essentially what caused collapse of the Sumerian city states and may be why the Indian government doesn't intervene in the ground water situation.

The graph on page 21 of the Atlas that I linked to above plots the relationship between rank on the UN Human Development Index (human well-being) and environmental footprint (consumption). It would take the resources of about 3 Earths to give everyone a modest Western European standard of living on a sustainable basis with the present technology and population.

You and Malcolm King seem to be believe that while the growthist paradigm might hit limits eventually, we can ignore them for practical purposes. Growthists believe that for our purposes, resources are unlimited and the environment has an unlimited capacity to tolerate anything that we throw at it. When the scientific community tells you otherwise, they are either fools, or they are lying and part of some vast conspiracy. If there is a problem, the technology fairy will come and sprinkle her magic pixie dust, and all will be well.

Very few people with science degrees believe in the technology fairy. Nature is one tough mother. New technologies cannot be whistled up to order, no matter how badly they are needed, and when they do appear, they may bring new problems with them. It is worth pointing out that of SPP's 22 candidates so far, 10 appear to have science or engineering degrees, and most of the 10 are working actively in these fields.

Rhian,

Ok you don’t like what I stated, fair enough.

Perhaps you would like to read this CSIRO paper http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf

In particular go to the ‘Conclusion’ at the end of the document and read further about the observed trends compared to the original ‘Limits to Growth’ book written in 1972.

Any discussion in relation to per capita wealth is basically meaningless. The western world has been on a debt binge since the early 1970’s. There has been no ‘genuine’ growth in per capita wealth. Yes lots of poor people now live better lives; yes by all appearances we seem to be living better and healthier lives. Unfortunately this positive appearance has been built on the world’s largest ponzi scheme.

Our global ecosystem is being degraded more and more, there are genuine limits and we have and are pushing beyond them all the time. The GFC was a blessing, consumption dropped and pollution output moderated. There are no real green shoots anywhere.

Australia is on the cusp of joining the US, Europe and all the other nations in financial crisis. China lost the 20th Century, is now trying to enter the first world to regain its prior status, sorry not going to happen, the resources to do so do not exist.

You can have substitution, but only so far, you can increase productivity, but again only so far.

We are hitting too many planetary limits, you just won’t admit it and as such, your bias blinds you to reality.

I have no solutions, I am a realist, I just observe stupid human behaviour and acknowledge that people like yourself and Malcolm just don’t want to understand the underlying predicaments we face.

You need to realise you can solve a problem, you can’t solve a predicament.

Our predicaments are predicated on our innate human behaviour, we as a species won’t change, and therefore the end result is obvious.

The environment/antipopulationist phase were are witnessing is really only the fourth phase of a historical movement to cut population going back to the 1920s and the 1930s.

Other iterations include the need to defend international stability, the need to curb global migration, the need to empower women in fertility choices (the Kerela and Africa sterilsation programs) and the need to protect the environment. In fact all of these iterations have one common denominator and that is slashing population.

It's an interesting sociological phenomena why they have chosen people as the independent variable. By isolating people, the blame for what ever x,y or z is, can be automatically shafted back to you and me. There's no doubt that at specific times and places, some people have wrought large scale environmental damage. But this is not the thrust of the SPP. By simply being human and alive one is complicit in an incredible array of damage, pollutants, consumption, etc. It's an unsubstantiated guilt trip which has no logical or empirical foundation.

The contribution and agency of people who improve their communities and who are working on large and small environmental issues and projects is not acknowledged at all. People are just mouths to feed.

We are probably far enough removed in time for current generations not to recognise the historical pathology of this kind of instrumentalist and objectivist thinking. The SPP is parasitic in that it plays on our fears and its only solution is to get rid of people. I can not remember a political party that evinced such intellectual poverty.