(cont. from above, changed username - against forum rules I'm sure, but these limits are driving me nuts)

For a start, every refugee that is brought to a country with a first-class education system and the institutes that encourage scientific study and technological development is a new mind that is more likely to be able to help find the solutions needed to reduce our GHG emissions. Secondly, allowing violence and disease to fester in other parts of the world will inevitably come back to bite us, and as a species, we are never going to be able to co-operate globally to tackle climate change as long as separationist attitudes exist.

daggett - the only reason I know your name is that you provided it yourself in this forum. It strikes me as slightly dishonest that you want to publish articles in this forum under your own name, but also want to comment on other authors' work (indeed, challenge them} anonymously. Perhaps it's not so much a case of intellectual sloppiness on your part, but intellectual dishonesty.

At any rate, the Vidal 'quotation' is little more than an egregiously hyperbolic hypthetical strawman deployed originally by some loony-tunes Irish white supremacist website, and shamefully taken up by you in this forum. It's becoming clearer why you might want to have two identities in this forum: your real one, where you have to own your ideas and provide proper evidence for your arguments, and your pseudonym, behind which you can hide in order to promote racist drivel.

If you were really interested in exploring a hypothetical situation where large numbers of Bangladeshis might seek refuge in a Western society, I'd suggest that Britain would be a better example than Norway. After all, there was never a Norse Raj that was part of a worldwide Norwegian Empire, the exploitation of which was directly responsible for the relative wealth of the Empire's ruling country - as was the case with Britain and its former Subcontinental dominions.

Indeed, it could be argued that the relatively large numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans and West Indians who have migrated to Britain in recent decades to share in its wealth are really just its colonial chickens coming home to roost. Culturally uncomfortable perhaps in the short term, but ultimately economically and morally just.

Daggett asked me to post the following on is behalf:

CJ Morgan,

You may attribute to me whatever motives you like to my request that on this forum where I have not chosen to use my own name that you address me as 'daggett'. The fact is that I have never attempted to conceal my identity from Online Opinion users. Any forum user has always been at liberty to follow the link to my home page. On other discussion forums I have gone further and included my own name in my posts. If I was attempting to lead a double life as a secret racist as you have alleged, then I would have thought that I had gone about it very ineptly.

Whilst I have not concealed my identity, I prefer not to have my own name splashed across forums such as this, that is, unless you can show why, for example, my authorship of other articles on Online Opinion (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=4820) is relevant to this discussion and, at that, why it would then be necessary to use my name.

If you insist upon doing this, then perhaps there may be nothing I can do, but I still consider your doing so to be extremely discourteous.

Given the notorious propensity of open-border advocates, many funded by wealthy growth lobby interests, to hysterically denounce those who have, in the past, questioned even immigration, let alone multiculturalism, in order to close down the debate, it is understandable, why many others choose to post anonymously.

For my own I have protested against the Iraq War and have written letters to the paper on this subject. You may find one on my home page. So, whilst I strongly question high immigration and multiculturalism, I believe that my concern for the wellbeing of all humankind has been demonstrated in practice, and is, for reasons I have argued above, which you have cleverly avoided discussing, more sincere than that professed by many open-border advocates, just as Norway's generous program of foreign aid is of much more practical benefit to the third world than would high immigration be.

Wizofaus,

Putting humans ahead of the environment is sawing off the tree branch you are sitting on.

The Redefining Progress site has the environmental footprints of most countries as calculated in 2006. (Environmental footprint is a way of expressing total consumption in notional hectares of land.) The global average per capita footprint is about 22 hectares, already above the sustainable capacity per person, while the US footprint is 109. This leaves an average footprint of 18 hectares for the rest of the world. Now lets assume that all those 300 million high consuming Americans were not just consuming less, but raptured up into the sky, leaving their resources to be shared among the rest of the world. This would raise everyone else's footprint to 23 hectares. However, the global population is growing at 1.3% (Australia at 1.4%, meaning a doubling time of 49.5 years). Assuming no increase due to the bonanza, and ignoring further environmental deterioration, peak oil, the pumping dry of aquifers, etc., it would take only 20 years of population growth at 1.3% to bring the average footprint back down to 18.

It is undeniably true that you could accommodate more people if they all lived like battery chickens. Who do you think people would blame for the poverty if you got your way? You would have far less opposition to helping people in their own countries, and it is likely to be far more effective.

If you think our environment is well managed here have a look at the government's own State of the Environment reports. Or have a look at the link to the Senate hearings I posted earlier. It is clear from that that we are being lied to about the safety of recycled water, lied to about the survival of some endangered species, including a lungfish of so much scientific interest that 7,000 scientists signed a petition begging the Beattie government not to build a dam over its habitat, lied to about the capacity of SE Queensland to support more people. Those "donations" from the developers and corporate elite have a high price.

(wizofaus, naughtily cheating the post limit...)

Divergence, no-one's suggesting that Australia's environmental management track-record is fantastic, but GHG emissions aside, it's still a great deal better than most 3rd world countries.
And no, of course there's no point trying to save human beings alive today without also ensuring the planet maintains its capacity to sustain humanity in 50, 100 or even 150 years' time.
However...there is good reason to believe that we are slowly "turning the corner" wrt to environmental concerns, and I think the next 100 years we'll see a lot of quite dramatic projects to put an end to destructive practices, and to restore the Earth's ecology to a point that we can be confident that it will sustain us for the foreseeable future. In that sense, we can afford a little bit more damage now if it helps bring more people out of abject poverty and suffering - more people that, as I said, have the potential then to become part of the solution, not part of the problem. It is going to be largely up to the wealthier, more industrialized nations, with high levels of scientific education and technological development, to lead the charge here, and the more people that are part of those nations, rather than living in countries where just daily subsistence far overrides any long-term concern for the environment, the better.

Against this, of course Australia has limited capacity to absorb more people, however it takes a rather dim view of our technological capability to suggest that we really can't fit any more in at all. I also think sheer economics will give a reasonably good indication when we're simply not capable to increase our population much further - a point we're not at yet, by all available measurements.

dnicholson,

Its good to know that your response to the problems affecting the worlds environment is that you have a "hunch" that everything will be OK, so lets just go ahead and import more people and cause more destruction to the environment. In the next 100 years we will solve the environmental problems.
That is in my opinion an absolutely incompetent response to problems that have a sound basis in scientific fact.

Headline tomorrow in the SMH, "Environmental concerns disappear, Dnicholson has a hunch that everything will be OK"