Which thirty million?

I think Peter is quite right to highlight Jonathan Porritt's renewed call to cut the British population.  There is a horrible sense that such a view is becoming ensconced as another unquestioned prejudice of our tranzi elite.  After all, the Times couldn't even find someone in their address book of the influential and powerful to actually criticise Porritt's position.  The closest we got was George Monbiot arguing the toss over whether people or prosperity are the greater problem.  No one was given a chance, or took the chance, to stand up for prosperous human beings as a good thing.

All this shows the ideological roots of the modern environmentalist movement.  The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth are canonical works for that movement, arguing that the incredible achievements of free market capitalism in doubling incomes every generation alongside massive increases in population cannot continue and will run into inevitable and awful Malthusian blocks.  Those books were proved dramatically wrong and the author, Paul Ehrlich, of the Population Bomb lost an expensive bet on his theory.  In light of that, the theory has been reinvented.  Now the problem isn't that we can't keep increasing human prosperity and population but that we can, and that is a bad thing as global warming provides Gaia with a means to take revenge.

What these theories always underestimate is human potential.  Just as Malthus was proved wrong by the unexpected boon of the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has and can overcome other natural limits to our prosperity.  That's where Jonathan Porritt's limit of thirty million comes in.  In among that sea of people who wouldn't exist if Mr. Porritt had his way, it is entirely probable that there will be those who might otherwise prove vital to our coping with whatever challenges nature throws our way.

Whether we're talking about perennial what-ifs like fusion power or some stroke of genius that will take the world entirely by surprise, the answers to our energy needs will come thanks to people and prosperity, not despite them.  Will Porritt's thirty million include the person who makes fusion power a reality?

At the same time, as people get better off they tend to do a better job of looking after the tangible natural environment.  It is hard to think of worse ecological tragedies in the 20th century than occured in the poverty of the Soviet Union.  Conservation is a luxury good that people will consume more of as they take care of more of their basic needs.

Finally, richer societies are better able to cope when natural disasters do occur.  That's why the number of people who die due to natural disasters has been steadily declining throughout the last century.

A prosperous humanity is more likely to prove genuinely sustainable than a desperate, poor one.

Government and opposition policy, and the ludicrous 80% target most politicians are so enamoured of, is based on the same ideology that sees political limits to economic activity, which they perceive as dangerous, as the way forward.  That's no accident, politicians have forced us to pay for a powerful lobby that, in turn, pushes them to puts its ideology at the centre of decision making.

Jonathan Porritt is both chairman of the Government's Sustainable Development Commission, with its over £4 million budget (PDF) pretty much entirely coming out of taxpayers' pockets, and Programme Director of Forum for the Future, which the invaluable fakecharities.org website shows is funded by over £2 million in taxpayers' money.  The fact that ordinary taxpayers have to support his ideological crusade is utterly disgusting.