by John Young
And as a result of this, forests continue to be torn up to make room for new subdivisions, plastics continue to bio-accumulate, our water table accumulates ever more toxicity, our commutes and the pollution they generate keep getting longer, and we keep filling yet more landfills with disposable products made from resources taken from the planet at steep future cost to our ecosystem.
When I was a kid, there were public ad campaigns against littering, grave concerns over the leakage and space of landfills, advocacy against dumping and more. There was a great deal of angst over “urban sprawl” and the damage to natural environments posed by expanding suburbs. Air pollution and smog were likewise deemed a public enemy. School children were shown movies of endless traffic jams, describing the country’s overpopulation. I remember seeing the display of a cigarette butt thrown out of a car window, with a statement that the filter portion would persist in the environment for 150 years.
But over the past three decades, these very legitimate concerns have all but disappeared from the radar, so much so that 77 million Americans drink tap water from public water supplies that don’t meet federal guidelines. Insecticides such as atrazine show up in our drinking water routinely. The herbicide glyphosate, tied to numerous problems, is now showing up in drinking water as well. Plastics have become a very serious problem, both in containing hormone disruptors that contact our food, and posing an ever-increasing risk to wildlife. Likewise, during these decades home construction has continued non-stop, natural areas have been destroyed, farms have been bought up for subdivisions, infrastructure has been strained and commuting times have lengthened.
And its even worse than that. Due to the fact much of our production is off-shored, the real environmental cost of much of our consumption is hidden. If you want to see breathtaking environmental destruction, just look up pictures of lithium mining in China. These mines produce the lithium for the ubiquitous lithium batteries used in cell phones, laptops and the electric cars which use double the copper of ordinary cars. To American consumers, these finished products seem to arrive by magic. But an entire infrastructure of environmental damage sits behind them. One reason so many products are made overseas is because they’d be more expensive to manufacture in an environmentally responsible way.
Rare earth minerals used for the magnets in hard disks, motors and more are, by definition, rare. But the appetite for these is so great that there is now a race to mine them from the bottom of the sea. The delicacy and importance of ocean ecosystems is well understood. Yet these will take a back seat to making sure three year old kids can have their attention diverted by bright toys that will end up in landfills.
While the focus of the political and academic classes has been on “climate change” – mostly as a cynical attempt to extort the developed world into economic suicide – all of these other environmental threats that we can verify with our own eyes are barely mentioned.
When did real and present threats to our environment stop mattering? When did America stop caring about the preservation of natural spaces and the encouragement of recycling? And, more importantly, what is really going on here?
We can see a hint with the changes in policy made by major environmentalist groups after they received millions of dollars in donations from vested interests. Specifically, if you were to look at the policies of groups such as the Sierra Club in 1970, you would have seen absolute opposition to further immigration, whereas today they favor immigration without reservation.
The single factor that most affects consumption and the environment is population. So while our native European-American population was propagandized non-stop about their need to limit reproduction to save the environment, the doors to immigration of all sorts were flung wide open. So a population that was 90% European in 1960 has become less than 60% today, and the majority of children born are no longer of America’s historic stock. Nearly all the net growth in the US population since the 1970’s – 100 million people – has come from immigration.
Even back in the 1970’s when our population was 250 million mostly European-derived people, we had serious environmental problems, many of which remain to this day in the form of hopelessly polluted areas. We already had grid-lock in major cities, and air quality warnings from temperature inversions near cities. So the advice to maintain zero population growth made eminent sense. And we already had plenty of people to win world wars, be the most productive people on earth, lead the world in innovations in science and technology and literally put man on the moon.
So why import, in aggregate, another 100 million people with no end in sight?
The answer is complex because there are many actors with many motives. Most certainly, especially on the Left, there is the clear motive of importing people who will reliably – along with their offspring – vote Left in perpetuity. Rather than win elections based on ideas, they decided to replace us with a population that is intrinsically leftist. And of course, within that Leftist group are multiple constituencies. But I will leave this group and its constituencies for consideration on another day. Instead, the factor I want to focus on in this article is economics.
Our Federal Reserve System is based on new dollars entering the economy in the form of loans. When you take out a mortgage, for example, the bank “borrows” that money from the Fed, who creates it out of thin air. The interest the bank pays to the Fed is generally referred to as the bank lending rate. But when these funds are created out of thin air, the money needed to pay those loans back, with interest, is NOT created. Thus, the entire economy is based on loans and requires continuous growth. That is the core of the problem in a nutshell.
Thus it becomes no surprise that a key economic indicator is “new housing starts” – a measure of new homes and apartment units being built.
Now, ask, what would the number of new housing starts be … if, today, our population were still 250 million and overwhelmingly white? The answer, of course, is “quite low.” No doubt some people would build new homes, but mostly they would maintain existing ones. And every time someone built a new home and moved out of a rental unit, the number of renters would decline, reducing the value of rental property. Pretty soon, rental property owners would be looking at a decline in profits.
Not only that, but all manner of tradesmen, ranging from carpenters to electricians, get most of their work from new construction. And let’s not forget all of the people engaged in the lumber business, making PVC pipe and so forth. So a large part of the way our current economy works is via new money coming into the economy through loans, and then filtering through all of the industries and trades involved.
So here you have entire segments of the economy from banking to insulation manufacturers depending on new housing starts to put food on their table. But new housing starts depend on an increasing population.
Although I used housing as an example, nearly every other industry in America is set up in a similar fashion. If you need more profits from widgets once the current market for widgets is saturated, the only solution is to expand the market – which means either overseas sales or increasing the sheer population. This applies to potato chips, cars, welding machines and anesthetics. You can sell more of all of these things with an increasing population than with a static population.
At first blush, one might think that a third world population on poverty level wages would not be a benefit to stock holders in terms of consumerism, but this is not the case. Because we have a welfare state, money is transferred from the middle and upper middle classes to that third world population, so they can afford to buy things as well. No matter how much money an individual makes, he can only eat so many potato chips, and he only wants so many cell phones. To sell more of these things, the welfare system takes whatever money he has beyond what is needed for his own sustenance, and gives it to people who have less, so they can afford to buy more. Although it first seems counter-intuitive, this is what leftists are talking about when they describe welfare as growing the economy.
And then there is the desire that the richest in society have maintained since the dawn of the mercantile era: cheap labor. It could credibly be asserted that the desire for cheap labor has been a thorn in our side since before the founding of the country, because of the importation of African slave labor which has plagued us with racial and ethical issues ever since. A constant-sized labor pool means higher wages and better benefits as productivity increases. But it also means higher costs and lower profits. Thus you see our Chamber of Commerce pushing endlessly for unlimited immigration.
So there are three economic drivers of replacement immigration: the fundamental nature of our banking system requires constant expansion to avoid collapse, the desire for expanding markets by expanding population, and the desire for cheap labor.
Taken in aggregate, all of these things override environmental concerns. Maintaining a static population with replacement level birthrates would lower profits, raise wages and, most importantly, reveal the Ponzi scheme underlying our banking system.
And as a result of this, forests continue to be torn up to make room for new subdivisions, plastics continue to bio-accumulate, our water table accumulates ever more toxicity, our commutes and the pollution they generate keep getting longer, and we keep filling yet more landfills with disposable products made from resources taken from the planet at steep future cost to our ecosystem.
The solution to this problem starts with reforming our banking system dramatically and conveying in no uncertain terms that the well-being of our people in terms of genetic continuity and a safe environment are more important than profit. As we do this, we need to deport as many people as we can who are not citizens. True, our homes will no longer have continuously inflating value, but the upside is that they will continue to be in neighborhoods of European character with clean air and water.
Things do not have to work the way the work now. It is entirely possible to have a sustainable economy that does not depend on infinite growth and therefore won’t end up replacing us with people from the third world. But that starts with us being willing to advocate for meaningful reform. And the way to force that reform is to continue the pressure to limit immigration and deport those who are already here, but are not citizens. This will force the Ponzi scheme to be revealed, and thus necessitate reform.