The Royal Society's appallingly bad report on population and consumption

Critics Attack Royal Society’s ‘Appallingly Bad Report On Population And Consumption’

By Guest Column Dr. Benny Peiser (Bio and Archives)  Friday, April 27, 2012 | Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

The Royal Society has released a report on what they call the joint problems of consumption and population. It has one excellent bit, some good bits – but unfortunately, given that the people writing one half of the report seem to have failed to read the other half, as a whole it’s a dismal failure. These sorts of errors would lead to a marking down in an undergraduate essay and to the failure of a PhD defence. The Royal Society should withdraw this report and work on fixing both the factual and logical errors before trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.—Tim Worstall, The Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2012

The world’s wealthiest people must urgently reduce their consumption to save the Earth from a “vortex of economic, socio-political and environmental ills”, a major report by Britain’s leading scientific academy concludes. The Royal Society panel of 23 eminent academics from around the world in the fields of economics, population studies and conservation science, calls for a radical “rebalancing” of global consumption to go hand-in-hand with attempts to curb further rapid rises in population. It concludes that tackling global inequality is central to solving the problem of too many people exploiting dwindling natural resources.—Steven Connor, The Independent, 26 April 2012

Based on what can only be described as the irresponsible usage of population growth predictions, the Royal Society has sanctioned a report that both undermines its credibility and attempts to dupe Western consumers into remorse over our ‘lavish’ lifestyles. The report suggests, like the farcical carbon trading scheme, a pseudo-market in consumption trading. There was a time when pioneering and ingenuity was rewarded. Today we seem to have regressed back to 1789, demonising market-driven growth and attempting to replace it with tick boxes and failed economic and development theories. The Royal Society boasts that Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick and James Watson were life members. It is my contention that these innovators and pioneers would be embarrassed of the pessimistic approach taken by modern scientists, many of whom see themselves as activists and are indeed children of ideology rather than professionals with a commitment to the scientific method.—Raheem Kassam, The Commentator, 26 April 2012

Paul Nurse’s undergraduate socialist spirit is still alive and well: he wouldn’t be against scientists getting involved in activism. “We are citizens, and citizens should be involved in politics, and I think those that have a strong view should be involved in party politics,” he says. “I’m happy to see fellows of the Royal Society politically engaged, if that’s what they see as right.”—Michael Brooks, New Statesman, 9 June 2011

Population growth may put us on the edge of a “golden age of development” for Africa – hardly the message from the gloomy Royal Society report… I would love to see a much more positive approach from scientists on these issues, one acknowledging human development as a much more positive prospect, and treating environmental resources not as a fixed quantity but as a dynamic part of a rapidly-changing (and in many ways improving) world. This does not mean denying biophysical limits (‘planetary boundaries’) insofar as they can be scientifically determined, but it does mean taking a radically-different, and much more human-centred, approach to tackling them.—Mark Lynas, 27 April 2012

With the slow fade of the climate change issue toward political oblivion, the green authoritarians need a new bandwagon to jump on and flog. And so this headline in Scientific American online is manna from heaven: “World Governments Establish Biodiversity Panel.” It’s clearly from the “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-at-the-UN-try-try-again” school.—Steven Hayward, Power Line, 26 April 2012