The Climate Paradox

The Climate Paradox by Peter van Druenen

Of this book I only found a Dutch version. But it has interesting ideas.

In this essay, the author deals with a subject that is as sensitive as it is almost ethical: man as the greatest enemy of the climate, himself and the world.

As early as 1972, it appears that a “Club of Rome” was convened, made up of civil servants and industrialists, who sent out a predictive document with their vision of the future of the world, depending on five different parameters, but the most important of which was population growth. Later, this study was attacked from all sides, and opposed. However, the facts show the great predictive power of the document.

The Climate Paradox essay however deals with another document. A similar document was drawn up as early as 1798, with self-made but different predictions, but without taking into account, among other things, the industrial revolution. In it, too, the then author, Thomas Robert Malthus, stated that population growth will be the biggest problem, among other things with the capacity of the world’s food production, which increased linearly, while the population exploded exponentially.

The latter was criticized because of the radical conclusions he posed: do not engage in humanity, do not set up emergency aid for disaster-stricken areas, do not allow wars to happen and do not provide food aid. Because everything you do now to do good will take negative revenge later through more suffering when the population becomes too large, and many more people will be in need, sick, have famine and are in a war situation. These very crude views came from a professional pastor.

The extreme reactions to the situation are clearly out of the question, because it is an uncomfortable truth that individual life is valued by many in the population more highly than the survival of the species. Institutional termination of life is therefore – rightly – out of the question. A number of other measures then attract attention. One of them is birth control. China has also shown a great lead in this respect, and from this we learn that population growth is still problematic for the climate due to a greater life expectancy of the individual. Birth control alone will not solve the problem of the climate.

In the meantime, there are also a number of initiatives to save the world by cleaning it up. But the question is whether this actually helps, given the problem of sea level rise. That is why the author calls for an alternative: first build the good dikes to keep it dry, only then work on cleaning up the earth.

Title: De Klimaatparadox, Author: Peter van Druenen, Publisher: Cossee Amsterdam, ISBN: 9789059368064

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