Why Don’t Liberals Care about Immigration-Fueled Overpopulation and the Environment Any More?
Article subtitle:
Tucker Carlson Asks: Why Don’t Liberals Care about Immigration-Fueled Overpopulation and the Environment Any More?
Article publisher:
Limits to Growth
Article date:
11 December 2018
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
It once was the case that at least some liberals supported immigration limits because of the harmful effects of excess population on the environment as a primary reason. But many have forgotten because politics have become more important than preserving the nation’s natural resources that support life.
For example, California’s severe five-year drought from 2011 to 2017 was a brutal reminder that nature still rules, and states that are part desert shouldn’t engage in endless growth: most residents had to observe water consumption limits which meant shorter showers and investing in efficient plumbing devices. At the extreme, some residents in Porterville, California ran out of water and needed to have it trucked in. California’s growing population, long on the brink of 40 million, means that the limited water supply must be divided into ever smaller shares. And civilization cannot survive without water....
But the Open Borders urge is strong within Democrat politicians since diverse foreign voters tend to be the biggest supporters of the big government policies D-pols enact.
Tucker Carlson recently interviewed a rare liberal who thinks immigration should be limited, Prof. Phil Cafaro, author of the 2015 book How Many Is Too Many.
As it happens, I reviewed that book in The Social Contract: see ‘How Many Is Too Many?’ – A progressive considers limiting immigration.
I found the book acceptable in some ways, but not all. Regarding the important issue of the Sierra Club’s perfidy where it secretly sold out the environment for a $100 million bribe, Cafaro is squirrelly at best. As I wrote in my review:
However, the treatment of the struggle for reform in the Sierra Club starting in 1998 leaves out vital elements, and they are important. Were any of the reformers interviewed? Apparently not. The book quotes Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope as saying that he had once believed that immigration should be reduced for environmental reasons, but that the issue could not be debated in the organization “without stirring up racial passions.”
That’s an odd thing for a professional defender of the environment to say: Well, we wanted to protect America’s environment, but people got angry so we won’t talk about immigration any more. In fact, the Sierra Club supported the terrible 2013 Senate Gang of Eight bill that would have doubled legal immigration in perpetuity.
So it’s not David Brower’s Sierra Club any more, and the reason was leftist politics combined with big money—over $100 million secretly donated by Wall Street investor David Gelbaum over the years 2000 and 2001. But the gift came with strings attached: “I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.” (“The Man Behind the Land,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2004)
But that secret bribe was not known to the grassroots reformers (and I was one of them) who worked for eight years within the Sierra Club’s democratic structures to return the issue of excessive immigration to its proper place as being understood as a negative force on the environment. Had we known that the fix was in, we would not have wasted so much time trying to fix a deeply corrupt organization.
So Cafaro blew off the most contentious environmental issue in decades apparently because he didn’t want to remind environmentalists about how rotten the top organization is. It would have been nice if Tucker Carlson had been more informed — he mentioned the Sierra Club but only in reference to the recent destructive wildfires.
[See original article for transcript.]