Demography As Destiny

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics believed in the power of demography. So important did the Soviets consider the age-structures of populations to economic and military power that university students were required to study demography in formal classes.

Soviet interest in demography may have been well founded. In the biological world, demography is fundamental to the survival of populations. Only populations whose survival and reproduction rates surmount the various insults of predation, parasitism, disease, and limited resources dodge the constant threats of extinction. As has been famously said, demography is destiny.

At this week's European Union conference to salvage a new Union treaty, one of Poland's two identical ruling twins, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, argued vehemently in favour of voting power for his country in great disproportion to Poland's actual population. In an argument that shocked the delicate sensibilities of an organization founded in the ashes of World War II precisely to avoid such conflagrations in the future, Kaczynski evoked the millions of potential Poles made phantoms by the Nazis:

If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million.

It is commonplace in environmental law to advocate for future generations in the interests of intergenerational equity. However, outside anti-abortion advocacy, arguments about the rights of phantom generations are much less common in both politics and law.

In the final agreement among members of the European Union (another notable victory for surprising battler, German Chancellor Angela Merkel), even twin power was not enough for Poland to win this argument. One wonders what the phantom Poles might have thought.

Magic Bullets

My 10 month old daughter was just diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. Nothing like an intensely personal interest to make one appreciate the miracle of antibiotics. Which has made me think deeply about the case of Andrew Harley-Speaker and his globetrotting case of antibiotic resistant TB.



Most of the news coverage focused on the Homeland "Security" farce and gossips has a field day with Speaker's decision to go on his honeymoon despite his infection. That is too bad.


The real story is the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. When did we stop attaching the appellative "life saving" to antibiotics? When did they become so routine that we forgot how vital they are? We are mad to squander this precious resource!!! As soon as I finish this entry, I plan on writing my senators to urge their support for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Use Act of 2007.



Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs) routinely administer large doses of antibiotics to make livestock grow faster on less feed (and to compensate for crowded and unsanitary living conditions). More than 24 million pounds of antibiotics are added to animal feed every year. This massive overuse dwarfs the problems created by patients failing to finish antibiotic prescriptions and physicians overprescribing antibiotics (though those are real concerns that must also be addressed.)



The results are frightening. According to the FDA, 70% of bacteria that cause infections in hospitals are resistant to at least one form of antibiotic. This problem is only increasing.

In 2005, after five years of wrangling, FDA for the first time banned the use of an antibiotic in agriculture. Concerns that growing resistance to Baytril was reducing the effectiveness of CIPRO prompted the ban. Lets hope this decision is a precedent. But, five years is a long time in the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

Mr. Speaker's case presented a perfect opportunity to educate the public about the dangers of antibiotic resistance, but instead spent the ink and bandwidth on nonsense. If I were the editor in charge, the headlines would scream MAGIC BULLETS NOT WORKING!! (yeah, i know, stick with my day job . . .) But, we have seen a world without antibiotics--it's called 1900. TB in that pre-antibiotic day was the leading cause of death in the United States. In the prosperous West, there are few remaining survivors from the world before antibiotics. But my 97 year old grandfather sure can tell some horrible stories about illness and death in the days before antibiotics. Do we really want to risk returning to those days?

Pneumonia used to be a dread disease-- the "captain of the men of death." Today, thanks to life-saving antibiotics most pneumonia patients don't even need to be hospitalized. My daughter is going to be fine, but I have a new appreciation of the fragility of our grasp on health and life.

Lula's Environmental Lulus

Over the past six years, Bush II has played the role of environmental villain in the eyes of many greens. This has been especially true on the issue of climate change. Based on his performance at the recent G8 summit in Heiligendamm, however, where he committed, at least rhetorically, to the need for reductions in greenhouse gases and to participation in United Nations talks seeking a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, Bush II may be starting to sing a greener tune. If so, who will replace his misunderstandings of, and obliviousness to, the science underpinning many environmental issues?

Enter a new contender: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil. Lula, on the sidelines at the G8 summit as part of the parallel meeting of the "G5" five largest developing countries (China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa), may be staking his claim to the mantle of scientific skeptic that Bush II may now be casting aside. Witness Lula's strange statement (reported in the Financial Times) that

We have to remember that everything we do from here on will not diminish the effect of the gases that are causing global warming today because they are the gases of the past.

Climate scientists, not to mention others interested in the global climate change issue, will surely be fascinated to learn from Lula the difference between "gases of the past" and those of today and tomorrow. If generalized, Lula's logic could be used to justify perpetual inaction because it suggests that nothing one can do on any particular "today" can affect the harms caused by greenhouse gases accumulated prior to that "today". Such inaction, especially coupled with rejection of science, characterizes a number of Lula's environmental policies, from continued deforestation of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic rainforests to planned dammings of the Amazon river itself, which would almost certainly lead to extinction of much of the river's hyperdiversity of fresh water fish. In fact, just as Bush II has been known to attempt to muzzle government agencies and their staff who question the scientific soundness of his administration's environmental policies, Lula similarly punished Brazil's environmental agency, after it opposed the damming for biological reasons, by subdividing it into two, less powerful, agencies.

However, Lula will have to work diligently if he is to succeed Bush II as the world's most prominent leading scientific skeptic. One of his very own G5 colleagues, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, has a large headstart, having achieved worldwide notoriety for doubting that HIV causes AIDS. One can only hope that Lula reconsiders his current path; here, too, he might look to Bush II, especially the last two weeks of Damascene conversion.

A More Convenient Truth

The Bush II administration appears to be undergoing a volte-face on climate change policy as unexpected for its substance as for its suddenness. The first signs of thaw occurred in December, when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proposed listing the Polar Bear under the Endangered Species Act due to the melting of its arctic habitat. Soon after, Bush II alluded to climate change in his State of the Union address. Perhaps prompted by the U.S. Supreme Court's remarkable 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, on the Environmental Protection Agency's responsibilities to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, not to mention pressure not to be the only dog in the climate manger at this week's G8 Summit, Bush II committed the United States to the fight against global climate change a week ago, albeit outside the United Nations framework. Now, having been cajoled by his best European allies, Angela Merkel and Tony Blair, Bush II has agreed to a G8 Summit Declaration containing a rather robust consensus statement on the need for significant action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near future, likely within the United Nations framework:

49. We are therefore committed to taking strong and early action to tackle climate change in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Taking into account the scientific knowledge as represented in the recent IPCC reports, global greenhouse gas emissions must stop rising, followed by substantial global emission reductions. In setting a global goal for emissions reductions in the process we have agreed today involving all major emitters, we will consider seriously the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050. We commit to achieving these goals and invite the major emerging economies to join us in this endeavour.

Most remarkable are the commitments to (1) "strong and early action...to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations" and (2) "consider seriously...at least a halving of global emissions by 2050."

These could become heady days for those who have long urged the United States government to admit and address the threats of global climate change, though words are obviously no substitute for action. Surprisingly, it appears that the climate change issue is far less of an inconvenient truth for Bush II than previously assumed.