OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #215, JANUARY 27, 2025.

 

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #215, JANUARY 27, 2025.  Compiled by Dick Bennett

 

MAQ  Review of On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change by Jade E. Sasser, New York: NYU Press, 2018, 189 pp.      

Jade Sasser medanthroquarterly.org

A critique of population control narratives reproduced by international development actors in the 21st century
Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”―and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back―and why now? In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground―until now.

Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites―from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference―Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. ­Although well-intentioned―promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community―these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible.

Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson.  The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.   Penguin, 2024. 

Here’s a sampling from a few pages in chapter 8, “Nuclear Threats and Climate Catastrophe.”

p. 223: Who’s responsible?  Rich Westerners.  “The majority of total carbon emissions have been from Western countries, with the contributions from the U.S. and Europe dwarfing the responsibility of China and India.”   “The top 1 percent of income earners in the world generate 16 percent of the global carbon, and the top 10 percent of income earners generate about half of the total.”

224: We know the causes of the temperature crisis (mainly burning fossil fuels), we know the mainly US perpetrators, and we know the solutions as set forth in the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative and the Green New Deal (GND) resolution introduced by Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Markey, but the US has opposed the solutions

p. 225:  Both of the two major Parties have actively blocked meaningful climate action—for example, the Paris Agreement--, the Republican Party in particular.   [As recounted elsewhere, on August 2022, Pres. Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which includes the largest federal climate change investment in American history.] 
p. 227:  And the big business lobbies are worse.