The Royal Society “knows” there are too many people on Planet Earth, and they have a cunning plan to deal with it:

Rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment. This report gives an overview of how global population and consumption are linked, and the implications for a finite planet.

— Royal Society, “People and the Planet Report”, April 26, 2012

If there’s one thing that spoils a socialist’s tea, it’s those “unprecedented levels of consumption” brought on by the spread of free-market capitalism. He can’t even conceive of an open system of freedom and enterprise that recognizes no limits and which belies the very notion of “a finite planet.”

It has long been self-evident that poverty is endemic — and thoroughly “redistributed” — within and among those nations that discourage free market capitalism and adopt command and control economies instead.

We say this is “self-evident,” but apparently the Royal Society doesn’t see it that way. Among their “Key recommendations”:

1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health. — Ibid.

Here we need to deploy a glossary: “The international community” = successful Western countries; “economic development” = taxing the crap out of those Western nations and forcing their collapse; “education” = Marxist indoctrination; “family planning” = abortion and/or 7.62 mm contraceptives; “health” = a term nobody can definitively define.

The Royal Society’s prescription implicitly embraces the image of the world as a big pie that can only be divided up into a limited number of slices:

2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact. — Ibid.

Translation: The successful free market economy nations are doing too well to suit us Marxists, and they really should be ashamed of themselves for providing so abundantly for their citizens. Instead, they should take a vow of poverty and put on sackcloth and ashes. The best way — the Marxist approach — is by “systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact,” which is a quaint way of telling the free market capitalists that no matter what they do and no matter how much or little they do it, their economic activities will always be regarded as harming the environment. The term “sustainable” is doublespeak for Marxist “green” programs that gobble up taxes and produce no efficient energy sources to speak of. (Caveat: If, in the vanishingly small likelihood that safe thermonuclear fusion reactors the size of a Volkswagen are ever developed, then all bets are off!)

3. Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high. — Ibid.

“Reproductive health” is always a Liberal Progressive-Marxist code phrase for abortion, and “family planning” never stays “voluntary” for long when governments push it as a “programme.” No, the very last thing prospective parents need is “political leadership” (code for unaccountable bureaucracies) in deciding how to plan their families.

And “financial commitment” is more code for massive — verging on confiscatory — taxation on the international level (e.g., the global poverty tax).

Also, since the world needs MORE people, continuing “the downward trajectory of fertility rates” is clearly suicidal.

4. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings. — Ibid.

Can it be merely a coincidence that the Royal Society’s report presages the Rio+20 Marxfest?

But, wait, there’s more! ‘People and the Planet’ also “discusses” the following (our comments are in [brackets]):

the potential for urbanisation to reduce material consumption [the aim being to crowd people into smaller and smaller land areas and implicity reduce the size of the population to some nebulous “optimal” level];
removing barriers to achieve high-quality primary and secondary education for all [in “free” government-run propaganda factories laughingly called “schools”];
undertaking more research into the interactions between consumption, demographic change and environmental impact [with the “findings” always condemnng free market capitalism as the prime culprit in destroying the “environment” — which, by the way, is another hazy term in itself];
implementing comprehensive wealth measures developing new socio-economic systems [which requires overthrowing free market systems and socializing all economies under centralized command and control Marxist-style planning]. — Ibid.

Here are some gems from the report itself. We’ve found it nearly impossible to cut through all of the gobbledygook, buzzwords, and phrasing that codes for Marxist intervention. Perhaps you can do better:

“Human impact on the Earth raises serious concerns, and in the richest parts of the world per capita material consumption is far above the level that can be sustained for everyone in a population of 7 billion or more.”

“… in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be
urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material
consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies, and is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all.”

“In the long term a stabilised population is an essential prerequisite for individuals to flourish.”

“Humanity needs to learn to act collectively and constructively in the face of long term and
therefore sometimes elusive threats, not just when faced with immediate and tangible ones.”

“The implication of these constraints is that the material throughput of the economy cannot grow forever. The economy of the future must produce goods and service of value to humanity with dramatically reduced physical impact. But today’s market system is distorted by failure to price environmental and social impacts, leading to perverse incentives for unsustainable activities.”

“Humans have interacted strongly with the environment since people mastered fire, settled in every continent except Antarctica, invented agriculture, and launched the industrial revolution. Humanity is now approaching a crucial time in this ongoing interaction, making this a critical moment for policy makers. Over the next 30 – 40 years the confluence of the challenges described in this report provides the opportunity to move towards a sustainable economy and a better world for the majority of humanity, or alternatively the risk of social, economic and environmental failures and catastrophes on a scale never imagined. This report has outlined some possible pathways to achieving a sustainable economy, through the combination of application of socially applicable technology, political leadership and institutional reform.”

— The Royal Society, ‘People and the Planet’, April 2012, 134 pages, PDF

Notice the recurrent use of negative, alarmist, and fear-mongering terminology in the limited sampling above: “impact”; “serious”; “unsustainable [and] damaging material consumption”; “elusive threats”; “the economy cannot grow forever”; “today’s market system is distorted”; “perverse incentives”; “unsustainable activities”; “Humanity is now approaching a crucial time”; “the risk of social, economic and environmental failures and catastrophes on a scale never imagined.”

To judge from their report, the Royal Society seems to have adopted today’s most successful political propaganda ploy: Never let a crisis go to waste, especially one that has been so laboriously manufactured.