Population Growth

Carolyn S. "Cally" Cochran, a civic activist who embraced liberal causes and was an outspoken advocate of educating the public on population growth, died Thursday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville, where she had been a founding board member. She was 89. Born Carolyn Sizer in Boston and raised in New Haven, Conn., she attended Bennington College and met her future husband, Alexander S. Cochran, while he was a student at Princeton University.

Global warming is "unequivocal," according to the recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people - all of us. Yet there never has been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming. According to professor Timothy Dyson of the London School of Economics, a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be canceled by global population growth. It's time to open a "second front" in the battle against global warming by stressing the need for population stabilization - sooner rather than later.

A REPORT out of the U.S. Census Bureau last week stated that the number of residents in suburban Baltimore, including Carroll County, continued to grow during the past year. Not as rapidly as in previous years, but still increasing. Baltimore City, no surprise, again lost population.Carroll and Howard counties were percentage-gain leaders in population growth in the metro area last year, as they have been since the 1990 Census. During the decade, Carroll's population has risen by 21 percent, Howard's by 26 percent.

Why do South Carolina and other booming Sun Belt states face long-term spending crunches even though their job growth is the envy of the nation?Look closely at the cost-benefit formulas they use to figure whether business giveaways are good deals.They're tilted in favor of corporate handouts.The formulas all but ignore the most basic equation in economic development -- that new jobs need new residents to fill them, along with new schools, wider roads, extra police and other government expenses that come with population growth.

UNITED NATIONS -- A consensus reached at a 180-nation conference in Cairo, Egypt, five years ago on a new strategy for limiting world population growth by improving the status of women is facing serious religious, ideological and financial difficulties.The strategy would allow the world's population to rise from its present level of about 5.9 billion people to close to 9.8 billion by the year 2050, and then hold it at around that level.But a review conference convened here at the end of last month to see what progress countries were making toward the Cairo goals broke up with barely half its work completed.

WASHINGTON -- Contemporary politics has three peculiarities. The strongest passions -- Republican hatred of President Clinton; Democratic loyalty to him -- are incongruous, given the nature of Mr. Clinton. Second, political ferocity increases as the stakes of politics shrink. And as saturation journalism drenches the public with news from Washington, the nation participates less and less in the passions swirling around the national government.Disgust with Mr. Clinton is by now nearly coextensive with the truly adult population, and is intense in the Democrats' congressional cloakrooms, where members of the world's oldest political party resent the degradation of it, and them.

WASHINGTON -- Contemporary politics has three peculiarities. The strongest passions -- Republican hatred of President Clinton; Democratic loyalty to him -- are incongruous, given the nature of Mr. Clinton. Second, political ferocity increases as the stakes of politics shrink. And as saturation journalism drenches the public with news from Washington, the nation participates less and less in the passions swirling around the national government.Disgust with Mr. Clinton is by now nearly coextensive with the truly adult population, and is intense in the Democrats' congressional cloakrooms, where members of the world's oldest political party resent the degradation of it, and them.

From the bay shores of Worcester County to the Catoctin foothills of Frederick, a surge in development has sparked a political backlash that threatens to shake up courthouses across much of the state this fall.Fed up with crowded classrooms, jammed roads and vanishing open space, voters in five counties ousted incumbents in last month's primary elections who had been tagged by critics as too pro-development. Growth remains a hot topic in races for county executive, council or commissioner in at least a dozen counties.

SOMETIMES things aren't what they appear to be. Seeing all the houses being built in Howard County, one would assume that growth is exceeding all expectations.That conventional wisdom, however, was knocked for a loop by recent data indicating some home-building rates have not met predictions.My first thoughts were that if fewer houses are being built, then population growth must not be as great either. Which would mean all the talk about new families overburdening a crowded school system was just that -- talk.

WHETHER IT'S smart growth or not, Carroll County is among the hottest growth spots in the state.Westminster ranks at the top of Maryland cities in population growth from 1990 to 1996. The county seat increased by 15.4 percent in that period.Rankings obviously change over time. Much of Westminster is built-out, so some other town will probably be atop the growth chart next time.No one is saying that Westminster attracted the largest number of new residents. That double-edged honor goes to nearby Frederick, which surpassed Rockville, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A quick question: What's the biggest environmental problem facing humanity today. Is it global warming? One would certainly think so judging from the actions of various governments, which are trying to reduce those manmade greenhouse gas emissions we hear so much about. Is it dwindling energy resources, running up against the limits of agricultural technology in feeding the earth's population, or perhaps diminished supplies of fresh water, without which life cannot be sustained? All of the above are exacerbated by the continued growth in the number of people living on this planet.

More people moved out of Howard County to nearby counties and states than moved in over the past few years, a trend that local and state planners think may be the result of sharply rising home prices earlier this decade. The total county population is still growing, though more slowly, according to a draft report by county planner Jeff Bronow. About two-thirds of the growth since 2000 is from births, while just over a quarter is from international migration, and 11.7 percent is from people moving into Howard.

Below is part of a post from The Baltimore Sun's Bay and Environment blog and comments from readers about last week's announcement of new Chesapeake Bay cleanup goals. Our view While the press coverage of the annual Chesapeake Bay summit this week focused on President Obama promising a stronger federal role in the cleanup effort, and state officials pledging to accelerate their pollution reductions, Howard Ernst isn't buying any of it. The associate professor of political science at the Naval Academy has written one critical book on the shortcomings of the restoration effort, Chesapeake Bay Blues.

Back when quickly rising home prices struck many as a good thing, economist Dean Baker was a veritable wet blanket. In August 2002, he published a paper suggesting that the country was caught in a housing bubble, that a price slump was inevitable and that there could be a huge loss of equity, "a surge in mortgage default rates" and "serious stress on the financial system." He was so convinced, he sold his condo in 2004 to become a renter. That all seems prescient now. Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank in Washington, doesn't claim to be more far-seeing than the droves of experts and economists who at least initially took a "don't worry" stance.

Two charged after 11-mile police chase Baltimore police charged two men yesterday with possession of marijuana after they led officers on an 11-mile car chase through the city on Tuesday evening. The pursuit ended at Key Highway and Webster Street in South Baltimore. WBAL-TV broadcast live video from a helicopter, showing police officers, their guns drawn, converging on the car and arresting the driver and a passenger. The driver, Darrell Wilson, 26, of the 2800 block of Ashland Ave., could face additional traffic charges related to the chase, police said.

Craft a moratorium on catching oysters It is long past time for sound science and rational thinking, not political and commercial interests, to direct the management of our declining oyster population ("Oyster `restoration' costing clams," Dec. 9). It is now widely acknowledged that the grandiose vision of achieving a "restored oyster resource occurring over a wide range throughout the Chesapeake Bay," cited in the 2004 Oyster Management Plan, is probably unattainable. But it may be possible to enhance or rehabilitate oyster populations in limited areas, such as specific reefs or tributaries.

Baltimore ranked 19th among metro areas in 2005 on an important measure of economic activity - up one notch from the year before. The numbers, released yesterday by the Commerce Department, represent the government's first-ever attempt to calculate gross domestic product for the country's 363 metropolitan areas. GDP is a tally of the value of goods and services produced. The government warned that the numbers are "experimental," but it intends to continue producing them. "There are many metropolitan areas that haven't seen an estimate of the size of their economy, and they don't have a clear picture of how their economy ranks," said Sharon Panek, chief of the section on GDP by state services at Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

A proposal to build a natural gas pipeline under the Chesapeake Bay has sparked alarm among some Eastern Shore residents and environmentalists who fear that it will fuel population growth on a once-rural peninsula that is fast being developed. Eastern Shore Natural Gas Co.'s proposed pipeline - which would be the first under the bay - is in the early planning stages and must clear many regulatory hurdles. But concern has heated up this week as residents learned more about the plans. "It will spur development," said John Cole, Republican president of the Caroline County Commission, who has been fighting plans to put sewage lines under the Choptank River in Denton.

Minorities constituted more than half of Maryland's preschool population in 2006, according to a state analysis of U.S. census data that show minorities have fueled virtually all of the state's population growth this decade. The data - released today by the U.S. Census Bureau - indicate that Maryland's population is increasing because of immigrants and minority families arriving from other states, as the white population declines slightly. An analysis of the data by the Maryland Department of Planning shows that the diversity is most apparent among young people, with minorities constituting 51 percent of children under age 5. Maryland's figures follow national trends in which one in three U.S. residents is a minority and nearly half of all children under 5 are minorities.

Carolyn S. "Cally" Cochran, a civic activist who embraced liberal causes and was an outspoken advocate of educating the public on population growth, died Thursday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville, where she had been a founding board member. She was 89. Born Carolyn Sizer in Boston and raised in New Haven, Conn., she attended Bennington College and met her future husband, Alexander S. Cochran, while he was a student at Princeton University.