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The Forum > Article Comments > Tiny [thought] bubbles > Comments

Tiny [thought] bubbles : Comments

By Ross Elliott, published 15/4/2011

But at the very time people like Smith are warning that the sky is falling on population control, our population pressure is arguably the opposite: we need more people, not less.

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So peak oil is a dead scare story?
You wish.
In case you have not noticed, the price of oil is steadily climbing making it eventually too costly for Australians to buy petrol or diesel.
Don’t believe me? Well let’s wait and see for a few months.
As for the alternatives of Fracking & shale (the same thing really) ask the poor sods that live in the tar sands area of Alberta what they think of the idea.
It an environmental disaster but I know that some people is not concerned with small obstacles like that.
Two metric tons of rock are required to obtain a barrel of synthetic crude.
Three barrels of water are needed per barrel of oil produced,
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/09/oil_shale_retor.html
file:///G:/PEAKS/PEAK%20OIL/PEAK%20OIL%20SCAMS/bakken.asp%20snopes.htm

Why can’t we have high density population areas like Singapore and parts of Europe?
Well have you ever been there? I think not but have you ever read about and investigated these places and compared them with Australia? I think not.
Really Curmudgeon, you have excelled in your post this time. Please I earnestly ask you to do some research before you write. Otherwise I will have to think that you are an ultracrepidarian.
Posted by sarnian, Friday, 15 April 2011 3:50:46 PM
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On the note of Population density in Europe and Singapore- I should point out that Singapore is a city-state with a population of 5 million (about half a million more than Sydney) with urban density triple of Sydney, as there simply isn't enough space for so many houses, and as such only very few actually live in a house than a highrise.

In Europe, I'm not really certain what the point of raising it is, as most of the places with a high standard of living have either:
1- a LOW population
2- A high population dispersed among the country in smaller-populated towns interconnected by efficient high-speed road and rail infrastructure.
3- Even cities like Berlin have LESS people than Sydney. (a million less).

In both cases, they have high density among a small population- but a high standard of living in most of these places due to competent (and more importantly, comparatively honest and level-headed) managers and administrators of infrastructure, planning and resources.

If you can find enough people to form corresponding administrative bodies in Australia that are neither incompentent, crooked, or loonies who entertain nutty ideas of what their constituents need, we can re-evaluate if this discourse is worthwhile.

Then there is a matter of getting people OUT of the capital cities and living dispersed among small country towns (and of course, hoping the people already IN those towns don't mind).
Posted by King Hazza, Friday, 15 April 2011 4:31:58 PM
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A STRONG ECONOMY IS A MORAL IMERATIVE THAT even JUSTIFIES RUNNING AUSTRALIA AS AN IMMIGRATION PONZI SCHEME AND LOADING THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT SCHEME ONTO AVERAGE AUSTRALIANS..

HALLELUJAH!

This song reminds me of my human-ness and our broken-ness. That we often lust after things and people we should not and in the end try to justify it and still give it all praise (HALLELUJAH) just as David and Sampson did in the Bible. I feel the sadness because there is no great middle or ending to these type of immigration PONZI SCHEME affairs...only the beginning with the attraction and the actual act of making endless immigration LAW. Beyond that...there is no real substance in the course therefore surrendering not to the relationships but to the consequences with little communication and a HALLELUJAH...praising the multicultural relationships anyway as we often times do to try to bring glory to our mistakes!

>>
Now I've heard there was a secret multicutureal chord
That Julia played, and it displeased the Lord
But you don't really care for overpopulation, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major rift
The baffled Queen composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Posted by KAEP, Friday, 15 April 2011 5:09:16 PM
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Sarian - no, sorry, as you yourself seem to have agreed, peak oil is dead. You admit that the reserves are there but claim that there are barriers to extracting the oil. I don't think you realise that the technology has changed or that there are different types of shale. The article you cite mentions the Canadian company Suncorp abandoning the Queensland shales. Quite right, they decided to concentrate on oil sands, which is a multibillion barrel resource. The oil bearing stuff unlocked by recent technology would be different again. The barriers you mention mean that the oil will be more expensive to extract - the water can be recovered, for example.

Time to move on from the peak oil story.

King Hazza - okay, you agree that higher densities of living are possible, just not in what you believe are Aus conditions. Take some time to find a comparison of the areas covered by Sydney and Melbourne, versus New York and London. You'll see that the Aus cities, although they contain a fraction of the population of those cities actually have a larger land area. Now try to imagine what the barriers would be to a slight increase in the occupation densities of the aus cities. Actually this is happening now, sort of, through the switch to medium-density zoning in various areas.

What you think of as the small towns in Europe and the US would in fact be part of the urban sprawl of the large Aus cities.

But the story is more complicated than that, as the area for up to two hours drive time around the major cities in Aus is really a sort of slightly-populated catchment of workers for the cities - semi-retirees on model farms are very common. We do not have a lot of large cities very close together but that is just the way things have worked out here.

In all, it is quite difficult to bleieve that increases in population will cause any noticeable problems for the rest of us.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Friday, 15 April 2011 5:26:27 PM
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In all, it isn't difficult AT ALL to believe that increases in population cause gargantuan problems for the rest of us: I mean we are LIVING in this shite: like babies born in toilets, pre-pubescent transport systems and electricity hijacking.
Posted by KAEP, Friday, 15 April 2011 5:53:07 PM
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They must be selling rhetoric at Macca’s these days. Whether it’s climate change, immigration, or population growth, the arguments are identical, ubiquitous, and not particularly nutritious. Let’s get real for a moment.

Under no conceivable criterion can Australia be considered ‘overpopulated’. Those who never leave Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane might get that impression, but it’s a transparent nonsense. Anyone who thinks the non-urban bits of Oz are uninhabitable desert has been watching too many documentaries. We could triple our population, and still IMPROVE the environment.

Immigration mitigates the problem of an ageing population because the fecundity of Australian RESIDENTS is below the replacement rate. Reproduction decreases as prosperity increases. The first generation of immigrants will have more children than the second, etc. If we banned immigration, our population would shrink, rapidly.

Yes, our capital cities are full. Problems are due to wretched town planning, lack of investment in infrastructure, and lack of alternatives. Small and medium-sized towns are viable, efficient, environmentally much more sound than megacities, and popular worldwide. But not in Australia, where 95% of infrastructure funding goes to where 55% of the population lives: state capitals.

Older Australians aren’t useless. Regarding employment, they’re very much victims of discrimination. In many societies, teachers are positively elderly. Workers need training at age 50 as well as age 18, if they’re to stay productive — university and TAFE need to wake up to that (or be forced at gunpoint to do it). Yes, raise the retirement age. But stop penalising savings — we want old people to support themselves, but their only options for doing so are super (you have to quit work) and the family home (you can’t spend it). Stupid.

Population growth worldwide is expected to stabilise by 2050, owing to reduced fecundity brought on by increased prosperity. Yes, Australia has a problem. It’s fixable, but not by closing our borders. We aren’t anywhere close to running short of resources — if world population ceases to grow, technology continues to develop, and we make sensible plans for how to deal with a pretty benign future.
Posted by donkeygod, Saturday, 16 April 2011 12:10:41 AM
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