Not a word about population pressure, which has steadily increased in parallel with increasing climate worries.

Until such a fundamental issue is factored into considerations, it will be business as usual for the steady increase of human dysfunction in relation to the environment upon which it depends.

If it wasn't such a tragedy such utter neglect by Friends of the Earth of a major underlying cause, one which affects every aspect of human society, would be laughable.

You are right, colinsett.

About 80% of the greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere are from developed countries, but China has now passed the United States as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and not because the average Chinese is living high on the hog.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/20/business/emit.php

Global emissions have been growing at 2.5% a year, even though per capita emissions from the developed countries declined by 12% on average between 1990 and 2001.

http://enviro.org.au/enews-description.asp?id=681
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/18/1087245110190.html

Like you, I wish Friends of the Earth would pull their heads out of the sand. The best solution might be to have the developed countries disproportionately make an initial contribution to fix the problem, since the existing situation is largely our fault. After that, limits for the individual countries should be based on their biocapacity as a fraction of total global biocapacity. This means it would be up to them to decide if they want a large, poor population or a small, rich one, and they would not be rewarded with a bigger share of the capacity for having more babies

Apart from falling about laughing at the hypocrisy of you 'flying' to the Climate Conference in Bali, you typically lapse into emotional rhetoric in pushing your cause celebre.

Just a few of your gems deconstructed:

"...After years of battling rising sea levels..."

Any proof of your fatuous and fallacious statement?

"...the diversity of groups present was evidenced by the different banners being carried at the march..."

They'd be the ones not constructed from material byproducts of the mining and pertrochemical industries, right?

"...La Via Campesina, the international peasants movement was also out in force..."

How does a peasant movement afford plane tickets and accomodation for a trip to Bali?

Such head-tilting nonsense may garner you a few fans amongst the vapid iPod-generation, who seek to assuage their consumerist guilt by giving oxygen to collectives such as yours.

The rest of us see it for the fact-void that it truly is and delight in tormenting wounded fragile souls such as yours by buying an even bigger plasma TV.

quite right, guys. let's establish an 'international lottery organization', overseen by the u.n., that notifies people in every country that their number has come up, they are surplus to requirements, and should report to their neighborhood soylent green factory.

it's too hard. population will be stabilized, even reduced, in the traditional ways. i read today that the black death is making a come back, in africa. just in time...

When things get really bad any where in time and space the factors that enable survival are often completely random.

What were the factors that allowed some to survive the great plagues of Europe?
Wearing a kingly crown? Having lots of gold?

How did some survive the pandemics that wiped out millions of native Americans who had no built up immune resistance to the relatively mild introduced diseases like measles etc.
How did some survive the Nazi holocaust and even life in the death camps?
How did some survive the bombing of Hiroshima, Tokyo and Dresden and the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad?

Nevertheless the rich and powerful have always found ways of protecting themselves to some degree, while the unfortuante masses died like flies.

But the worst case scenario as posited by James Lovelock for example, predicts that billions of people will be wiped out.
Who knows? That may be what does happen.
Comparative wealth wont make any difference whatsoever.

What will happen if an Australian city (or anywhere else in the world) runs out of water? Which is entirely possible.

It is a human right to steal or kill (if necessary) for food and water for survival.

Last couple of posts highlight the real problem: Civilisation requires spare wealth. If the rich think their wealth will protect them when people are starving and well-armed then they need to think again. We need to address the population vs resources while we still have spare resources. If we get into explicit "rules of jungle" (even more than US has recently done) then it is doubtful that survival and civilisation can co-exist.
Whatever we do, the less bankers involved the better: *That* I am certain of!

There are some weird and even horrifying comments to this article. Some people seem to have a craving for authoritarian and frankly fascist 'solutions' to problems.

Here are three positive and human-friendly ways to reduce population over a few generations:

* educate the women: for every year of education that women receive above a basic level, on average there are 0.3-0.5 fewer children;

* compulsory education systems: as John Caldwell pointed out long ago, when a country introduces and enforces a system of compulsory education, it turns young children from being an economic asset around the house or the farm into an economic liability, and within a generation, families are far smaller;

* aged-pension systems: understandably, in countries without pension systems, families are large to ensure that there will be enough grown children to look after parents in their decrepitude.

A fourth factor would paradoxically be cutting the infant mortality rate, so that parents are more confident that the fewer children they have will be more likely to survive.

Joe

Loudmouth,

Governments might be slightly more inclined to adopt your excellent proposals if more babies didn't mean more greenhouse carbon credits that could be sold to the developed world. There might also be a problem if a country is simply too poor to provide free, compulsory primary education for all or to provide old age pensions, even if just for the people who don't have sons to support them. I don't know if China had any real alternative to more coercive measures.

Please, be specific. Climate change is a natural process converted into playground of bureaucrats to benefit from playing digits while speechifying of industrialisation as the most devil moving force of.

Don't forget that developing nations' "peasants" chop down trees and burn off, regularly and fiercely, every dry season. I have seen it and have suffered bronchitis because of it.

They also dynamite reefs to catch fish.