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ENGLISH EXPATS MAKE MORETON THE ONLY BAY IN THE VILLAGE

"ESCAPING the overpopulated boroughs of the UK, British immigrants are moving to Brisbane's bayside suburbs, creating their own Little Britain by the Bay." (http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24897167-5007190,00.html)

In the story one women stated, "I would never raise my kids back in England." Another stated " Back in the UK, five-year-olds ... don't know how to play any more."

At least you have identified one group who is driving and benefitting from population growth both in Europe and Australia. Perhaps you need to read my article "How the Growth Lobby threatens Australia's future" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8485&page=0

Elsewhere, the Murdoch press has implicitly acknowledged that Sydney and Melbourne are now overcrowded as a result of population growth, when an editorial of 18 March 2008 "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development" stated:

"much of (Queensland's) growth comprises city refugees making a sea change ..." (see "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" at http://candobetter.org/node/388)

... but that won't stop Rupert Murdoch, even for one minute, telling Australians that we need ever more immigration and population growth.

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mil-observer wrote, "you should feel embarrassed, if not ashamed".

This seems to be an attempt to close discussion using moral blackmail.

Perhaps you are the one who should feel ashamed for having promoted, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the agenda of "the parasites of finance and real estate speculation", as you described them.

Lots of premises there daggett, all big on generalization, assumption and, in key areas, exaggeration too.

For starters, I don't "dodge" anything - especially where your own Malthusian premises are concerned. So don't presume to task me with responding to all of your own particular preoccupations, which seem to include doctrinaire Malthusian excitement about imagined (but rarely defined) "limits" to humans and all their treatment of humans as some nuisance-like plague. I've already responded to such simplistic formulae on OLO before, repeatedly. I find it tiresome, as if trying to make religious conversion among people for their (less malevolent) articles of misguided faith.

You did not engage or acknowledge my above detailed reply to your questions about developments in the nuclear industry and their great promise for the people of India (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8326#133250). So be it: clearly you were either unable or just unwilling to contemplate any such peaceful and positive changes except as transgressions of a simplistic and degenerate Malthusian dogma. A pity, because such negativity severely limits your perspective, while the dogma itself promises decay at best and genocide at worst.

On the "cultural differences" that you claim are/were so "important today to West Papuans, East Timorese, Tibetans etc", and "Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s": it seems to me that this all describes a "divide-and-rule" conditioning in media control (I've been there too, so I urge self-critical reflection).

What of many Palestinians and Jews who joined forces to fight the British Empire (and the non-Jabotinsky/anti-racist Jewish migrants)? And (various) West Papuan people employed and established within Indonesia's multi-ethnicity, including positions of authority to ministerial level and significant proportions among security forces? As for similar constructs around "Tibetan" identity, I suspect that you are one of the many westerners misled badly there, especially at the time of the olympics. What happened then was a coldly premeditated infiltration and mass-murderous assault - claiming over 80 mostly Han and Uighur lives - in a deliberate, sponsored effort at destabilizing China.

Given your admirably non-conformist treatment of "terrorism" propaganda, I suggest you look more carefully at these other issues too.

mil-observer,

In fact, I was aware of the technological edge advantage that India enjoys in nuclear power, having read the Chapter "Nuclear Fission Power Options" by Sheila Newman in "The Final Energy Crisis" (2nd edition), 2008 edited by Sheila Newman Pluto press RRP AU$44.95 (see also http://candobetter.org/TFEC)

Nevertheless, even the best nuclear power technology can only incrementally improve the situation. It cannot hope to improve our efficiency by the one or two orders of magnitudes necessary to cater for the needs of a world human population that is at least 12 times what it was before humankind began to exploit its finite non-renewable endowment of fossil fuel energy.

What you are implying is that nuclear powered desalination plants lining the shores of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal can hope to create enough fresh water to replace what is now being pumped up from beneath the Deccan 24x7 to sustain much of India's agriculture.

I will believe it when I see it.

If that happens, the environmental consequences for the Indian Ocean would have to be huge, and we would still face at least most of the usual dangers that nuclear power poses, but on a much greater scale.

And before we can hope that desalinated water can replace the bore water now being used, the nuclear power plants, together with pumping stations, pipes and all the infrastructure necessary to distribute the water to where it will be needed will have to be built. This would would consume vast quantities of the world's non-renewable natural resources and massively compound he global warming problem.

If this fails, then India's 1.2 billion+ people could be in very serious trouble when their wells inevitably run dry.

Frankly, I don't like to think about it, but I see no excuse for denying that a serious problem exists or for denying its scale.

Can I suggest that you carefully read the following articles and explain why you see no cause for alarm?

"Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production" at http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=328&Itemid=1

"Food supply may fall 25% by 2050, says UN" at http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/02/18/2494642.htm?site=science&topic=enviro

daggett: thanks for the Newman blog reference. Refreshing to read a blogger dealing with the subject more or less on its own terms. I liked especially her concern for reprocessing via fast breeder reactors (an aspect I omitted).

The first serious error I note in your (Eric de Carbonnel) reference to world drought, food production and imminent inflation i.e., "The demand for agricultural commodities is relatively immune to developments in the business cycles (at least compared to that of energy or base metals". Now the insane price fluctuations last year already proved how intimately connected those vague "business cycles" are to food prices. Developing countries in particular suffered near-universal food price hikes due to rampant speculation on biofuels.

The pedigreed writer's second error is his seeming eagerness to extrapolate production stats from drought-affected countries. The obvious omission there is the situation in NON-drought countries. What usually happens in such weather cycles is a tit-for-tat compensation between bumper crops in some regions against miserable harvests amid drought elsewhere. Australia is a good example, where Queensland and the top end yielded record harvests - and floods - against the southeast's drought.

Your take on all this seems woefully pessimistic and destructive. With such Malthusian constraints on our vision we would probably have never realized so much as an aquaduct. And yes, I see no problem with ocean desalination projects and their promise for both demographic and environmental stabilization. As for the infrastructure effort needed for nuclear-based desalination and power supply, it seems quite minor compared to what's been going on til now e.g., lavish waste via financier cartels like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Macquarie, etc., or the related grotesque opulence of silly artificial cities in the Persian Gulf.

Regardless, dodgy prophets like de Carbonnel will probably claim vindication when the disintegrating monetarist system yields its vast bitter harvest of hyperinflation from mass bail-outs, rendering famine a certainty - but from definitely anthropogenic/human causes.

Sadly, our discussion hinges on faith. As your passivity and pessimism would prefer: "I will believe it when I see it."

mil-observer wrote, "What usually happens in such weather cycles is a tit-for-tat compensation between bumper crops in some regions against miserable harvests amid drought elsewhere."

Don't you think that you need to substantiate such a sweeping claim? Perhaps you might produce data which incontrovertibly proves mil-observer's First Law of Global Agricultural Productivity, that is that every loss in agricultural productivity in some part of the world is automatically compensated by an equal gain in agricultural productivity elsewhere?

Certainly this 'tit-for-tat' law you appear to have conjured up didn't work for the ancient Romans, the Ancient Greeks, the Ancient Sumerians, the Mayans, the Chaco Anasazi and and many other failed agricultural societies. Why should it be substantially different today?

It's obvious that we have seriously degraded the Australian environment and hence our ability to produce as much food as we have been able to in the past and the same goes for most other countries in the planet. If you can't recognise that then your head must be stuck in the sand.

mil-observer wrote, "As for the infrastructure effort needed for nuclear-based desalination and power supply, it seems quite minor compared to what's been going on til now ..."

Is it really?

The projects you describe, as wasteful as they are, are not intended to alter natural flows on such a massive scale as would be necessary to replace the bore water upon which much of India's agriculture depends.

Are you aware of any other projects on such a scale that were not the cause of environmental disasters?

You're quite prematurely snide there, daggett. But that's all good fun when I get to see Malthus' sick head looming yet again.

My anecdote about Queensland's and NT's recent compensatory effects on Australian agriculture is well known; it had good publicity, including from ABC's Landline, for example.

In that same context, the de Carbonnel drought-population map still appears woefully deficient as any statistical guage: it offers no insight into any worldwide ratios of drought/higher precipitation for that period. You should critique that source first before snapping at my mere mention of your source's deficiency there. It's funny: you're telling me to fetch data for you, but your own trumpeted source wasn't even up to the task with its simplistic and selective depiction of drought!

Indeed, the map's isolated attention on drought, superimposed onto population shades, smacks of exactly the kind of pessimism I identified in your very own worldview. Furthermore, de Carbonnel's apparently aristocratic background (or at least aspirational pose thereof) would typify the misanthropic and degenerate worldview of many such people who regard themselves as somehow special and above, beyond and apart from we commoners. Population often terrifies such people, especially when so many more people get to prove the actual mediocrity of such "special breeds", and the disgusting injustice that still grants them undeserved privileges. Inbred parasites like princes Charles and Philip are perhaps more instructive examples: they're both on record as backing Malthusian vomit too.

But most importantly, I never asserted that some climatic equilibrium would inevitably suffice to counter any and all drought effects, so take your words back and stick them. I simply identified the deficiency and scare-mongering implicit in de Carbonnel's amateurish map projections. Therefore, when I state that "what usually happens in such weather cycles" I merely assert the truism that biblically catastrophic and unmitigated drought does not attend world civilization's current food production and distribution as some insurmountable norm. If we consider the effects of absent letters of credit on exports, or biofuel speculation, or GM cash crops as compulsory credit conditions, well, they can cause catastrophes without help from the weather.