popnperish

'The climate debate is not lost - the issue is very much alive'

No like the tobacco industry the Government funded alarmist needs to continue with propaganda in order to protect their tax payer funded junkets and benefits. Thankfully the general population has woken to the fact that higher fuel and electricity prices mean more pain for most pensioners. Not every one can afford to burn up carbon at the rate of Mr Flannery and Mr Smith.

Dick,

As a young Australian I totally disagree & am disappointed with your position on this issue.

While watching your "documentary" on population prior to Q&A last year I also got quite angry with you, as you stood in front of your helicopter, tractor & 4WD (on one of your many large properties)espousing that, as a society, we use too many resources & are threatening the land we live on... it was a shameful hypocrisy.

I think your stance on this issue is derived from your narrow world view & your pessimism about other peoples motives & Australian society in general.

As a society we face significant challenges in resource management, governance & social function, but this has always been the case. As a society we can and will respond to these challenges.

Over the next 10 - 20 years it is likely that we will see major developments in...

1. Cellulosic ethanol for transport fuel
2. Renewable industrial & household energy from biomass, solar & geothermal, perhaps even nuclear
3. food security planning & agricultural efficiency
4. Water use & treatment planning
5. Natural Resource Planning
6. urban planning

As these are developed and implemented a sustainable population will continue to thrive & can easily afford to grow in Australia. In these circumstances - why cap population at all?

Why don't you focus on the challenges & opportunities?
Why are you optimistic about yourself & pessimistic about the rest of society?
Why do you so easily forgive yourself for the hypocrisy of your own monumental personal environmental footprint?
Why don’t you want to see Australia continue to grow & evolve?

You occupy a position of leadership in Australian society because of your large material wealth & profile.
It is a shame you don't use that position constructively

"As a young Australian I totally disagree & am disappointed with your position on this issue"

As an ordinary Australian, without resorting to the typical, "I'm entitled to special consideration because I'm young" chant, how do you feel about it?

I don't agree any more or less than you with Dick, but it is interesting how you put yourself above others by arrogantly pushing a "special entitlement", perspective.

Do you think that will endear yourself to others? Or do you simply not care about anyone else, because you're so special.

Or do you feel you are more entitled than anyone older than you? The ones who paid for everything up till you could come onto the scene and suddenly become more important than everything before you?

We do see this attitude a lot and I'm interested in the basis of it. (were you an only child?)

Something must be generating this overblown sense of entitlement some people have.

I'm eager to learn ..

Tet

You say the antigrowth movement doesn’t need emotional language to advance its cause. I suggest you inform Dick Smith , because his article is full of it, including this priceless gem

“A collapse of the financial markets, followed by ghastly natural disasters have shown that we are just one unexpected shock away from crisis. ”

Smith says the best arguments for growth he’s heard is “because we can”. Trivialising and failing to acknowledge counter arguments is the hallmark of the ideologue.

Here are a few other reasons to support growth:

- We need skills and labour we don’t currently have to capitalise on the once-in-a-century opportunity created by the resources boom.

- Most surveys show that migration has a positive effect on economic conditions in Australia – for example, over the longer term per capita economic growth and output has been higher in states with faster population growth

- Migrants are also better off coming here – or else they wouldn’t come

- Personally, one of the things I like most about Australian society is its cultural diversity. Immigration is an important contributor to that.

The argument contained in the article are, at best, debatable.

- The water constraint is a furphy. Yabbie, Perth has Australia’s highest per capita water consumption in Australia. Desalination is affordable. We can use other sources more efficiently too (dams reserved for agriculture, Yarragadee).

- Arguments about global population sustainability are a furphy (as well as being wrong) in a debate about Australia’s immigration levels. Immigration doesn’t add to the world’s population, it only redistributes it.

- As others have pointed out, the food security argument is a furphy. We produce far more than we use, and will for the foreseeable future.

- The arid continent argument is a furphy. It is true that much of Australia is arid and uninhabitable, but Australia is a very big place. The small proportion that is comfortably inhabitable covers areas bigger than many countries with much larger populations (e.g. Japan).

The difficulties with this debate is the tendency to reduce it to a pessimissm vs optimism stance. It is more about risk mitigation based on projections about resources and environmental impact, and especially future food supplies.

To deny there is the possibility of global food shortages is to adopt the resting on laurels approach of most governments who adopt bandaid approaches instead of being proactive and reducing the impact of potential problems caused by a growing populations.

The fact that healthy economies produce less children has to be the starting point. One of the most obvious approaches is to raise the standard of living, fostering democracies and standards of governance in the Third World. Birth rates will come down as a response to improved living conditions and education.

The solution is not always just to move populations around so that the effects of overpopulation are spread particularly to countries where resources are already limited and land encroachment is impacting on agricultural production such as in Europe. What we don't need is an imbalance in terms of food production where the world's food supply is governed by a smaller number of providers, but a greater spread of agriculture including increasing local food production. Local food production has a positive spin off for local communities, the environment (where suitable crops are grown), self-sufficiency (reducing dependency and protection against dumping).

Good comment Pelican - what is the worst that could happen if we limit population growth? There really is no downside - we can look at countries with both stable populations and zero economic growth eg Denmark and cannot really claim that these countries are worse off than those countries which shoot for larger populations and high economic growth.
On the other hand if we look at countries with high population growth one is hard to find evidence that population growth is a good thing.
On that basis I cannot see what the fuss is about - there appears to be no downside to limiting population growth but there is the genuine possibility that higher population growth will leave us all worse off.