Loudmouth

How does a country's population decrease, apart from immigration and emigration

Do you think population decreases because you simply leave a country!

I find that to be a ludicrous statement.

If a couple, married or not, has more than 2 children then population will increase, only if your willing to stay single and that usually means your self indulgent or unfortunatley not a perfect specimen then you can be deducted as 1.

If all of Africa moved to Australia we have done NOTHING to reduce the population
This a issue that goes beyond nationalistic borders.
China has 1.1 billion and I bet you $20 they all dont live in china
India has 1 billion do they all live in India

Come on, no matter where you live you still gotta eat, still gotta use power, still gotta drink water.
How many times has water in london be recycled. 8,10 or more times

The more people anywhere in the world is a disaster in the making.
Quicker the decision to reduce the better the less people that will be involved, the big dissapointment is that we just wont make as much money (Im a greedy bastard), but we will have a more sustainable world.

Non sequitur, Mick.

Sorry I must have missed something. The world has too many people, therefore Australia "can head-off this crisis by increasing our migrant intake"?. Duh? If there is still a tiny little bit of the world that is not yet hopelessly overcrowded, we should make it overcrowded as soon as possible so it won't stand out? Just don't get it.

Surely it would be better to STOP bringing people in to our small continent (yes, small - most of our country is desert and might as well not be there for all the good it is) and be a world leader by changing from the old 20th century model of growth at any cost to a new way of 21st century thinking which is stable population before overpopulation crushes our environment just as surely as the Middle East has been wrecked by overpopulation.

Mr Windy, "Biomass" electricity generation - the logical start-point for required Third World (particularly African) development. From this starting point, all things are possible; without it (or equivalent alternative), the downward spiral accelerates.

We cannot sustain current levels of food production and the current population on "Biomass" electricity generation or any other renewable energy source. The EROEI of all renweable energy sources, including the energy required to produce the infrastructure to harvest renewable energy, is subtantially larger than that required to produce an equivalent amount of energy as oil.

For example, to replace the worlds current annual energy consumption in oil with solar voltaics would require an area the size of Malaysia packed solid with solar arrays. Put all the worlds oil refineries and oil rigs in one place and they would come no where remotely near to this sort of area.

The world is not yet at breaking point, or even at point of no return - things would be far worse if it were.

I simply disagree with you Saltpeter. Peak oil, peak fish, global warming, peak water, recurring global food shortages,...........

I think we are very close to being at breaking point.

The time for half measures and avoiding difficult chopices on population reduction is almost over if not over already.

So, Squeers and Windy, your solution is arbitrary euthanasia,

Prevention of pregnancy is NOT euthanasia. Otherwise the pill would be a tool of euthanasia. So your above statement is idiotic Satlpeter.

which could just eliminate the next Einstein or Newton, who just might be the one person with the answer to the sustainability question, or for Stephen Hawkins' diaspora to colonise the galaxies.

As was pointed out by some one else, you have to wade your way through a great many more Hitlers, Polpots and Amins in order to find those extra Einsteins and Hawkings.

Look this argument is also idiotic.

It is the same mentality that a problem gambler has of just putting a bit more money in the machine in order to increase the chances of a big win that will solve all their financial problems.

The more logical solution is to reduce the population and along with it the problems that need to be solved. Therefore we will not need to produce more Einsteins to solve them.