JohnTaves
1. Oz has been below rerplacment fertility of the 2.1% for 34 years now and so is achieving your 'goal' already in terms of reducing the global population.
2. Thorium will be online in China, India and other countries very soon. Cheap, clean nuclear. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html and http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html
3. The 700 million might be pretty lonely in the many ghost towns? You are talking about Australia having only 2.3 million people? Wow.....will need to ponder deeply on that.

Oz has been below replacment fertility of the 2.1% for 34 years and IS still stacking on a NET natural increase of 150,000 people per year.

Figure that!

The vanity of those USING irrelevant statistics to inveigle an assumed dumb down Aussie audience indicates a wickedness that is the hallmark of a way too segregated multiculturalism in this country today. It is tantamount to foreign interference.

The FACT is women are having too many children for our fragile ecology.
And no amount of vested interest BS statistics will ever change that.

Only Politician power-lust, business council greed and selfish immigrant "we want to take over you weak skippys" mentalities are interested in 150,000 net additions and 300,000 immigrant additions to our population per year. In terms of history these vested parties will be viewed as traitors. That is a FACT.

Perhaps the real issue is not "WE cutting OUR fertility rate" but Women, who are the ones with the incessant maternal urges, "taking RESPONSIBILITY for the damage overpopulation is causing" in a wide range of liveability indices not least of which is the Murray Darling Basin fiasco.

Women must understand that they as human beings must care for our collective environment with more than just mealy words, man bashing placards and and politics of increasing the Rich V Poor divide. These are just vain attempts to get on the right side of the "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST CURVE" mania that pervades our society as a substitute for real values & Love.

Men KNOW women are equal and we keep waiting for them to prove it by showing us how to improve our living standards. But all we get are shopaholics, unattractive baby factories and Ah Bra advertising.

What are we to think?

johntaves,

You are obviously generally right in terms of the global picture. It would take the resources of approximately 3 Earths to give everyone a modest Western European standard of living, as shown in this graph from New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2624/26243101.jpg

Note that this is based on 2003 data, so the situation would be worse now.

From the Global Footprint Network atlas (link in my first post), Australia is still within its biocapacity, although we are certainly experiencing environmental and resource problems, as evidenced by the expensive, energy hungry desalination plants in our big cities and our ranking near the bottom of the developed world in terms of environmental management

http://epi.yale.edu/Countries

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/environment.aspx#context

Back in 1994, the Australian Academy of Sciences recommended 23 million as a safe upper limit

http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf

Stabilisation (which Dempografix supports) is clearly the most important first step for Australia, before deciding if and how far to let the population slowly decline. However, he appears to have been misled by media propaganda suggesting a massive overhang of Baby Boomers, who will make the population sink like a stone when they die. The truth is that Generation X is 10% larger than the Baby Boom generation, and Generation Y is larger still. Mark O'Connor has dcne the math in his blog

http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/2011/06/bernard-salt-abandons-his-baby-bust.html#comment-form

The biggest part of the problem; is economic paradigms absolutely locked to population growth to growth! These models demand more and more resources, more and housing/urban growth/hospitals schools etc. This keeps demand happening and the wheels of traditional demand driven commerce turning. This in turn creates inflationary pressures and rising prices or endlessly devaluing currency.
What you could buy for a $1,000.00 when I was a boy, now costs at least $30,000.00; and or, at least double the hours of employed endeavour?
And the basic wage in America, hasn't moved upward in real terms, for around thirty years?
Doing what you've always done while expecting a different outcome is madness.
We need to replace population growth, with something that will keep the wheels of the commerce, we all depend on for our livelihoods, turning!
That something is change, reform and removing poverty in all its forms and guises wherever we find it.
This will allow us to end our current dependence on designed obsolescence; another absurdity.
We need to remove all unproductive parasitical practice and middle men marketing. [No one is owed a living and there are no free lunches.]
These practises and or speculation, simply doubles living costs and lines the pocket of speculators, who effectively do little or nothing to earn it; and, do little more than perpetuate misery, or remove bread from the mouths of babies.
Instead, lowered costs will enable the poorest among us to better use their scarcer resources; to meet unmet need, and in so doing, add new demand; to the demand driven economy.
We also need to vastly reform and simplify our tax systems; to make avoidance actually impossible; dramatically cut the cost of collecting it; and, make the wealthy pay a fair price; for the various privileges they are accorded; and indeed, enable many of the opportunities seemingly reserved for the privileged elite; to be made available to everyone.
We also need trade not aid; and, what aid remains, needs to be focused on helping the needy to help themselves; and or, remove the root causes of enduring poverty!

@Divergence

You've got things a bit backwards. You are using Australian Academy of Sciences and Global Footprint Network as the authority to judge whether my statement is correct or not. The statement I made is the concept that must be understood before one can estimate how many can be sustained. The statement I made is fundamentally sound. The estimates you quoted are by no means certainly good. When I read the information on the Global Footprint Network, I do not come away convinced that they fully comprehend that we must not consume any resources that we depend on faster than they renew, and it isn't clear that they comprehend how much we depend on oil. But maybe I conclude that because I comprehend how ridiculous it is to make those estimates.

What do you estimate is the crop yield given no fossil fuel derived fertilizers? How do the crops get planted and harvested without oil driven tractors? Can we transport, store, and package in anywhere near the efficiency we do with oil? Seriously, why would any self respecting scientist be so arrogant to think they can imagine the outputs of an economy so very different from today's? But more importantly, why do it? We cannot possibly wave a wand and wake up tomorrow without needing to use fossil fuels. The idea that such an estimate is useful proves they aren't paying attention. It will take several generations of averaging less than 2 children before it is not obvious that we are consuming essential resources faster than they renew.

Unless I am mistaken, the Australian Academy of Sciences recommendation of an upper limit of 23 million is not a statement that Australia can actually sustain that many. They are simply attempting to say "hey, lets try to stop here and go down". If I am mistaken, then the AAS are a bunch of blithering idiots.

Divergence.
1. No there are 5.2 million boomers (1946 to 1964) 4.1 million born here and the rest from the NOM. I will get the correct and factual numbers from the latest abs ages data and post here later.
2. Less kids now as a poewrcentage of our population and I certainly am not schooled by media propaganda. It is called Sociology.

KAEP
"Oz has been below replacment fertility of the 2.1% for 34 years and IS still stacking on a NET natural increase of 150,000 people per year.
Figure that!"
1. It is called the increased lonjevity and is about our demographic momentum. More people living longer...
2. Your 'FACTS' our NOM are way out and not facts at all.