Peter Hume wrote:

>>And so the recommended means to cut our fertility rate is...?>>

That is easier than you may think.

There is a very strong and well-established inverse link between educational and career opportunities for women and fertility. The better educated they are, the greater their career opportunities, the fewer children women choose to have.

So if you want to reduce fertility make sure that women have access to education and that there are no barriers to their entry into the workforce.

There is also a strong inverse link between URBANISATION and fertility. In my native South Africa back in the 1960s the fertility rate for rural Black women was steady at 6.6 babies per woman. In urban areas it was 2.8 and falling.

In any case fertility rates have been falling all over the world. Europe is below replacement rate – a continent-wide average of around 1.5.

In India fertility rates have fallen from around 5 in the 1970s to 2.6 today.

Even in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia fertility rates have fallen from around 6 in 1990 to 2.3 in 2011. Another ultra-conservative Islamic country, Iran, has a below replacement fertility rate of 1.88.

China too is below replacement. Doing away with the one child policy may bring about a bounce in fertility but I suspect it would not last long.

In 1960 the UN forecast a global population of 8.5 billion by 2000. Here we are in 2011 and the population has just passed the 7 billion mark.

When I reached my 65th birthday someone asked me what had surprised me most during my life. I did not have to think about my reply.

THE BIGGEST SURPRISE OF MY LIFE HAS BEEN THE GLOBAL PLUNGE IN FERTILITY RATES.

So fertility rates are falling and the best way to accelerate the process is to ensure equal rights for women.

Further to my previous post about plunging fertility.

As ever the devil is in the details. Religious people have on average more babies than their secular counterparts. This is true even when adjustments are made for differences in socio-econonmic status and educational levels.

In the past the seculars boosted their numbers by recruiting the children of religious folk. This MAY be coming to an end.

You can find an interesting discussion of these trends in:

Breeding for God by ERIC KAUFMANN, Prospect, 19th November 2006

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/11/breedingforgod/

Atheists believe the future belongs to them.

They may be wrong.

See also:

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann

http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325140940&sr=1-1

I've noticed that atheists get apoplectic when I point out that the trend towards increasing secularism may be coming to an end.

Sometimes I think atheists have as much of a hard time confronting reality as religios.

halduell, writes

' There is a book that should be made required reading for the HSC. It's called Planet of Slums and was written by Mike Davis in 2007. I challenge anyone scoffing at the ideas presented in this article to read the book.'

No wonder so many see so much commonsense in Jesus words. When you read the drivel the author of the article has written you don't know whether to cry or laugh at such stupidity. Here we are inviting skilled immigrants by the thousands as this sort of dogma is preached. Never before has our lifestyle been more affluent. Keep breeding guys and don't fall for such nonsense.

This is a thoughtful article which raises serious matters. The author probably doesn't mention immigration because there is not the space to discuss Australia's other (major) source of population growth in the one opinion piece. Rather than putting our resources into building more infrastructure for more people in this country we should set an example by adopting a population policy that leads to stability as soon as possible. Then we will be able to afford generous overseas aid, especially aid for family planning. For example, the total fertility rate in Afghanistan is currently 6.3 and their annual rate of natural increase is 2.8%, (This means their population is set to double every 25 years.) No amount of military intervention or generic development aid can create peace and prosperity in such a demographic setting.

>>Jenny Goldie has interests in population, peak oil and climate change. She is an active member of Sustainable Population Australia and of ACT Peak Oil.>>

PEAK OIL!

Quick quiz:

Which country has the largest proven recoverable oil reserves?

If you answered Saudi Arabia you're probably wrong.

At current prices exploiting Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands is economically viable. As the technology improves so will the amount that can be recovered. Canada may have the largest oil reserves. Production seems likely to reach 3 million barrels / day by 2015.

Another contender is Venezuela. It has the worlds largest known reserves of "heavy crude."

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_crude_oil

There are also greater economies that can be squeezed out of the internal combustion engine. I expect the trend of improving fuel efficiency to continue.

We are not going to run out of oil for a while yet.

Finally, with improving battery technology the time may come when we need less oil anyway.

SUSTAINABLE POPULATION AUSTRALIA

How can you write about population without writing about immigration?

Full disclosure: I am an immigrant. If I had been setting immigration policy in 1996 I would not have accepted me.

Some very good points in this article. The main global problem is that we have 7 billion people going on 9 or 10 billion on a planet that could sustainably support (at least until the far future) 1 to 2 billion in modest comfort. The Global Footprint network has done the math on the resource issues and why we are in environmental overshoot as Jenny Goldie says. It is clear that peak oil is far from being the only issue. See

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010

Nevertheless, I agree with mralstoner and stevenlmeyer that the main issue for Australia is immigration. Our fertility rate has been slightly below replacement level since 1976, and most estimates suggest that growth by natural increase will stop at some time in the 2030s. Without net immigration, the population would then slowly decline, until we decided to stabilise it with some mild encouragement or incentives to have a few more children, or with a modest level of net immigration. According to the ABS, natural increase was 150,000 last year, less than half of our population growth for the year. The ABS didn't specify what share of the natural increase was due to births to recent immigrants.

I haven't found a similar graph for Australia, but the demographer Leon Bouvier worked out the trajectory of the US population assuming zero net immigration after 1970 and a continuation of the 2.0 fertility rate prevalent then. He showed that the US population would have peaked at 255 million in about 2020 and would be down to 236 million by 2050. It is now 310 million and headed for the stratosphere due to Congress' policy of mass legal immigration and tolerance of mass illegal immigration. See

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/about-problem/our-lost-future.html

I also think that mralstoner is right that our politicians would simply further increase immigration if the fertility rate fell. If we can't force them to back off, it isn't even worth worrying about fertility, which has been pretty much taking care of itself.