Greg. An interesting article well constructed. It has been observed that populations that increase the educational level of all, and particularly the female component of that population, results in a decrease in population growth. Equally, those populations that move from abject poverty towards a 'middle class' level of existance, also have a commensurate reduction in population growth.

One could argue that growth and development resulting in wealth generation, higher educational levels and increased health benifites are the most effective factors in reducing population growth. Witness the population growth figures of the wealthy first world countries.

It could be suggested that the arguments against development and wealth generation
espoused in your paper could be the greatest factor in maintaining the status quo with
respect to population growth.

To propose the notion that CO2 is a 'pollutant' or a 'toxic substance' (as labled by the
American Environmental Protection Agency), as opposed to an airbourn nutrient essential for the wellbeing of the biosphere and mankind, is to promote the limitation/reduction of the single most effective ellement on the planet that directly addresses the very problem you refer to.

I agree with your identification of the problem, but submit the above as 'just a thought'
On one of a possible number of solutions.

You are quite correct that environmental activism without restricting population growth is actually worse than no environmental activism at all. See "To save the world we may have to waste it":

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6998

At this stage of the game, growth is not development and it is certainly not progress!

Great article Greg. The environmental elephants you mentioned are real but they are not the only drivers of unsustainable population and consumption in both the developed and the developing world. Innovation in our education, business and economic systems and models is essential in transforming individuals, communities and nations towards happiness, wellbeing, engagement and collective impact for a better future. We need a new generation of leaders and organisations that can deliver real change.

Well that was the longest advertisement I have read on OLO, & not even for a book.

I suppose if you find doing something is not all that profitable, it's not a bad idea to move on, & sell something that doesn't exist. Sure keeps the investment in stock down.

I think there's a name for that, but I'm having an old-timers day, & don't want to remember it.

I rather like this anti-pop article.

For one thing its written by someone who works and who isn't dancing half stoned in Byron Bay twirling a fire stick.

Just a few comments. The speed of population growth is plummeting in most western nations. Plus most of Europe, the US the UK, Japan and Australia will also have to find ways to ensure the Boomer cohort doesn't saddle us with debt - that's the elephant in the room.

There is an annoying and persistent fallacy that Australia or anywhere else is over populated. This is simply not correct. The only country in the world which has a population problem - and its major - is Africa.

Over-population is a common theme in this sort of writing, and has been since the 1930s at least, but no-one has been able to convincingly show that there is some limit to population or to resources. Every time mass starvation or permanent oil shortages are forecast for such and such a decade, the forecasts turn out to be completely wrong.

There is a hard example to hand in recent news bulletins. Those of you who recall recent warnings that there is some limit to energy resources in the foreseeable future, should look up the discovery of gas hydrates off the coast of Japan. Major, major gas reserves discovered. Sorry, but you've got to foget about limits to energy reserves for a generation or so..

Cheryl. Your second sentence did make me smile.. An immage to amuse. It looks like I am a member of the " elephant in the room" cohort to which you refer, I do apologise... Yes, Africa is the population bomb I agree. I argue that with development and wealth generation these countries could have populations move into the birth rates evident in the countries you mention.
Curmudgeon, I would agree that with each prognostication of doom, gloom and catostrophic prediction of energy shortage, those damn boffins keep comming up with clever technologies to extract cost effective sources of energy.... They do muck up the doomists dont they ha ha.

AS long as humans produce biological waste and that waste can be converted to methane, we will never run out of energy. As long as waves crash into our southern shores, we will never run out of energy. As long as the sun shines and we can convert a solar thermal reaction to power a catalytically assisted cracking of the water molecule, we will never run out of energy; or, in this case, ultra cheap hydrogen, the endlessly renewable fuel of the future?
The problem is not population growth per se, but our fundamentally flawed economic reliance on it!
We we can get past that by instead concentrating on removing poverty and injustice in all its guises and forms, including mindlessly making it dearer, we will have created a far superior economic model; no longer dependant on population growth or designed obsolescence.
Making it dearer than it needs to be; only ever negatively impact the poor and or entrenches poverty; the opposite effect and outcome we want; if we truly want to actually reduce population growth; or indeed, see it humanely reversed.
The best alternative energy outcomes and the easiest transported around the world, will be the least expensive ones. Someone really needs to hammer that one into some really thick heads!
If economic improvement is the only real or conclusively proven way to reduce population growth; then it is the solution of choice we should all get behind and or target.
And a monumental improvement on mindlessly mouthed mantras like, make it dearer, make it dearer!

What LOSERS with too much Testosterone, Oestrogen (or both?) seem to selectively overlook is that INCREASING POPULATIONS never INCREASES their CHANCES.

OVERPOPULATION only EVER increases the chances of freak mutations which have the ability to supercompete with current human genetic strains.

The current genetically superior freaks are termed CEOs and they have one purpose in life: to screw LOSERS in order to DOMINATE dwindling ENERGY reserves.

Bit of PROPAGANDA here, some drugs there, fatty foods, a casino or two and a nice WAR:

Like taking CANDY from babies. And the more babies, the bigger profits we make before we set them all to killing each other while we watch and laugh.

Too easy!

Ha Ha Ha!

Its only a FINITE planet if you are a curmudgeonly genetic dead letter.

Julia Gillard's particular car industry support will go almost directly into best selling 4WD vehicles. She KNOWS! The deadly tailpipe, rubber on road and $$infrastructre overuse caused by 4WDs is an ELEPHANT that maintains a viscious class divide in Australia.

These vehicles are not people movers so much as class-warfare military weapons.

Gillard must be seen as the FRAUD she is on Climate change and Environmental issues. Charging the poor the brunt of Carbon taxes: pretending to compensate while corporations pass on bigger and bigger price rises. And when you can pay no more you will be so low as to be thankful to be sideswiped and killed by a drunken 4WD owner going to pick their kids up from kindy.

Ditch The Witch!

Cheryl:

...#.For one thing its written by someone who works and who isn't dancing half stoned in Byron Bay twirling a fire stick.#...

...Cheryl, you have a very negative view of Byron Bay! You should visit Byron Bay and see for yourself how beautiful and unpolluted it is! Huge number of people actually work there too! Another Tut, Tut, for the day!

No slight on Byron Bay, Diver Dan. Where else can a man or woman effectively retire on a disability pension for the rest of one's life and contemplate the universe on my tax dollars? More dolphin-spirit power to them.

Good on you Cheryl, don't you fall for it. I could take you to a thousand places more beautiful than Byron Bay, & another thousand places less polluted, less spoiled, just as uninteresting, & not a dancing fire stick to be found.

KAEP, you'll have to buy a new violin mate, the energy is no longer dwindling. Haven't you heard, they have found out how to access the huge known reserves of shale gas. They haven't started seriously looking for the stuff yet, & have enough reserves to supply over a century of our energy requirements.

I know it is a terrible disappointment to you & the doom brigade, but you will have to get used to it. All the population will be living just like me soon, better than a 17Th century king.

Better tell your mates to get rid of all those solar & wind shares, there like Confederate money, worthless, just they don't know it yet.

So now there'll be no reason to have to fight each other, & there will be plenty left over for us peasants, even after those dreadful CEOs have had their fill. Even the All Gores of this world become sated sooner or later.

I'm afraid if you can't handle the good news, you may just have to slit your wrists, because there will be no stopping it now. Those who see no reason why life should not be fun, will not stand for it.

Surely the simile of “elephants in the room” refers to thing that people are aware of but are afraid to discuss? The supposed threats of materialism and over-population population are about the most discussed perennial in newspapers, books and sites like this.

Curmudgeon

This alarmist goes back a lot longer than the 1930s. Aristotle, Tertullian, Confucius all wrote of the perils of over population. It’s astonishing that over 2,000 years of failed apocalyptic predictions of catastrophic over-population have not deterred the doomsayers.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/overpopulation-the-perennial-myth/

'within our control'.
Who's control?

'despite all of our focussed efforts,'.
At control?

'We in the West have fallen hook, line and sinker for the myth of happiness from materialism...'.
Who's the we here? Should we ban consumers or just re-educate them? How about camps for recalcitrants? Who'll decide who are recalcitrants? Do we appoint a departmental committee or just leave it up to those 'in the know'. You know the 'correct' thinkers?

'Our entire consumer society is based on the concept of dedicating almost all of our waking lives to the pursuit of more'.
Is it? By all of us or just all those recalcitrants, in desparate need of re-education, who seem to want more comfortable lives?

'Innovation in our education, business and economic systems and models is essential in transforming individuals, communities and nations towards happiness, wellbeing, engagement and collective impact for a better future'.
Yea, let's innovate and re-educate.

'...our fundamentally flawed economic reliance (on population growth). We we can get past that by instead concentrating on removing poverty and injustice in all its guises and forms...'

Yea let's just impose a socialist regime ... that'll fix it all.

Damn I didn't want to sound at all idealogical I just wanted to sound fair! Did I say that or did the of Director of thinkEd, want that?

Sheesh won't these leftie dogooders ever leave us alone to decide what's best for ourselves?

I guess the men(oops People) in the white coats and re-education pick ups and cattle trucks will be out to 'select' me.

I'll have to change my name and sail away.

I suspect that Confucious and his contemporaries were needlessly alarmist given their era. However, can someone explain how graphs like the one below could *not* raise alarm bells, or at a minimum point to real environmental solutions?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Population_curve.svg/360px-Population_curve.svg.png

And there is no bloody room on my enviromentally savvy tiny floating palace for any bloody elephants... or idealogical control seeking gooses. I have a bloody big weapon to deal with them and it also involves the use of a very short plank and some very hungrey but rapidly disappearing threatened sharkes ... Byron Bay sounds an ideal location dor such rudinmentary enforced 'self-discipline'.

I'd soon see how many 'know better than me's' (and most of the historical western writers and phisolophers) would actually be able to walk on bloody 'enviromentally perfect' water.

Greg

I’m not surprised by the fact that there are a long more people now than there were in the stone age, let alone alarmed.

It’s a mathematical inevitability that any measure that grows on average a little each year will produce a graph this shape given a long enough time frame. If your graph finished in say 1800 rather than 2000 then its shape would be almost exactly the same, only the axis values would be different.

I’ll cheerfully concede, however, that a more informative chart would show population growth rates being very slow up to about 1000 years ago, picking up a little through the middle ages and accelerating significantly at the time of the industrial revolution, before slowing somewhat lately.

The key question for me is WHY there are so many more people now. The answer is a trivial truism, but one with profound implications - it’s because more people are being born than are dying. Yet if we look at fertility rates, we can see that these have been declining for decades, first in developed countries, more recently in developing ones. The reason for global population growth is that death rates have been falling even faster than birth rates. This has many causes, including more productive farming, improved medical science and improved public health, utilities and education. It is something I think we should celebrate as a colossal achievement. To bemoan human population growth knowing that it is a product of improved life expectancy seems to me a miserable and misanthropic ideology.

I’ll also accept that current population growth rates can’t go on for ever. But I see no reason to expect that they will. The best explanation by far for recent demographic trends is the “demographic transition” from a subsistence world of high birth and death rates to a prosperous one of low birth and death rates. During that transition, population growth temporarily accelerates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Cheryl:

.#.. Where else can a man or woman effectively retire on a disability pension for the rest of one's life and contemplate the universe on my tax dollars?..#.

A)- ... most overseas countries, for example Bali/Indonesia, cheap and convenient.

Prompete,

To be fair, it's not CO2 itself that is defined as being the problem , it's the perceived increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's what "too much" means.

If the planet can only cope with a maximum amount then that creates consequences.

It's the same for the effects of population levels, in which case there are 3 certain methods to reduce it - War, Pestilence and Famine.

Each are inevitable but it would be wiser to find better ways of living within the available environmental means.

Wobbles:
Point taken. I guess the issue is to define What is "too much" . Paleoclimatolagists and their variety of proxy data sets could suggest that we are nowhere near reaching the 'too much' point. The ppm volumes suggested by the proxy data may be a bit 'wobbly' (+- 50ppm), But volumes up to 10 times what we currently experience would appear to be reasonable in not creating the 'forcing' everyone fears and would be a positive boon in aleviating poverty, enhancing food production and perhaps averting your accurately identified population controll methods. Indeed, much wisdom in living within environmental limitations as defined by......?

Well, it just so happens that I've had a couple of beers a few minutes ago with an old aquaintent down the local watering hole.
He had just returned from visiting his son in China. We talked about the three Gorges Dam which he saw & what a marvel of engineering it is. I remarked about my theory of the possibility of all that weight unbalancing the planet. He said that that was actually a subject of conversation there. I then replied if that's possible then perhaps this could explain the way out of season seasons we have lately here in the tropics with the doldrums being two months overdue & no monsoonal rains as yet. Add to the theory the immense amount of water lost in the Aral Sea & perhaps other places so many degrees from China & eastern Siberia with their immense dammed lakes & it doesn't sound all that implausible that the planet could be a few centimetres out of its usual trajectory. Just a thought, Hmmmh.

The people who keep chanting that Malthus was wrong remind of those skits on Sesame Street where the puppets keep looking for a monster that is right next to them. In Malthusian trap societies (all of them before the late 19th century) people outbreed their resources and overexploit their environment. From a perspective of thousands of years, the graph of living standards versus time is a downward sloping curve, punctuated by occasional spikes where new crops or new technology have expanded the carrying capacity, or where some disaster has pruned back the population. The good times never last, however, because they just result in more and more mouths to eat up any surplus and restore the accustomed level of misery. The physical anthropolgist Lawrence Angel examined a great many human bones from Eastern Mediterranean countries and found sharp declines in average height and life expectancy from the Palaeolithic. There was some improvement in the Hellenistic and Roman periods ("What have the Romans done for us?"), but after that it was downhill all the way to the Industrial Revolution.

In some societies an equilibrium is reached, with most people living in grinding poverty under a tyranny where death rates balance out birth rates. (See economic historian Gregory Clark's account of early modern Europe in "A Farewell to Alms"). Collapse is likely because safety margins are too thin, as with the Irish Potato Famine. The late blight arrived in Ireland from Mexico in the 1840s. It kept coming back and wiping out potato harvests year after year. The Irish didn't have any resistant varieties, and significant numbers of people were living on plots of land that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes.

(cont'd)

(cont'd)

This was partly the fault of the British, who ruled Ireland at the time and had commandeered a lot of the best land to grow export crops, but it was also the fault of the Irish themselves, who had blown out their population from perhaps 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million by the 1840s. 1-1.5 million people starved to death, and another 1.5-2 million were forced to emigrate. Hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe as well.

If there is no strong central government to stop them, people try to drive off or kill their neighbours to take what they have. The conflict or the persecutions get blamed on "ancient tribal hatreds" or religious bigotry, but this is because religion and ethnicity make good rallying points when people are joining up sides. People can always find other excuses. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Roman Catholic Hutus killed other Roman Catholic Hutus in districts where there weren't any Tutsis, and the people who were killed were likely to have been involved in disputes over land. This account by James Gasana, Rwanda's former Agriculture Minister, gives overpopulation star billing and includes a table showing the relationship between calories per person and massacres in the different districts of his country.

http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/EP155B.pdf

There are many other articles saying the same thing about Rwanda. There is also an article in last week's Weekly Guardian, "Scarce resources spur strife in South Sudan", on the massacres by the Nuer and Murle people. Do you still want to claim that Malthus was wrong?

Yes of course Malthus was wrong.

His prediction that population would expand to absorb any increase in resources is not compatible with the evidence. If Malthus was right, then families, classes and countries where resources are abundant would experience faster population growth than those where resources are scarce. In fact, the reverse is true. Whether comparing countries, within a given country over time or through time-series trends, there is a strong NEGATIVE correlation between prosperity and fertility. When people have a good chance of raising their offspring to successful adulthood, they choose (on average) to have fewer children.

Fertility rates worldwide have halved in the past 50 years and are now below replacement rates in many developed countries, including Australia. Demographers expect this trend to continue, to the point where global population may stabilise late this century.

All this is the opposite of what Malthus’ theory predicted.

Rhian,

History didn't start 50 or 100 years ago. Malthus was clearly right about his own time. Compare the population growth rates in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with those in the American colonies, where the abundant resources resulted in exceptionally high fertility rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States

See also Prof. Paolo Malanima on the historical inverse relationship between population and wages in Northern Italy

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Articles/Wages_%20Productivity.pdf

What has changed over the last 100 years or so is development, which has pulled some (not all) countries out of the Malthusian trap. Developed countries can defend themselves with technology rather than numbers. Developed countries need an educated, high quality work force, so they enforce compulsory education and child labour laws, breaking the nexus between large families and economic benefits for the parents. They can also afford to pay pensions to their elderly. As one American blogger put it, "Social Security is a small price to pay not to have my parents or my wife's parents living with us." Modern contraception makes it easy to avoid unwanted births.

I don't think it is possible, though, to make everyone rich, even if population growth stopped tomorrow, due to resource limitations and problems with pollution of various sorts. We are already in environmental overshoot, using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. See (especially p. 21)

http://issuu.com/globalfootprintnetwork/docs/ecological-footprint-atlas-2010/1?mode=a_p

If resources account for population growth, why was the USA’s indigenous population low and stable before white colonisation?

The article says that high birth rates and low death rates both contributed to population growth. This accords with the demographic transition model, predicting rapid population growth as developing countries transition from a fairly stable pre-industrial population (in America’s case, its indigenous population) to a low fertility, high life expectancy developed state. As the transition model predicts, both birth and death rates declined rapidly as the USA became more prosperous. And – in contradiction of Malthus – the white population, with its greater prosperity and longer life expectancy, had birth rates consistently below the black (largely slave) population:

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography

I agree that a Malthusian trap was more plausible in pre-industrial societies that it is today, and nowadays may be more plausible in poor than rich countries. But taking the world as a whole, the global tendency towards higher life expectancy and lower fertility rates suggest that the transition model is a far better explanation for demographic trends than Malthus’s grim theory.

Can everyone be “rich”? That depends on what you mean by “rich”. In the past 100 years we have made stunning progress in improving life expectancy. The overall incidence of famines is declining, as is the rate of absolute poverty and its effects such as malnutrition. We still have a long way to go, but trends are heading in the right direction. I see no reason to expect them to stop.

If you conceive of economic growth as producing more and more of the same stuff, then resources might one day provide a limit to growth. But economic growth is driven ultimately by productivity and innovation, and the possibilities for improving these are limitless. People in developing countries use satellite telecommunications services in places that could not hope to pay for the copper wires network that would have been needed a few years ago to access such services. Where people use telecommunications networks, we no longer need scarce and expensive copper but can use silicon-based fibre at many times the efficiency

"But economic growth is driven ultimately by productivity and innovation, and the possibilities for improving these are limitless."

Unsubstantiated drivel!

Its a THERMODYNAMIC FACT: Growth is always driven by FREE-ENERGY. Reality: Finite energy, more people, less free-energy per capita, less GROWTH per capita and less growth PERIOD. Except of course, for those on salaries 100-1000 times the average citizen. Ah but they don't exist. In your theory of everyone is EQUAL - HA HA!

2012 is going to be an interesting year for people who still believe in SANTA~! Or those who would try to make others believe in such fantasies for some competitive edging.

How can anyone believe that current world population is not a problem when you consider what is happening to the world environment? That is of course unless you don't consider world environment to be important - but only people, is that it? Damn the environment, we can do without it - is that it?

Just how important is Homo Sapiens, that more and more is better and better? Forests being destroyed, with oxygen loss, habitat loss, species extinction - including many species as yet unknown to science, plants and animals which might hold the key to fighting disease, or are just a source of amazement and splendour.

Land clearing for food or oil production, to sustain subsistence communities in abject poverty while the West revels in its cleverness; habitats destroyed or changed irreversibly by over-grazing by domestic herds, with ever-diminishing returns; land raped to exploit fossil fuels; the marine environment raped beyond sustainability to feed ever increasing masses of humanity; the world increasingly put at risk to feed fossil fuel consumption; toxins released into the environment in the name of progress. We kill the world, that we might live. How clever we are.

While some caring people and organisations are working hard to bring a few species back from the brink of extinction, so many other species go to the wall unseen and unheard, in the name of progress. And, this makes sense?

Before fossil fuel usage some communities reduced their environment to desert by over-exploitation; now we have floods, landslips and mudslides because of lack of ground-cover. Ever increasing demand, and ever diminishing returns. We kill all before us, to maintain an illusion of progress and satisfaction.

Too smart for our own good? Reckon.

Rhian,

The demographic transition model merely describes the process of getting out of the Malthusian trap.

It is worth looking at an article by Debora MacKenzie in the Jan. 7 New Scientist on the Limits to Growth model World3 and recent work that has followed on from it. Such models have been run to test technological optimist scenarios:

"In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy - which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials - and a doubling in the reserves of non-renewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reduction was added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck, driven by the continuing rise of industry... Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise in relative prosperity."

The bottom line is that we are in global environmental overshoot and would be set to hit the wall even with no more people. Due to overextraction, the water table under Punjab's wheat belt has been falling at a meter a year. India has started importing grain again. Even if everyone cut their fertility to replacement level tomorrow, we could still expect 2-3 billion more people, just due to demographic momentum. (If the young adult generation is much bigger than older generations, there will still be more births than deaths, even if family sizes are small.) I have seen calculations that India's population would double under that scenario before stabilising. 42% of the children are malnourished now. Fertility rates have also remained stubbornly high in a number of places, the reason why the UN has raised its medium population projection to show a peak at 10 billion instead of 9.

America's indigenous population was kept low because of the limitations of their technology, often the lack of suitable crops, especially in the colder areas, and the lack of suitable domestic animals. See Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel". There were very dense populations in the Aztec Empire and elsewhere in the New World, before the majority of the population were wiped out by Old World diseases.

Populations were kept relatively stable by unremitting tribal warfare. "Constant Battles" by Prof. Steven LeBlanc (Archaeology, Harvard) contains a first hand account of excavations in the American Southwest, among other places. Instead of noble, peaceful Indians in harmony with Nature and each other, he reports fortifications, environmental damage, whole villages massacred and the bodies left unburied, collections of trophy heads, etc. Prof. Lawrence Keeley (Archaeology, University of Chicago) writes (p. 91) in his book "War Before Civilization": "My own first excavation training was on a prehistoric village site on the San Francisco Bay in California. Thousand year old skeletons with obsidian arrowheads embedded in the bones, missing heads, and other signs of violent death were so common that our excavation crew referred to burials as 'bad sights'." LeBlanc and Keeley report many similar findings all over the world.

Divergence

Interesting info on old N Am cultures. Surely the historical evidence you’re presenting reinforces my point. Different resource endowments, technologies and cultures have supported different population densities, sometimes stable, sometimes not; sometimes prosperous, sometimes not.

While on occasion populations have been constrained by lack of resources, Malthus’ proposition that population must inevitably expand to absorb an increase in productive capacity is demonstrably false. In most developed countries, including Australia, fertility rates are below replacement rates. I challenge you to explain how this can in any way be compatible with what Malthus said.

I am not familiar with the “World3”, model, but I am familiar enough with modelling to know that its results are products of its assumptions. Without knowing the assumptions the equations are based on it’s hard to comment on the results, but a quick Google suggests it’s linked to the Club of Rome, hardly a neutral or independent voice in the “Limits to Growth” debate. And it does seem to me that any model that predicts that populations will crash because economic growth causes pollution is seriously flawed in its specification of how people respond to problems and threats. All our recent experience demonstrates that rich societies have a lower tolerance for pollution than poor ones. Pollution in Australian cities is declining. It’s estimated that London’s air quality is the best it has been since the 16th century (http://myurbanrevolution.com/2010/02/09/interesting-excerpts-from-naked-economics/) and its still below European standards, so will have to improve further.

Likewise, the definition of “economic resource”, or indeed “resource”, is not fixed but changes depending on demand, technology, etc. Oil was not a resource at all until the nineteenth century, when people worked out how to use it for energy on a significant scale. The US energy industry has recently been transformed by the development of unconventional gas that until recently was not deemed economic to produce. As things become scarce, their prices rise, and people have the incentive to discover, develop or devise an alternative. That is the market economy at work.

Rhian,

Malthus thought that population growth could be limited by moral restraint. As stated above, I think that societies can get out of the Malthusian trap and that some have actually done so. This is not under dispute by anyone, so far as I know.

So far as World3 is concerned, the New Scientist article also claims that Limits to Growth was never actually disproved, that there was an media campaign to discredit it, similar to what is going on now with climate change, "The political right rejected its warning about the dangers of growth. The left rejected it for betraying the aspirations of workers. The Catholic Church rejected its plea for birth control." Graham Turner at the CSIRO has done a detailed statistical analysis of how real growth compares to the scenarios in Limits. "He concluded that reality so far closely matches the standard run of World3." This is not to say that models should be treated as gospel, but it is clear that the technological optimists must come up with multiple solutions to multiple threats, not just one magic bullet. Exporting our pollution to the Third World doesn't count.

You might also consider the War on Cancer that was inaugurated in the US with great fanfare by President Nixon. There was certainly strong demand for cures for cancer, backed up by large sums of money from government and private interests. Yet success has been quite modest. Some problems are just plain hard. Do you really want to bet the farm that all of them will be solved? I find that arguing with technological optimists, however, is like arguing with Creationists about evolution. It is a matter of religious faith, even if it means ignoring the laws of physics

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

So, if countries with the highest pop growth rates can ameliorate the detrimental effects of over-population by engaging the capitalist model, how will cherry picking the best minds in those countries (to accelerate the capitalist cause in the West) help achieve that goal? Isn't this another form of colonial exploitation?

I often hear people argue that we are "helping developing countries" by importing their talent. It seems to me that all we are doing is trying to facilitate the accelerated rape of our own land by importing intellectual capital from impoverished nations. And, if we are not raping our own land we are importing materials from the poor nations to sate the Western consumer appetite that inexorably grows through both technological redundancy and population growth based on the importation of production units/consumers to live the Western "lifestyle". Given the violence and corruption that goes hand in hand with Western economic and political exploitation of Third World nation's resources, exactly how are we helping?

Also, we hear about the benefits of educating women, but what good is that to an educated women when she ultimately is subject to the vagaries and subjugations of a patriarchal society? Would you love the idea more than you fear the fist?

Now here's a serious, non-rhetorical question, how many of you pro-growthers (immigration supporters) and pop blinkers (AKA "human pop growth is no problem", E.G. the technological solution is just around the corner etc) do not financially benefit from pop growth? How many of you are of pure ideological belief and can sustain the argument with empirical evidence that is divorced from your own vested interest? cont...

cont...

Another thing bothering me lately is how we have heard for years that the pop with stabilise at around 9 billion. Lately, the 12 billion figure has begun to emerge. Was there ever any science behind the 9 bil figure? Was it just a sop to placate emerging concerns? Has the population for any species ever naturally plateaued before ecological limitations begin to dictate? Or do they just crash and burn like dumb beasts? Why are we supposed to be different when our behaviour mirrors every other species' rush to ecological precipices? Every call for frugality, moderation and caution with resource use is met with hysterical campaigns motivated by short-term self interest. Just look at what has happened to natural forests or the way the pokie industry reacted to moves to protect people who are afflicted with pathological addiction that is plainly detrimental to society.

12 bil, who cares!? I'm in for my chop NOW! F the kids! It's a hedonistic catch cry that is inbuilt into the inherent excesses on fundamentalist capitalism. With the term "fundamentalist capitalism" I mean the notion that acquiring money is the be all and end all of human existence. I'm sure you'll understand regardless of which side of the fence you sit. Making money has been elevated above all other considerations such as society or maintenance of the environment that sustains us.

BTW Cheryl, half wit hippies are on your side in this one. They're into "no borders and no infringement on personal freedoms". Fundamentalists at both ends of the spectrum have a lot in common.

As it stands, I think every person is entitled to at least one child. With natural attrition that would allow the human population to stabilise and eventually decrease to whatever level is ultimately sustainable be any measure. The Earth has a finite number of atoms within its systems, therefore it follows that it can only sustain a finite number of humans. When the majority of the human population understands this, the greedy, egotistical, superstitious, ignorant and plain stupid will have to get with the program.

A sagacious piece Sardine.

Everyone with a BRAIN on this planet knows you are correct.

But Because of Oestrogen, WOMEN must have all the children necessary to live a respectable and comfortable life. All sorts of statistics can be assembled to show they are not destroying other cultures, ecologies, climate and environments. For when they are dead they are no longer statistically significant.

And because of Testosterone MEN must agree with women on the above since they KNOW its the ONLY way they will ever get laid even if its unsatsfactory.

CEO's and Politicians KNOW this evil is endemic and say "I can become famous with this knowledge" .. "So long as I can transcend my own hormonal urges, encourage this selfishness, hide all the negative consequences, reward all the negative behaviours and above all DEMONISE ANYONE who dares tells the TRUTH".

There wouldn't be but a handful of people in the world today who for some unknown reason believe in TRUTH and JUSTICE and are prepared to stand tall and say so.

God help them!

The majority of the human race are LIARS. LIARS always get ENTANGLED in their own worst mischief and that means the human race is headed for extinction as soon as Oil's Free-Energy trickles to a too-expensive dead end in about a decade.
All the phony shale-gas, Nuclear and German style BS Renewables which are FULLY reliant on oil and coal and which are just a FRONT-END for the fossil fuel industries will grind to a halt when you can't get fuel for maintenance and servicing. How can people NOT understand this