"We have the knowledge, we have the global management capabilities, and we have to make it work. We only have one planet. We therefore cannot afford to fail."

One wonders whether the author is confusing knowledge with green propaganda?

Do the Greens have the knowledge regarding anthropogenic global warming? If the answer is yes, let them table the empirical scientific evidence that proves the hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are the driver of dangerous global warming.

With regard to global management, as former senator Bob Brown indicated, the Greens have the ambition to form one world government and assume total control of the planet. Who said totalitarianism was dead?

Hi Popnperish,

You may be onto something very fundamental. And it is almost self-evident that there are two ways to deal with this urgent issue:

(1) sterilise a proportion of young people, perhaps a tenth [but see (2) below], say around their 18th birthday. Those to be sterilised could be chosen by lot.

(2) a similar proportion of larger and fatter young people could also be chosen, again by lot, for community consumption. At eighteen, they would be in their prime. They should have the choice of being either eaten by other Australians or processed and shipped to Third World countries. This could relieve problems associated with the importation of meat products, as well as varying our national diet. Win-win-win !

In these ways, the effective birth-rate could be consistently reduced - before people became fertile - by about a fifth, well below replacement rate, so gradually the overall population will decline over the next couple of centuries, in a fairly smooth and socially non-disruptive way.

Young Greens should be encouraged to volunteer for this importantly historic service to mankind. Be the first in your community, Popnperish !

Cheers,

Joe

Dear Joe/Loudmouth
Well, it's an interesting idea and maybe better than everyone dying a slow and painful death from starvation or malnutrition-related disease. But it's on a par in the altruistic stakes with JonJ, Cheryl and Pericles who only want to act in the interests of their own descendants and to hell with the wider community.
Much better all round if we acknowledged limits to growth that have been set by the biosphere, both with respect to availability of resources and also with the capacity of the atmosphere, earth and oceans to absorb our wastes. Once we acknowledge those limits, we can accept the need to limit population growth.

It's a modest proposal Loudmouth, but one which I fully support. Who said the Internet wouldn't solve the world's problems?

My proposal to the Green Reichstagg never saw the light of day.

I thought we could provide the feral anti-populationists with long sharp sticks made of cedar and dolphin snout and get them drive the refugee boats back as they tried to land. Of course it would mean them living north of Derby in summer, but the price of eternal fanaticism is no air conditioning. They hate technology anyway.

I sense I am in the presence of genius.

Cheryl
Boy, you're sure raising the bar on sheer nastiness but you've already achieved great heights in that respect on various fora around the place.
For the record, we 'feral, anti-populationists' aren't about to wield any sticks at refugee boats. Rather, we prefer to deal with the problems at source. While many refugees on the boats fulfil the strict definition of refugee by genuinely 'fleeing persecution', most are economic refugees driven out of their countries because their populations grew too large for the resources available to sustain them. If we can 'take the pressure off' by helping these countries stabilise their populations, then we might see less pressure on our shores.

Hi Cheryl,

I hardly think so !

Hi Popnperish,

As you write, "Much better all round if we acknowledged limits to growth that have been set by the biosphere, both with respect to availability of resources and also with the capacity of the atmosphere, earth and oceans to absorb our wastes. Once we acknowledge those limits, we can accept the need to limit population growth."

Yes, but aren't there more humane ways than Cheryl's proposals or mine ? Yes, I think so - the key factor to bringing down the birth rate in most western countries was their various Education Act, by which it was compulsory for children to attend school from five or six until they were twelve or fourteen, thereby rendering them no longer an economic asset but actually a cost during those years - with the bonus that they were, by definition, educated.

And the key factor these days is to ensure that as many women as possible around the world get highly educated, so that they not only can make their own choices but, as experience suggests, they delay having children, have fewer children or choose to have none, and are far more economically productive into the bargain.

Population reduction is, as we may belatedly realise, is something which needs to be handled very carefully. It would be too easy - and too late - to discover way down the track that various population-reduction mechanisms (all freely chosen) have reduced the number of young working tax-payers below levels sufficient to comfortably support a rapidly growing older, non-working population.

Effective population reduction, at a rate which does not disrupt this balance between workers and non-workers, may be as slow as 0.01-0.1 % p.a., or 0.3 - 3 % per generation. Say, 1-10 % per century.

As work becomes less physically onerous, governments could tinker with the notion of raising the retirement age, at least for those in fairly cushy jobs like public servants (and conversely lower it for all working women, and for physical workers).

[TBC]