<< Says Law says that a production or supply can create a demand. >>

Gee, that Say fellow must have been a smart cookie! Of course the production or supply of a resource or good can create a demand!

<< population in itself does not increase demand >>

Oh! So when the population of Australia increases, a demand for food, services, infrastructure, goods of all sorts, etc, etc, is not created on top of the pre-existing demand, isn’t it.

Of course it is. Of course population creates a demand.

<< the greatest check on population growth is prosperity >>

Prosperity certainly lowers the birthrate, but it doesn’t ‘check’ population growth, and it certainly doesn’t check the unsustainable effects of population growth if per-capita resource usage and waste-production increase along with increasing prosperity, which they certainly do!

What are you really advocating here? It seems that your worship of technology is directed towards a more prosperous future. But your worship of completely untempered population growth and hence unsustainable resource usage and environmental impacts, just flies totally in the face of this.

They are totally at odds!

If you want a healthy prosperous future, you should be advocating both technological advance and population / resource usage stabilisation.

Consider Paul Ehrlich’s famous equation: I = PAT.

A – affluence

T – technology.

We need technological advance AND population control. And we need to be very mindful that increasing affluence and hence increasing per-capita resource usage and waste production is also a major factor.

Cohenite, advocating technological advance without population mitigation is just completely nonsensical.

I = PAT.

Ehrlich is not an authority for anything; his predictions have not eventuated and his Malthusian doom and gloom is discredited.

Like Ehrlich, like AGW, your notion of sustainability and constraining human population and SOL is predicated basically on a notion of pristine nature as it is now and an imperative that natural process must not be interfered with.

And given that, who decides what level of interference with nature is acceptable?

Currently it is the AGW scientists whose predictions have had as much sucess as Ehrlich's; which is to say none.

At some stage, just like Ehrlich's terminology, a decision has to be made and a line in the sand drawn about no new encroachment, no new technology to improve crops or power, and that a level of population must not be exceeded.

What are you proposing, a Soylent Green approach?

If you increase prosperity, educate women and mitigate religious influence [since the biggest impulse for population increase, outside of poverty, is now islam, although obviously islam and poverty go hand in hand] population will reduce.

I don't revere nature, I respect it.

Notions of sustainability are evanescent and meaningless unless quantified, and increasingly they seem to be based on a worshipful attitude towards nature with humans vandals of the glory of nature.

To me, ultimately, this is misanthropy.

Let's see, the story so far, on AGW and population:

* world temperatures have gone up 2 degrees in 140 years. Canberrans must wake up horrified of the implications of that on these mornings.

* sea-levels have gone up 2 inches in a century. Has any body noticed ?

* average world temperatures have not risen for fifteen years now. Of course,they might, any year soon. But they haven't.

* as Cohenite points out, when women are educated, for a host of reasons, the birth-rate goes down. In Russia, japan, and most European countries, is the population booming ? or flattening ? Or declining ?

Maybe Henny-Penny got it wrong.

So can we put aside all this nonsense and get back to the real dilemmas facing us ?

Joe

Cohenite, you seem to be profoundly confused and self-contradictory.

You say:

<< If you increase prosperity, educate women and mitigate religious influence [since the biggest impulse for population increase, outside of poverty, is now islam, although obviously islam and poverty go hand in hand] population will reduce. >>

Firstly, allow me to correct you: the rate of population growth would reduce, but population itself would continue to increase. I’m sure that is what you meant to say.

But yes you are quite correct here.

You are espousing this as a good thing, which puts you in large part in agreement with us Malthusians and Ehrlichians!!

So then, why is it not sensible to more directly strive to lower the birthrate as part of the education of women, and the lobbying of religious leaders and governments to assist in lowering the birthrate?

Are you going to discriminate between different aspect of the education of women and poo poo the bits that are more directly related to lowering the birthrate while applauding the bits that might in a secondary or tertiary manner have some effect on the birthrate in the longer term?

You need to figure out just what it is that you are supporting and not supporting here cohenite.

<< Like Ehrlich, like AGW, your notion of sustainability and constraining human population and SOL is predicated basically on a notion of pristine nature as it is now and an imperative that natural process must not be interfered with. >>

What a bizarre assertion cohenite!

We are talking about human sustainability, about resource demand and supply and about the continuously increasing demand side of the equation while the supply side is showing enormous signs of faltering.

<< At some stage, just like Ehrlich's terminology, a decision has to be made and a line in the sand drawn about …, no new technology… >>

What??

Have you just made this up or what??

When have those who advocate a sustainable future ever denounced technology?

Of COURSE we need technological improvements. But what we also desperately need is for these improvements to not facilitate continuous population growth. At the same time that we need to improve food-production technologies and all manner of other technologies, we need to learn how to stop the population and the resource consumption and environmental impact from forever growing. It comes back to managing the supply AND demand sides of the essential equation, rather than just forever working on trying to increase supply.

You are presenting a totally closed mind to anything other than your entrenched (and really quite bizarre) views. You are attributing absolute end-of-the-spectrum views to those with whom you disagree.

Maybe if you looked at what they were saying in a more balanced manner, you would see that they are not saying anything like what you are saying that they are saying! ( :>/

Ehrlich IS indeed a foremost authority on population and sustainability.

My basic premise and that of the vast majority of ‘Malthusians’ is NOT one of pristine nature.

Notions of sustainability are NOT evanescent or meaningless unless quantified.

And as for your reference to Soylent Green, well it just shows how loopy and extremist your thought processes really are!

"while the supply side is showing enormous signs of faltering."

No, it is not. You forget Ehrlich LOST his bet to do with shortages of resources. Your guru has NO successful predictions.

We could go but until you are prepared to say what is an unacceptable use of technology to increase supply or indeed whether there is a limit to supply in any or all categories you are just spinning on the spot.

Pick energy for example; how would you limit that in the context of the natural environment?