It'd be extremely difficult to slow birthrates when you have more tha 3/4 of the population believing that having plenty children is the answer to their old age. And who can blame them ? Governments aren't looking after anyone, they just spread some taxpayers money every now and then & kidd themselves into thinking wow! aren't we good.
Medicine had the largest impact on overpopulation. If the can prolong life than surely they can find a way of curbing birth rates.
Rather than giving billions in foreign aid to some corrupt officials, pensions could be paid to the poor so they can see the benefit of curbing birth rates. Any human couple with two children could have reproductive prevention operations & in the unfortunate case of a child dying early the operation could be reversed. This would ensure a quality of life for those already here instead of masses existing in misery.

How on Earth can one expect the underdeveloped world take their present levels of overpopulation seriously when they've been told time and time again that any ill-fortune that befalls them is due to AGW!

Now-a-days whenever a low-lying delta (which they might have recently cleared of its protective mangroves) gets swamped by a tsunami, or marginal land fails to deliver.Everyone screams "climate change cause this!"

Breed-on, the West at the behest of the UN & IPCC will pick up the tab

Malcolm/Cheryl,

To quote you

<Every time you and the SPP make a statement on population, you can hear the laughter from the fourth floor of the DEEWR Population and Labour Strategy branch in Canberra. Oh that's right, they're growthists. Ha!>

If they do laugh, it may be because they are pig ignorant on the biophysical basis of our prosperity and, indeed, our survival. If you trash your environment, you trash your society and your economy. If people are doing such a great job of looking after the environment, and more people would look after it even better, then why have the successive State of the Environment reports been showing pretty steady deterioration? Why does Australia rank at the bottom of the developed world for environmental management?

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/environment.aspx#context
http://epi.yale.edu/dataexplorer/tableofmainresults

If our leaders are making bad environmental decisions, then why should their demographic decisions be any better? The usual economic arguments given for high population growth/high immigration are also very dubious.

Here are some nice quotes for you from the 2010/2011 Productivity Commission Annual Report on the effects of high immigration: (p. 6):

p. 6: “An understanding of the economic impacts of immigration is sometimes clouded by misperception. Two benefits that are sometimes attributed to immigration, despite mixed or poor evidence to support them, are that:
• immigration is an important driver of per capita economic growth
• immigration could alleviate the problem of population ageing.”

(cont'd)

(cont'd)

p. 7: “Because immigration makes labour more abundant relative to the existing stock of capital and land, it tends to increase the returns to the latter at the expense of labour.”

p. 8: “By the same token, there are also likely to be some scale or density diseconomies. For example, Infrastructure Australia (2011) reported that the cost of providing new infrastructure is rising faster than the rate of inflation — in part, because costlier construction options such as tunnelling for new roads, now need to be adopted in the large cities.”

“’Externalities’ may arise when additional people generate adverse impacts on others, without facing the associated costs of their actions. For example, population growth may put pressure on the environmental or urban amenity of the existing population.” [Why increased density has to be rammed down people's throats rather than being greeted with glad cries.]

p. 17: “Consumption of urban water is one example where excess demand is typically managed through water restrictions and prescriptive conservation measures, at a significant cost to the community. Commission economic modelling estimated that stage 3a restrictions in Melbourne reduced community welfare by $420–$1500 million over a 10 year period, compared to a volumetric price (PC 2011c).”

“Further challenges arise when the focus is on retaining or improving the wellbeing of the existing population. Even if efficient, congestion charging does not guarantee that the existing population would not suffer from population growth or the impacts of the policy itself. Indeed, some incumbents would be worse off due to paying more for using the road (taking into account travel time) or being forced to change their travel arrangements.”

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/113407/annual-report-2010-11.pdf

SPQR,

You are right. Some Pacific Islanders are blaming deterioration of the environment and living standards on AGW, when it is really due to population growth, at least for the present.

Cheers Divergence

Good to see you on board. Your posts are always well worth a read.

Malcolm/Sheryl or whatever you call yourself. Think about this:

We are animals, we will always work toward overcoming those around us that try to do us harm or try to gain benefit, whether it be social, environmental, economic, it does not matter, we are what we are.

Do you really think the economic environment we live in is benefiting us? Wrong, the entire mantra is wrong, profit is the aim, whether it be a World Bank, the IMF or Joe Asoka who runs the local Deli, he wants something from nothing, i.e. profit, milk purchased at $1 is sold at $1.20, never mind the middle man, the farmer, the cow, the grass, the ecosystem that provides it!

Likewise, look at our global financial system, fractional reserve banking, based on debt, the need for continued credit, not that hard to work out, a Ponzi scheme.

Since the late 20th Century, early 21st Century, we have built an economic model, ecosystem functional fraction, based on oil, at the presumed price of between $10 and $20 per barrel of oil, now we are living in a world of oil based on a minimal cost of around $90 per barrel.

You do not have to be a genius, this is unsustainable. Why do you think the world economy is in free-fall.

Notwithstanding the above, we are destroying our global ecosystem at greater rate each day we reside on this planet.

We are a species, that supposedly is aware, governments will not resolve the problem, religion the same, we are an innate creature that craves the ability to screw over the next one in line. Once you work this out you will quickly realise we have no real future.

Ponzi economics, false GDP, misunderstood ecosystem functionality, finite resources, faith in technology, the mantra is the same, a delusion based on a relative biological function ingrained within us all, long before we will realise we have beyond help.

Rhian, Malcolm, the SPP is irrelevant, our species continuation is based on reality, one you both fail to understand or comprehend in the broader sense of the word.