Our extravagance is not our extravagance but Theirs! If we had representatives that represent the folk who elect them, all of them instead of narrow vested interest and patent partisan politics, things would be very different? We'd have reticulated energy back in public hands and charge ourselves less than 2 cents per KwH for it.

Thereby, make the task of actually recycling everything, both feasible and profitable for cooperative enterprise. Moreover, that energy doesn't need to be coal per se, but the methane we could cook out of it using flameless heat from carbon-free MSR thorium.

Even if just to produce cheap fuel for less than 44 cents per cubic metre to power on-farm irrigation and reduce not only the cost of irrigation but reduce CO2 emission from those sources by as much as 40%!

And even compress it to use in farm tractors trucks etc. The only thing absent from this public good is our alleged representatives and the political will? And could be sent around the nation in a gas grid pipeline not much more expensive than new clean coal and adjacent geosequestration. And with that reduce both transmission and distribution losses, currently a combined 75%.

And then use that scrubbed gas in onsite ceramic fuel cells to produce on demand reliable dispatchable electric power, and where the exhaust product is mostly pristine water vapour. Given this combination has an energy coefficient of 80% and most of the current transmission and distribution losses are eliminated at power prices we can only dream of.

I have to own up to my own extravagance, I have left the aircon on day and night through the last hot spell.
Alan B.

So its just those brown and black babies you want to restrict?
mhaze,
What are you trying to stir up now ? ateday made it perfectly clear by stating one offspring per person. To me that says 2 children per couple. What is that is so difficult to comprehend there ?
Nowhere was race brought into this, you did that ! What's wrong with you ?

Let me try to make it simpler for you 'individual'.

Replacement level is 2.1 children per woman ie 1 and a bit (to allow for deaths etc) per person.

In Australia we are already below that level. In Europe they are already below that level. In North America they are already below that level. China. Indonesia. Japan. All below the replacement rate.

So since the world population is increasing, who is above the replacement rate? Places like Niger,Angola, Burundi, Chad, Mali, Somalia, Uganda,,Zambia,Malawi,South Sudan,Afghanistan,Mozambique, Liberia etc.

Do you see a pattern there?

So when people blithely call for zero population growth, they are actually calling on all those brown and black parents to have less kids. They'll be the ones making the sacrifice, not those blond-haired, blue-eyed parents.

Its not conscious racism...but it is unthinking racism nonetheless.

No, mhaze, the hope for a stabilisation and then a reduction in human population growth is not racism. It is simply a comment that reflects on the racial character of the issue. Big difference.

This graph from the Global Footprint Network shows environmental footprint (consumption) against rank on the UN Human Development Index (human well-being), which gives a rough indication of the relative importance of excessive consumption versus population.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/sustainable-development/

You can see the extent of excessive consumption from those countries that have much bigger environmental footprints than the other countries that are similar to them in rank, i.e., they are using up more resources, but not making their people any better off. Nevertheless, if all the resources were divided equally, we would all be poor. There are simply too many people to give everyone a decent quality of life and not trash the planet.

Why does mhaze want to condone irresponsible behavior simply because people are black or brown? Barbados, a black country, has a fertility rate of 1.80, not much different from Australia, and is in the very high human development class on the UN index. Costa Rica (fertility rate 1.78) is in the high class and almost the very high. It ranks far above the other Central American countries that are sending those caravans to the US. The real issue is to do with culture, not race.

went for swim Bondi recently. Sea levels just the same as 50 years ago and just as cold. Just thought I would point that out.