Jenny Goldie, humans are no different than any of the non-human creatures roaming the earth: survival depends upon the ability to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Controlling population numbers through conscious effort (in a time frame that has any relevance to the pending resource crisis) means a whole lot of folks will suffer. No one, not Australian, American, Russian nor Asian will willingly trade pain for pleasure. And, given the fact our basic survival mechanism opposes such behaviour, self-regulation is not in the cards.

Andrew Bartlett keeps telling us that migration doesn't affect the global population because people just move from one place to another. However, the existence of liberal immigration policies does influence decisions to have children. This is because people who expect some of their children to emigrate tend to have more of them. There are a number of references on this subject in Virginia Abernethy's "Population Politics" (Perseus, 2001), some showing comparisons between Welsh villages and Caribbean islands in the past that did and didn't have high emigration.

Migrant fertility also tends to go up in the host country because the migrants now believe that they can afford the very large family sizes idealised by their culture. The 2003 Mexican fertility rate was 2.53 children per woman (CIA World Fact Book (on the Web)). The fertility rate of Mexican migrants in California at the same time was 3.3 children per woman (see C.A. Davis and J.J. Brown, Californian Journal of Health Promotion 1 (2003) 78).

Then there is the effect on Third World governments who think that they don't have to encourage family planning and reform their bad economic policies because the West will let them export their dissidents and their surplus population.

Jenny Goldie has tied the overriding issue of population growth into two of the most ominous resource issues that we face; water and oil.

Spot-on.

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“How can you say that in a country with the vast land area we have, and with the marvels of modern engineering, we could not sustain growth as a nation.”

Why Realist would you want to “sustain” growth? Why wouldn’t your “solution C” be to work towards a stable population? Surely that would be the most sensible solution. Any other supposed solution would simply allow the population to grow a whole lot bigger and hence require more ‘solutions’.

You seem to just innately want continued growth. You don’t give even a hint of why.

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Kenny, how about an explanation.

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Andrew, you haven’t addressed the much called-for desire on a different thread to know why you want 30 million Australians? With your views, it seems that you should be chasing 100 million or more. I am not the only who still completely fails to understand where you are coming from.

“…. migration doesn't increase population levels by a single person - all it does is determine whereabouts on the planet a person resides.”

Andrew, you keep repeating this sort of statement. It indicates one thing to me – that you don’t give a hoot about population levels in Australia. How can you only think of population levels on one level – the global level? As I have said before, I always thought the Democrats supported the concept of ‘think globally act locally’. You are not acting locally, nor thinking globally, pertaining to population.

Xist, many scientific organizations are concerned by the impacts of global warming on agriculture. Throw in an imminent oil peak and you have the ingredients for a real crisis! Worldwide grain production has already peaked and appears to be in decline due to a variety of other factors such as an increase in urbanisation (the concreting over of our agricultural areas). Try the CSIRO sustainability network Update 56:-
http://www.bml.csiro.au/SNnewsletters.htm

Or Lester Brown on falling grain production.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update28.htm

Water loss is impacting on agriculture.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2005/Update47.htm

World food security now in doubt.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update40.htm

And without a doubt, you must read “Eating fossil fuels”.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

So unless you have any sources backing your claim that global warming will be good for agriculture, can you have a look at my sources? Many scientists are asking how we are going to feed the current world population after peak oil, let alone doubling it!

David Lankshear
eclipsenow.org — Welcome to the end of the oil age!

David Lankshear, I think your comments are probably in response to the statements put forward by commentator Taz. I think you and I are reading from the same page when it comes to the effects of climate change and resource scarcity – hydrocarbon energy sources in particular – on human lifestyles.

However, I’m more than pessimistic when it comes to any society consciously, and successfully choosing to limit population growth – whether it results from curbing immigration or limiting indigenous growth – which seems to be Jenny Goldie’s thesis. If it happens, it won’t be the result of a change in political or social will, and it will be painful.

As far as the impacts of global warming on agriculture are concerned, there likely will be regional short-term gains in productivity as some of the land in the more temperate areas become more hospitable. But, like you say, other factors will probably restrict access to that increase, and in the end we will see no net gain.

Tim flannery has spent his entire life looking backwards. And there is no way I'll put my kids on a bus to the future when the driver has his seat facing the other way. It is well worth the wait for another bus.

And as for poor Ms Goldie, she was flogging this stuff back in 1985. And each time she has tried to hook it onto the prevailing issue as a surrogate for actually fixing the problem at hand. This time it is water and we are only a third of the way up the water learning curve. By simply ensuring that every house diverts its used shower water to flushing the toilet we will save 25% of urban use. Put the rest of the grey water onto the garden and save another 8%. And that 33% improvement will support another 10 million people without a single extra dam.

Limiting population will never buy us time because it also closes off options that rely on scale. And new technology constantly lifts the population threshholds for many of those options. And right now there are loads of projects that are on hold in regional Australia because we have an immigration program that is biased towards urban migrants.

What we actually need is a system of guest worker visas so we can import a portion of cheap labour to maintain jobs in threatened industries. So instead of watching a whole factory with 200 local jobs get shipped overseas, why not bring in 50 lower cost temporaries so at least 150 of the local jobs remain viable?