Greenlight "200 years ago there was a relatively miniscule world population "

You make a good point.

The issue is not so much we, as individuals, produce too much CO2 but there are just too many of us producing CO2.

We come back to the real problem, how to fix the world population?

I note a mere 60 years ago Australia had 1/3rd the population it has today.

Every effort and resource deployed toward resolving "greenhouse gases / global warming / environmental degradation" is a complete waste of effort.

The real focus, the only thing which will solve anything, is to divert all those resources and efforts into answering the simple question -

"How do we reverse the world population explosion?"

Answer that and the rest of the problems, almost miraculously, dissappear.

I have a few ideas, maybe

Hold back on the cure for AIDS,

Stop messing with the balancing influence of high infant mortality rates.

Ban the Roman Catholic Church and any other institution which preaches anti-contraceptive strategies.

Locally

Abandon the Baby-Bonus

Tax incentives for Tinks (Two Incomes, No Kids)

Ultimately though, it is a world wide problem which can only be resolved by world wide action. The few of us in Australia really don't matter. The billions in China and India do but we should still expect to contribute to population decline if we want to ask other nations to do so.

Greenlight: Thanks for the comments. My response is that, if people don't know what to do, then there really can't be much of a crisis that needs resolving. I'm not trying to be flippant. My experience is that most politicians and government lead from behind; they follow the demands of the broader community. If the community doesn't demand action and solutions to a crisis, then there won't be much leadership coming out of our pollies. Conversely, if as seems to be the case now with climate change the community is leading the government, just remember that government is the biggest industry in Australia: I can't tell you the national figures but in WA the state public service employs more people than any single company and the state budget is $16 billion. If politicians believe that they have to come up with answers, they've got the resources to be able to do this very quickly.

I note that the question of population growth has now been raised. I really can't see any cure for population growth except for the solutions we've learned from the last couple of hundred years: economic prosperity which causes people to have less children. My conclusion may not be a popular one but I believe that we morally and ethically don't have a choice about whether to control human population: we can't, unless we want to do it the same way as Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot to Hitler. The decision not to have children will be taken as always by the individual mother and/or father and we have to give people the economic conditions (the prosperity) whereby they choose not to have more.

Well Col & Bernie it would be nice if we could just leave it till
everyone could see the problem. By the time it is obvious to everyone
it will be too late. Thats why, in theory, we have leaders that are
supposed to listen to the whistle blowers, look into the problem and
act on what the experts tells them.

During the war there was enough time to get everything going as they
had the energy available.

Now we will be competing against other countries for the energy and
our oil companies are all owned by US & European companies.
They will not compete with their head offices for oil.
The Oil Depletion Protocol would allieviate that but I am not too
optimistic that it will be implemented.

If the optimists such as yourselves are correct then 20 years might
just be enough time if we started two years ago.
Us pessimists look at the shape of the global oil production curve
as it has flattened out for the last 2 1/2 years and shake our heads.