CJ Morgan,

You can access the 2002 CSIRO Future Dilemmas report and also a summary to it at

http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/futuredilemmas/

It considers three scenarios, immediate population stabilisation at 20 million, high growth to 40 million, and an intermediate scenario. Which one you consider desirable obviously depends on your value system and the risks you are prepared to take with the environment and with maintaining a viable society. If you are a conservative Catholic and believe that you will get a gold star from God if you pack in the maximum number of people on the minimum standard of living (or hate your own society so much that you want ethnic replacement), you will take a different point of view from someone who wants a decent quality of life for all social classes and to hand on the environment in the same condition in which we found it (or better).

The issue is complicated because greed and stupidity also play a role in environmental pressures as well as sheer numbers. However, the report says, "population numbers [not lifestyle] are the primary driver of resource requirements in urban Australia". We see this with water restrictions in the cities. Water use doesn't vary much with income, so they can't raise the price on excess consumption without hitting large, poor families. Some bans are aimed at wasteful practices, such as watering in the middle of the day when evaporation is high, but others work by reducing quality of life. Washing a car with a trigger hose is actually more efficient than with a bucket. Using a soaker hose and timer is more efficient than handheld watering. The idea is to make time-poor people put up with filthy cars and dying gardens. The Beattie government wouldn't need to build a dam over endangered species habitat if there weren't so many people in SE Queensland. Nor would it be promoting the drinking of recycled sewage, despite the public health risks in the event of human or mechanical failure.

(cont'd)

Yes I was aware of the Watson comment, which was regarding intelligence, not violence. FWIW "more violent" != "genetically inferior". Is a less violent lion or shark a better lion or shark?
Even "less intelligent" != "genetically inferior". Intelligence is not some magical trait that outranks all other survival advantages. For all Homo Sapiens' intelligence, we may not ending up surviving all that long anyway, and we certainly won't successfully out-compete the rest of nature.
So I have no issue at all with accepting that levels of intelligence might vary between various ethnic populations (allowing that intelligence is a murkily defined beast at best, and almost certainly not something that can usefully be reduced to a single number on a linear scale). As it is the evidence seems to be that Asians races outrank us on our own IQ tests, so there's hardly much cause of white supremacism there. The issue is purely whether the reason that sub-saharan African populations have had trouble forming stable, prosperous nations is largely genetic. You don't need to be Einstein to run a country.

My own preference is for stabilisation at 20 million in conjunction with measures to limit waste, inefficiency and conspicuous consumption. (You can walk and chew gum at the same time.) This means mass migration is what is significantly more than zero net, say over 50,000 a year (until natural increase goes negative), since half out population growth is coming from that source.

I favour this approach because the environment is seriously deteriorating with the present population. The latest Measures of Australia's Progress report is out and is summarised by David Dale in the Sun-Herald today. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of bird and animal species that are extinct, endangered, or vulnerable rose by 44%, from 119 to 171. 24 of the 83 principal fish stocks are now overfished, as opposed to 3 in 1996. We have achieved the highest per capita level of greenhouse gas emissions in the OECD.

Wizofaus, Ted Trainer does go over the top at times, but it was the CSIRO report, not Trainer, which claimed that the minerals, oil and gas will run out in a matter of decades and pointed to the degradation of agricultural land. If you think human ingenuity will always save us, why have past societies collapsed?

I am mostly concerned about the environment, but our politicians really are setting up the conditions for a perfect storm if we end up with serious ethnic fault lines in conjunction with rapidly falling living standards.

An elegant expression of a traditional racist context:
"As for your comment on opposing immigration on environmental grounds, you and I are in agreement" by redneck.

At the end of the day even pigs might flight, perhaps.

Divergence - if you're worried about our per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, then we should be importing as many people as possible! After all, the main reason our emissions are so high is because of the intensive resources industry (plus the fact that so much of our electricity comes from brown coal). Our per-capita domestic oil and electricity gas usage is well under that of the US.

As far as minerals etc. running out, while there's no question domestic oil supplies aren't likely to last more than a few decades, most of our profitable mineral resources aren't about to become seriously scarce any time soon (including natural gas and coal). At any rate, even if they did, this would make recycling sufficiently worthwhile to ensure that there were still stocks of economically useful materials. I haven't read the CSIRO report, but I suspect it was talking about "currently-economically-recoverable reserves" not "ultimately recoverable resources". Most raw minerals have reserve levels in the 1 to 2 decade range, and have done since records have been kept: that's the nature of how "reserves" are determined.

And no I don't believe ingenuity will *always* save us, I just believe it's the only thing that *will* save industrial civilisation. Convincing people to give up the twin paradigms of economic growth and ever-increasing material standards of living is doomed to fail (and I would argue, unnecessary. Neither depend on destroying the environment - it's just been the easiest and cheapest way to do it so far).

Thanks Kanga (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#96853) for having shown up the disruptive and insincere behaviour of at least one forum participant.

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CJ Morgan wrote, "At what level of immigration does it become 'mass immigration'. I've asked what would be an acceptable migrant intake, but nobody seems to want to answer."

As I wrote earlier (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#96433), I had posed five questions directly to you, before you put the above question, and you have not responded to any one of them.

So, you seem to feel on the one hand you are entitled to demand of me immediate and specific answers to each and every question you have asked of me, but on the other hand I am not entitled to expect the same from you.

I don't see why I, or anybody else on this forum, should feel obliged to attempt to reason with a troll who prefers personal abuse to argument and who repeats the same arguments over and over again without having the courtesy to acknowledge my responses to those arguments.

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In case anyone may feel that I am being unfair, I Invite them to read my summaries of to CJ Morgan's 'contributions' at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#96360 and http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#96378 and ask them to read his posts for themsleves, in order to see what little substance related to the topic at hand is to be found in his 18 posts so far.