Ah yes Mr Cook a pully paid up member and propagandist for Opus Dei with their obnoxious claim to be doing "gods" work in the world. And their sado-masochistic "holiness" rituals.

And also via Mercator, a fellow traveller of the all the usual "right" thinking American think tanks, and their "right" thinking Christian culture war warriors who subscribe to the ideas that the white christian USA is part of "gods" plan for the entire world and that it, the USA, is, as part of "gods" plan bringing "freedom, "democracy", "markets" and "jesus" to everybody else---with capitalism being the vehicle for doing so.

The logic being that "god" is creative---capitalism is also "creative", therefore it "obviously" is "gods" gift and mandated/anointed vehicle for bringing all the above fruits to one and all. Even via shock and awe as in Iraq or via the Shock Doctrine altogether as described by Naomi Klein,

The proposal is really just a variation of Hardin's classic essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" (http://dieoff.org/page95.htm). It notes that there are common costs that arise through individual action and these will be paid for in some manner. Interestingly, Hardin apparently decided on a variation of land-tax as the means to ensure that people at the very least minimise their use of scare environmental resources.

Sounds fair to me. Australia's population is anticipated to double over the next 50 or so years due to both migration and an increasing birth rate. World population is now above 6 billion and predicted to reach 9 billion before leveling out. Mother breast feeding associations, religious zealots, and the Catholic church better start looking after the future for their children rather than making stands on the their right to unlimited procreation. If population is not a fundamental part of the problem in the climate change debate we have surely lost the plot.

“…instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment”

That quote from David Attenborough is the most sensible thing yet said about climate change. It emphasises the hypocrisy of the self-appointed ‘climate change scientists’ who keep telling us that it is human activity that is causing climate change. They make no mention of the world’s obvious over-population.

As we in Australia run out of water and, in the foreseeable future, lose the ability to feed ourselves, no political party has the guts to come up with a population policy. It’s all more immigration and more home breeding that is called for. This is total, suicidal madness.

Birth control as mentioned in this article is probably politically impossible, but the total cessation of immigration and the removal of all non-citizens are definitely possible. While this wouldn’t alleviate the problem of world over-population, it would give us breathing space to attend to the damage done by too high immigration to Australia

I suggest Howard's departure is a sign the public mistrusts the goal of relentless economic growth. Apart from skilled immigration he wanted more people in Australia through baby bonuses and Section 457 visas. Globally however oil production is in decline and we have less grain per capita than in the 1980s. On the other hand we need future taxpayers and aged care workers. Already Generation X is saying the baby boomers have appropriated too much real estate wealth. It seems to follow that today's children will blame future restrictions to water and energy on 20th century excesses.

However I doubt there is any formula for the 'right' population except that we certainly have more than enough now. Worker shortages evaporate when booms finish. We must aim towards a comfortable population that can cope with temporary imbalances without finger pointing.

According to Britain's Optimum Population Trust

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.release07May07.htm

a decision to have an additional baby (beyond replacement level) is the same, in greenhouse gas emission terms, as a decision to take 620 round trip flights across the Atlantic. Since our carbon footprint is 19 tons a year in contrast to 12 tons in Britain, an additional Australian baby would be equivalent to 982 such flights. The mandatory abolition of incandescent light bulbs would produce a trivial improvement in comparison to the baby tax.

Yes, there may be technological solutions to some of our problems, but we are experiencing serious problems on a number of different environmental fronts. Human societies do collapse instead of finding a way out through human ingenuity. Witness the Irish Potato Famine of 1848 and what happened in Rwanda in 1992. It is hardly the mark of an intelligent species to do an uncontrolled experiment on your planet's atmosphere, so it is arrogant in the extreme to think that we can go on growing our population and consumption forever. Globally, we already have so many people that it would take the resources of 3 Earths to give all of them a Western European standard of living and 2 Earths for an Eastern European standard, even if all the wealth was divided equally. We are experiencing massive loss of species. According to the last Measures of Australia's Progress report, the number of Australian species on the extinct, endangered and vulnerable lists has increased by more than 40% since 1996.

It is about time the Catholic Church started preaching responsible parenthood and respect for the rest of creation instead of "every sperm is sacred".