(continuedfromabove - Whoops! I misspelled calculations as 'cancluations' and 'continue' as 'contiunue' etc.)

In the meantime if you want to fill in some of the gaping holes that you have displayed in your understanding of this question I suggest you read "The Great Coal Hole" at http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=116

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Yabby wrote, "I have argued for 30 years about the population factor ..."

What kind of population control advocate is it that actually welcomes higher consumption of resources? Hasn't Yabby heard of Paul Ehrlich's equation I = PAT

(I = Impact on Environment, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology).

What kind of population control advocate demands higher immigration into a country without enough water for no reason other than to satisfy the excessive consumption demands of some of the inhabitants of that country?

If Yabby had ever been a genuine population control advocate, which I doubt, so what? People who have sold out their principles for comfort and expediency are a dime a dozen. No doubt his low regard for so many of his fellow citizens helps him to rationalise his choice.

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Yabby wrote, "You clearly know nothing about nature or history, for I assure you, they will simply
take what they need."

When his other rationales for the rape of our environment fail to stand up, Yabby now hides behind an alleged need for Australia's unconditional servile acquiescence to the demands of overseas powers which have not even been explicitly stated.

In fact, Yabby is the person who has shown ignorance about history with the convenient simplistic one-dimensional grasp of geo-politics that he is now pushing. The fact is as has been demonstrated by historians such as Andrew Ross (see http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=860
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665) Australia did once stand up to the threat of foreign invasion contrary to the myth that the US saved us from invasion at the Battle of the Coral Sea. If we have, since the Second World War, lost some of that self-reliance it would have a lot to do with the destruction of Australia's manufacturing capacity due to the abolition of tariffs and other (tobecontinued...)

Dagget, unlike you, I don't break into pangs of terror, every time
somebody writes something in some book. That does not make it gospel.

I focus on the big picture, you can bog yourself down with the
little pictures, if you get your thrills that way.

Mining is mining and if State EPAs are doing their jobs, then
miners have rehabilitation plans, even uranium miners. Tailings
can be covered up, vegatation replanted etc. Miners have plenty
of money to do it. If a mine is going to poison large areas,
then clearly its up to the State EPA to see that it does not happen.

If the Australian Coal Association figures are wrong, then our
Govt can point that out. Just because you read something somewhere,
does not make it so.

Yes I've been saying for 30 years that the global population is
a problem. Alot of the problem is still that women are forced to
have children that they don't want, in much of the third world.

On what basis does Yabby dismiss Daggett's assertions? Dagget documents his arguments carefully, whereas Yabby's contributions here seem to be ideologically motivated, without objective support.

(...continuedfromabove) forms of government intervention which Yabby and his ilk support.

In fact, geo-politics is a combination of diplomacy and military capacity. Only in rare examples will it be necessary to give everything demanded by a superior foreign power in order to prevent invasion.

Whatever the truth of the world geo-political situation in 2008 may be, Australians need to discuss it calmly and rationally in order to reach an informed democratic consensus as to how to deal with it, free from the self-serving hysteria that the likes of Yabby would engender into it.

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I think the rest of us would be well advised to be less trusting than Yabby would have us be in the willingness or ability of mining companies to fix up the mess they plan to create, particularly on the scale necessary for Uranium mining at Roxby Downs, or in government regulators to force them to do so, given their poor record thus far, the massive quantity of chemically toxic and radioactive materials that is to be unearthed and the time scale of over tens of thousands of year over which they need to be kept isolated from the surrounding environment, groundwater and the atmosphere. As Jared Diamond has also shown in his discussion of the legacy of the mining industry in Montana in Chapter 2 of "Collapse" (see also http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6002&page=0#86639), it is costly and difficult to properly isolate the by-prodcts of mining from the surrounding environment. In the past many mining companies have, either by design or ignorance, avoided doing this properly. If the cost of fixing the environment properly were fully factored into mining, this would have made many mines uneconomic.

Another factor which has not been factored into the nuclear industry are the massive costs of decommissioning old nulcear power stations and disposing of nuclear waste (see http://candobetter.org/node/349 http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/02/29/ministers-warned-of-nuclear-albatross-91466-20543168/). So, in the not-too-distant-future we will be faced with the unpalatable choice: either pay inordinate amounts to look after the mess created by mining, nuclear power and other industries, or accept living in an increasingly poisoned and radioactive environment.

Well said, Kanga and Daggett.

If I may tremulously offer a supportive comment or two...

The estimates offered by John Howard's in-house committee did not include the extremely high cost of decommissioning (mentioned above); nor did these include the real cost of rehabilitation, wherein this requires replanting of appropriate local land unit flora; without which fauna habitation cannot be viable.

This includes the placement of hollow logs and tree trunks. Without these critical ecological links rehabilitation can take more than a century, rather than a mere decade or two. So far, no mining company has done this; often just dumping Acacia Ariculaformis seedlings or similar which, along with high grasses, archtypally precede degradation to desert.

On a typical throwaway comment of Yabby's, overpopulation is widely misunderstood. The feminist idea of women being forced to procreate, to satisfy the egos of evil and brutal men, is propaganda gibberish.

What we have, instead, is a single scenario linked to a chain of events. This first started when the British East India Company forced Indians to abandon traditional crops and adopt cotton to feed the Manchester mills. This monoculture depleted soils, fractured social systems and local economies and, along with other forms of exploitation, created the perennial famines and poverty that we now associate with once-prosperous India.

With social infrastructure all but destroyed, Indian parents know that, given poverty-induced infant mortality rates, if they do not have at least 12 children they cannot hope to have three males survive to look after them when they reach old age. This is India's only old age safety net; and until such eroded 3rd world countries are enabled to develop egalitarian economic management systems, they will be unable to replace this domestic crisis mis-management with a formal old age pension, and thus remove the launching pad of high birthrates.

Conversely, when Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, UK and Sweden established indexed age pensions, the birth rate went below zero within three decades. This is simply how humans respond to security of survival. Yabby will deny this because he would rather the satisfaction of a Malthusian cull.

*The feminist idea of women being forced to procreate, to satisfy the egos of evil and brutal men, is propaganda gibberish.*

Actually not so Tony, its more about religious nuts like the
Catholic Church, who want more little Catholics. They have alot
of influence in the third world and their campaign against modern
family planning, abortion etc, is huge and relentless. Never
understimate their lobbying ability. So you cannot compare women
in the first and third worlds, they don't have the same options.

My argument for years has been that third world women should have
the same family planning options as first world women, then our
ever increasing population problem would be largely resolved.

In the first world, women have choices. Availability of family
planning, availability of abortion services. Not so in the third
world. So they keep popping out those babies, if they want them
or not. So you land up with even more poverty.

Kanga, you are free to believe every single word that Daggett
posts, read every single reference etc. Frankly I could not
be bothered lol. Some people can focus and understand
the big picture, some can't. Ah well. So be it.