Lev,

I am not sure it requires a PhD to figure out whether its possible to reduce the ecological impact of humans on Australia by increasing its population. It boils down to this: can you conceive of a situation were adding one more human would reduce the total impact? I can't. If you can't, then no matter how many you add the total impact will always increase, even if the ecological footprint per person is decreasing.

I did spend an hour or so trying to find support for your statement on the web that "I suspect you will discover that it is quite possible to have high economic wealth, high population density and a low ecological footprint." I didn't succeed. It would be good if you could post a link that does demonstrate this. If you can't I am inclined to not dismiss it.

And when you say immigration in Australia might reduce the total impact of humans on earth - clearly that can't be the case. Australian's have one of the highest ecological footprints on the planet. That means an immigrant will always increase his footprint when he adopts the Australian lifestyle.

RStuart,

I have provided some very simple and obvious examples that anyone can understand. The consumption of any good produced in Melbourne, for example, has a lower environmental impact that the same good produced in Melbourne then exported to Svalbard.

I am very sorry that you spent an hour trying to discover a places with high economic wealth, high population density and low ecological footprint. The graph provided by Divergence on the 14th of May provides such examples - Japan and Ireland are clearly indicated in that evaluation as countries with high population densities, high HDI values, and an ecological footprint of approximately half of that of Australia.

Finally it is utterly erroneous to assume that (a) all immigrants will increase their ecological footprint if they move to Australia and (b) that the Australian lifestyle is static. As a trivial (and rather contrived) example if a consumer of Australian imported goods in the United States moves to Australia and consumes the same goods, their ecological impact will be dramatically reduced.

Lev,

The Australia Institute has done the calculations on the environmental impact due to increased consumption among migrants and worked out that 2 net migrants are approximately equal to one extra Australian baby. Even if we took all our migrants from rich First World countries, there is still the issue that they would have to be supplied with desalinated water ("bottled electricity"!) or recycled water that is almost as energy intensive to make safe, and more energy would have to used to pump the water uphill to where they would use it. There isn't enough water for the existing population. That is why the Queensland government is building dams on endangered species habitat and why white government cars cruise our neighbourhood hoping to nab some poor devil who is hosing the detergent off his car or some confused old lady who is watering her garden on the "wrong" day.

Commodities can be shipped around the world very cheaply by water, possibly even by computer controlled sailing ships, if necessary.

Peter Newman is popular with the growthists because he says what they want to hear, much like Bob Carter and the coal industry or, in the past, Peter Dusenberg and Thabo Mbeki (the head of the South African government, which didn't want to have to supply anti-retrovirals to its people). There are plenty of scientists (not town planners like Peter Newman) on the other side. The president and vice-president of Sustainable Population Australia are both biologists. No amount of spin can hide the fact that there isn't enough water, and the situation may well become worse.

Lev, "The consumption of any good produced in Melbourne, for example, has a lower environmental impact that the same good produced in Melbourne then exported to Svalbard.".

For the life of me I can't see what relevance that has to do with your proposition that "increasing Australians population could reduce out total ecological impact on Australia". That is your proposition, isn't it?

I didn't say I was trying to find "examples". As you managed to demonstrate, one off examples can be misleading. You selected Ireland and Japan, which support your point, but choose ignore the US which is an example of the reverse. Its was disappointing to see you resort to such tactics. The graph does illustrate one clear overall trend - but it isn't related to population density. What I was looking for was someone other than you who believes increasing the population on a land mass could reduce that populations ecological impact on that same land mass. Despite an hour or so of looking, not a single hit.

And finally your example of a US immigrant is clutching at straws. Again, look at the graph. Count the number of countries with a higher ecological footprint than Australia. It isn't hard - there are 3, which together hold around 5% of the wolds population. As you full well know, the vast majority of Australia's immigrants don't come from those countries. They come from the remaining 95% of the worlds population. So my original point stands - our immigration policy does indeed increase humanities impact on the planet.

I think you believe that increasing the population density will increase everyone's living standards. Unlike your claims about ecological impact, there is lots of evidence out there supporting that view point. This means the "growthist" tag Divergence gave you is appropriate. Why not wear it with pride?

I and I expect Divergence argue the population density to living standard correlation you are championing only holds true while we aren't hitting resource limits. I think once those limits are hit the reverse will apply - increasing the population will decrease the living standards.

Why is so much of the current debate about this concept of 'ecological footprint' when it is a flawed and false concept. If you go to the websites that try to explain the concept, you'll see that, by all measures except energy, the world is living within its finite constraints. With energy, we are living outside our constraints because the assumption is made that all carbon emissions are only capable of being reversed by planting trees, and we simply don't have enough spare land on which to plant trees.
Our ecological footprint is an artificial concept which assumes we will make no technological improvements to the way in which we use energy or try to deal with the issue of high global CO2 emissions. The concept doesn't even take into account energy efficiency which can reduce energy consumption by 30% or more quickly and cost efficiently.
At the end of the day, most of the posts to this OLO article focus on resource consumption and Australians are incredibly wasteful of just about every natural resource, especially water. We can and should be more efficient in the resources we use and I'm not sure why we are having this debate about population size and immigration when the far easier goal is to reduce consumption, in particular, by economic means, i.e., double the price of water and electricity and see how quickly people start taking an interest in reducing their usage of these two products.

Bernie Masters,

No one claims that environmental footprints are more than a rough guide. That doesn't mean that they are worthless. Sydney University does them at its Centre for Sustainability Studies. They do leave out some factors, but they also allow reasonable comparisons to be made, for example about levels of consumption between countries. The graph I linked to earlier shows a wide spread in consumption (within limits) for First World countries, with no apparent effect on human welfare. I agree with you that we could probably cut consumption in half without doing any real damage to people, as there is a lot of waste and inefficiency in Australia. This does not mean that an 80% or 90% cut in consumption would not really hurt human well-being.

What do we do with the savings? Do we fix up some of the environmental damage we have done and extend some (evidence based) help to the world's poor, or just use the extra capacity to pack in more people? Are people to be treated as battery chickens who can't complain so long as they have enough to sustain life, or are they entitled to some freedom, dignity, and room to move? What is "enough water"? People can get by on one shower a week or a pretty much unalloyed diet of beans, cabbage and potatoes. But how far do you want to go? Is it OK to force an old man to let his garden die, because you want to use the water for population growth? What about forcing people to live cheek by jowl with neighbours, regardless of their own preferences, and denying them a garden altogether? Is it a good thing that the supply of land has been restricted? You can pack more people into the same area, but the cost of land and hence housing has skyrocketed, putting an intolerable burden on people. No one is dealing with such questions.

Technology isn't magic. Lets develop it first, then decide what to do with it.