With contradictory policies from our government, we will never be able to address climate change. Kevin Rudd prefers the short-term benefits of population growth, driven by immigration, rather than compromise the guaranteed support from business lobbies and land developers. Why should the public make sacrifices to their livestyles and pay ETS taxes for a small reduction in ghg while the population is being "projected" at such as high rate? If we halted our massive skilled immigration program we may be able to see some reduction in air pollution and environmental devestation. We do have a strong tradition of multiculturalism and immigration, but we do not live in the 1950s now! A global population blow-out is the cause of climate change, but still we hear little intelligent debate on limiting human numbers.

All of our politicians have a stupid attitude to population. They listen to the building industry and other industries needing population growth to continue selling unnecessary luxury and throw away goods. These industries are prepared to lie and bribe (political ‘donations’) to get what they want.

One of our greatest global warming alarmists, Tim Flannery, warned some years ago that Australia’s sustainable population was about 13 million; but someone seems to have gagged him.

The Greens now never mention their erstwhile anti- population growth policy which was one of the things which attract voters in the first place.

The recent report (The Australian Jan.29) that foreign students are starting to back off education in Australia will probably cause panic among the high immigrationists as this scheme has always been used as a backdoor immigration lurk – ‘visas for degrees’ – to increase population and avoid the necessity of training Australians by the previous and current governments.

Of course, let’s not worry that most of these foreign students don’t have the standard of English to work in the area they are supposedly trained for, and we a left with incompetent taxi drivers.

The housing industry admits that immigration plays a major role in their industry, and it is quite clear that there is no benefit to Australia in population growth except for a few rich people who want to get even richer.

Unless Australia ceases all immigration and tries to reduce the population to a sustainable number, the future is going to be very grim.

Australians should be banging on the gates of Canberra trying to get the message through to our thick-headed, obstinate and treacherous politicians.

Population pressures and green energy are separate issues. I say this because the sustainable clean energy machine is already rolling and nothing is going to stop it now. If the developments in policy and the switch of venture capital in America towards renewable energy is looked at it seems unlikely that the targets set for limited emissions mean nothing. Green energy will have overtaken them long before they are due to be implimented. Fossil fuel proponants are yesterdays people. For Australia the decision is to get on board or get left behind.
There are many issues surrounding population growth that need to be addressed but the reliance on yesterdays technology is not one of them.

I would like to see Australia have a population of 13,000,000. I would like to see a reduction in population all over the world. How do I persuade my many descendants not to do what comes naturally? As an emigrant to Australia how can I say in fairness that I can come here, but you can't?

Barry
Good article very thought provoking.
I take back what I’ve said about economists. At least as far as you anyway.

Daviy.
I think you should look at this link as it shows the CO2 output of producing the food at current levels it out weights the rest. If we are to feed the population we have the CO2 output would increase significantly further. This means more people = more CO2.
Ergo the two are so linked as to be one and the same. Green fuel may mean more time but the end result is still the same.
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2673/26731701.jpg

Leigh,
I think you missed the point. The life boat mentality of stopping Immigration wouldn’t solve anything.
Pollution, CO2 knows no national boundaries the people still exist they still pollute still create excess CO2 so unless you are advocating annihilating all 3rd world population and developing people like China, India etc.
The author hinted at a possible solution… education etc.
BTW there are no uber conspiracy as such just special interests doing what Capitalism as we practice it allows.

VivKay
Business as usual in Lifeboat Australia is myopic and ultimately pointless if only though sheer weight of numbers. If they get desparate enough. Consider China/India's military strength then ours. The US will only become involved in a full scale shooting war if it threatens them. We are part of the world we need to act as part of it.
You're right though we're not in the 1950's a pox on Howard's politics that set us back 10 years.

I've got to agree with the article and all comments so far.
Politicians get labeled "racist", "alarmist" or worse at the mere suggestion of slowing down immigration. They also are so driven by yesterdays business interests that the nations interests and future wealth don't get a look in.
We have the engineers and workforce to lead the world in modern energy systems, yet are being lead by 19th century managers and "leaders" who will simply follow the lead of the US and England.
Some of the religious nutters believe that God will sort it all out when the Rapture comes: Breed like God intended!
I am reminded of the following geeky cautionary tale:
"A colony of bacteria is growing in a petri dish. The colony doubles every 2 minutes. After 1/4 of the dish was full, some began to worry that they only had 4 minutes left until the dish is 100% full, after which they would all die. A brave soul decided to go exploring and climbed the edge of the dish to have a look around. To its delight there were 15 more dishes nearby! It had taken their entire history (hours) to fill a mere 1/4 dish, and now here was vastly more resources than they could imagine. The bacteria returned, there was much rejoicing and the pessimists were quickly killed for worrying the rest needlessly.
After 12 minutes the colony was dead."
Humans are breeding exponentially too. Humans kill each other before they starve, so 100% utilisation will never be reached, yet this is what economists are aiming for. Although heavy going, Jarrod Diamond's "Collapse" is worth reading. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is also a good read to understand the rise of modern civilisation and its vulnerabilities.

What on earth is Rudd’s rationale for maintaining our ridiculously high immigration rate, given the effect it is having on our ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and several other huge environmental, economic and social concerns?

It is just so straightforwardly obvious to any reasonably intelligent person (including Rudd) that rapid population growth in this country is absurd.

One has to assume that he is being highly disingenuous in bestowing this massively high immigration rate up on us…and in boosting the baby bonus.

In the lead-up to the election he didn’t mention an increase in the already ridiculously high immigration rate. Then one of the first things he did after being elected was to increase it…without public or expert consultation.

Rudd knows that he is seriously playing up here. Rather than make any effort to balance the push from the real estate industry and other big business vested-interest sectors, he is just pandering to them all the way.

He is strategically trying to keep the issue out of mainstream discussion, and doing what all leaders before him have done – espouse the positives without ever mentioning the negatives, in a totally one-sided, biased, scurrilous presentation of the issue.

I couldn’t be more disgusted.

One piece of good news on this issue is that the Australia Conservation Foundation, at long last, seems to be actively onside with the push to reduce our population growth rate.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/18/2468629.htm

Yes, discussions about population growth has been sadly lacking in the environmental debate. Governments are too stuck in the myth of continual growth at the behest of business interests to even consider for a moment that population is a key factor in pressure on resources. It is barely mentioned in these debates.

One of the greatest disappointments has been the failure of the Greens to place more emphasis on this issue. When did it become politically incorrect to raise population growth as an issue? I suspect it was during the economic rationalist 80s.

Like the financial crisis which has exposed how greed can bring down a nation, it may take an environmental crisis to bring population into the debate on sustainability. Perhaps the reality is that on some issues, humans will only learn the hard way.

I have never read so much crap in regards to the 'overpopulation' myth. When are people going to demand some evidence instead of accepting this socialist myth with no scientific backing? The stupidity and selfishness of Australians not breeding will lead to someone else benefiting from our numerous resources. We are stupid if we are not selective about immigration but certainly not because we are over populated. The 'over population myth' is similar to the global warming myth. It is a scaremonger tactic of those wanting to push their own agendas and fill their own pockets and egos.

runner - you of all people talking about scientific backing.

Why is it inconceivable to ask how a portion of land (mainly consisting of desert) can keep on sustaining an ever increasing population for an indefinite period of time without having a major impact.

Science will tell you if you that resources are not a bottomless pit, some are renewable but not at the pace required to keep up with population (such as water). Some are not renewable (some minerals etc). How many years did it take for a bit of organic matter to make oil?

This has nothing to do with socialism - (blatant paranoia). This issue overrides politics.

Our cities are overcrowded, transport is at bottleneck, the best farming land is being handed over to housing development, river systems are dying, more dams are on the planning board, water shortages have hit most Australian cities - what more evidence do you need?

Logic dictates that you cannot go on increasing population if there is no corresponding increase in avaiable water, food (such as dwindling fish stocks) etc without having an environmental (and other) impact.

Sustainability means forgetting about politics and the impediment of a short-term electoral cycle and getting on with the business of doing what is needed.

Pelican - all true. I reckon it's not being discussed because it violates a basic principle of society - that the economy comes first. We're all here to serve the economy, not the other way around; how will Macquarie Bank revive if it doesn't have the requisite numbers?

Runner - our numerous resources consist mainly of plain dirt containing special dirt other countries are willing to pay money for. That will last a while but we still can't eat it, or drink it, or live on it. In case you haven't noticed, we're kinda short of water and suitable places to build houses.

Since you've mentioned it, can you cite scientific backing for anything you've said...ever?

Pelican and Bennie

Their is no doubt that parts of the world and Australia are overcrowded. Hopelessly incompetent State Governments have failed to plan for the increase traffic and the lack of building dams where water falls (usually opposed by the feral Greens). To say we are over populated however is simply not true. By whose measure are we over populated? Tonnes of food is still wasted and their is enough food to feed the world many times over. Kangaroo meat itself could easily supply meat for our population and much more. In every city in Australia you still see people watering lush Green lawns. South East Queensland has had enough rain to cause numerous flooding in the last few months. Your assertion that we are over populated is simply a myth or at best an opinion.

You say Pelican that we must forget about politics and then push your own idealogy.

Pelican,

I agree that WORLD population including ours is beyond sensible carrying rates.
As I over emphasised in my last post stopping SENSIBLE migration Drs etc won’t achieve anything worth the effort or the moral turpitude.

The link (in my post –thanks to Steven) shows that the problem is global the biggest anthropomorphic contribution to CO2 is food production. Our survival, our profligate lifestyle will be a moot point if say the likes of China, India etc. continue to ‘develop polluting, inefficient industries and continue growing even at a reduced rate.
China has problems now with its policies.
Our contribution to world CO2 is exporting coal and destroying food in order to keep the profit up.
I agree we should have a population policy that policy needs to consider our need for younger people or we/our standard of living will crash.
No-one seems to understand that any change in population will need massive changes in the way the world and our economy are structured.
Simply saying like Ludwig that it will be difficult isn’t enough we must work out how to achieve it.
It is unfair to be disgusted with governments they ultimately do with in the boundaries of what the public will accept.
Likewise the Greens can have the most appropriate policies on ZPG but if no one votes for them they may as well stay home.
Ultimately it is up to the people of Australia...good luck in convincing people like Col Rouge...his attitudes are shared +/- by at least 40% of Australians.I think you would need to get a referendum numbers up to do it.

runner,

The Queensland government has only recently given up a plan to build a dam on the habitat of three endangered species at Mary River, including a lungfish of tremendous interest to science. If dams could solve our water problems, the politicians would be building them, instead of going for expensive and energy hungry reverse osmosis plants for desalination and sewer mining for water. Ordinary people are likely to see their water bills double. We have permanent water restrictions in almost all of our cities, with people encouraged to spy on their neighbours. Not many green lawns where I live, unless it has been raining recently. There are a lot of costs associated with water restrictions to the community, some not immediately obvious. See

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24826011-5013404,00.html

We do grow more food than we need, but the issue is whether it is sustainable and whether the safety margin is big enough. We have degraded a lot of agricultural land and continue to degrade more. Our agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and on reserves of phosphate and potash, all of which are being depleted.

The corporate elite are demanding the high immigration and the baby bonuses (and getting them thanks to their political donations) because they want cheap, compliant labour, bigger markets, and easy profits from real estate speculation. They can afford to buy their way out of most of the environmental and social problems that result from their policy. Can you?

Examinator,

The politicians have beaten up population aging because they can use it as an excuse for why infrastructure and public services are getting worse in many areas. Making class issues appear to be generational issues also makes them and the corporate elite safer. Growing the population to solve a (mostly imaginary) aging problem is simply a pyramid scam that locks us into unending population growth.

Take a look at the World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index

http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/TravelandTourismReport/CompetitivenessIndex/index.htm

Germany, with negative population growth, actually ranks ahead of us, the US, and Canada, and many other European countries with very low growth rates rank high. The level of public services in these countries tends to be much higher, because enormous resources don't have to be diverted into infrastructure for growth. Where would you rather live? Young, growing Nigeria or elderly Germany?

Our real problem is simply to vote out the existing politicians and replace them with leaders who understand sustainability issues, although countering the propaganda of the major parties and their corporate sponsors may indeed be a problem.

The silly squawkings of Rudd concerning the viewpoints of Muslim fringe clerics some time ago demonstrate how well he learned his lessons re Garret Hardin's" life boat" thesis.
Populist soapbox stuff merely reinforces the mortgage belt, further turning it from realpeople needing toknow the truth, into a docile political commodity, and this is the aspect that Rudd, Turnbul etc see things from, rather than as any thing related to real problems.

runner

Apologies if you think I was pushing an ideology. I guess to be fair mentioning issues like "myths of economic growth" is ideological but it is difficult not to raise this issue because it lies at the heart of the population debate. Well it is one factor particularly in the western world but also impacts the developing world who live with the insecurity of old age and without the security of the welfare state.

This issue does transcend politics if the Australian experience is anything to go by. Both the major parties seem to be aboard the same self-destructive train.

Examinator

You make some good points and it is not enough to just state the problem but to suggest possible solutions. This will mean re-thinking the way in which we manage the economy and it will more than likely mean a more regulated economy.

The problem when we start talking economy and regulation is the old 'reds under the beds' paranoia is sure to raise its head and this is not conducive to finding a balanced solution. By balance I mean acknowledging that pure socialism is not the answer but a regulated economy which integrates and recognises sustainability and environmental issues as an important part of that economy.

We are more than just an economy. From a global perspective I would like to see diplomatic relations at the most senior level discussing systems that would see a welfare state established in all nations that would provide security for old age while encompassing a global perspective on reducing economic disparity. World leaders are already meeting on climate change and national security issues why not a global solution for population sustainability and wellbeing.

This is the only solution for the developing world. I know this is not easy and maybe it is naive to hope that it could happen but you have to start somewhere and little by little inroads might be made.

What a crop of officious meddling religious fascists Australia is raising.

This entire discourse is based on nothing but rabid ignorance. You are reasoning like morons because your assumptions are wrong.

There is not now, never has been and never will be a static ecology, climate, or human economy. Got that? Do you understand that? If not, you are not qualified to comment because you are too stupid and should just kill yourselves now. Humans are part of nature. Got that? Understand that? It is not a sin for them to use natural resources. We are not facing an imminent ecological catastrophe. The current fashionable hysteria is not based on science it is based on religion - a religion of anti-human pious pretentious morons. Those who declare, for example, that the carrying capacity of Australia is x million don't know what they are talking about, and it's as simple as that. How would they know? Have they examined all the resources, all the human value systems, all the potentialities, and do they have knowledge of all future developments do they? They assume a static world. Should cavemen 100,000 years ago have stopped using caves because there weren't enough to support a population of 6 billion? Should Aborigines have deprived themselves of kangaroos because there weren't enough then to feed a population of 20 million? Wake up, you morons. If we are to preserve natural resources for future generations, they in turn will be under an obligation not to use them for still future generations, so the whole asinine screed amounts to a position that humans shouldn't use natural resources. The idea of central planning of the entire ecology and world economy by political diktat is not just stupid, it's like - how many disproofs could you possibly want you idiots?

If you think there are two many human beings on the planet, why don't you shoot yourselves and stop annoying the rest of us: a win/win situation?

Pelican
Any time you discuss a problem of scarce resources, the principles of economics apply. It doesn’t matter if you would like them not to apply, it doesn’t matter if you are ignorant of them, it doesn’t matter if you think that you can make them not apply by physically violating people, they still apply.

Ultimately there are only two possibilities: the management of natural resources, and human social co-operation can be based on agreement (the way of a market society), or it can be based on political violence and threats (the way of government).

If we are more than just an economy, how come all the issues you are trying to solve are economic issues, and how come your solution is to use political force to try to steal economic goods from people?

Your vague idea of a ‘balanced’ system shows that you don’t understand what you are talking about. If total government control is not competent to provide the management of resources you envision – and you know it would result in both ecological and economic disaster, don’t you? - then where is the lesser, partial government control going to get the competence to properly manage resources from? The free market?

Richard Nixon once said ‘Just ‘cause I’m not paranoid, doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to persecute me.’ Attempts to implement central government control of the economy cost 100,000,000 lives in the 20th century. It is not paranoia to think that an attempt at more and more centralized government control of the whole world economy and ecology, which is what you are proposing, would lead to human deaths on a vast scale.

What is truly frightening is the ignorance of people who have available all the disproofs in theory and practice that this deluded, destructive, anti-social belief system could possibly want – and yet still setting themselves up to forcibly improve their fellow creatures by trying it all over again!

You should be ashamed of your ignorance, fool, not pretentiously displaying it.

How many people should have to die to fulfil your dopey concept of a sustainable world?

Yep, Wing Ah Ling, I've read about those 100 million lives - unlike the mays, coulds, mights, if trend continues, etcs, of the professional panickers, there is much evidence of dids and has's, and all such a short time ago! But when the 21st century's first mass depopulation measures occur (surely never again!), perhaps by depriving people of water lest we commit the sin of building a dam), these same people will put up their hands and ask, how did it happen? Alas, I don't think anything can be done about it - stupidity seems to built into the human genes. As Einstein said, the universe and human stupidity are infinite, although he wasn't sure about the universe. From my understanding the moral of Peter & the Wolf, was to stop crying wolf. Whereas these people can't point to a previous occasion where their panic was well founded, history shows that fear of centralist fascist control is well justified. If it is OK to call sceptics holocaust deniers, it should be OK to call these people fascist fundamentalist maniacal control freaks. And stupid ones at that.

Ah Wing Ah Ling, you are playing devil’s advocate, for the sake of a good cyber-stoush, yes?

If you really held the views that you are expressing and you had confidence in them, you’d express them in a neutral manner, and not in the most offensive and belittling manner that you can muster, hmmm?

I mean, you’ve completely skittled your credibility in the first two lines, with “religious fascists”, “rabid ignorance” and “morons”.

So then, I’ll take up your challenge, on one condition; that the exchanges be polite or at least neutral and address issues and not the person.

Before I bother addressing any of your points, can you let me know if you can correspond in this manner or not. Thanks.

By the way Wing Ah Ling, welcome to OLO.

Ludwig, you might consider also directing your requests at the AGWers, who threw the first stones in this debate and continue to do so. Flannery et al have called into question the morality of people who so much as question the science (that is fundamentalism), likened sceptics to holocaust deniers (hard to see how you can be both immoral AND in denial?), and make unsubstantiated comments about vested interests, associations, and mental states.
Reader poll: Is it just me or are Flannery, Hamilton and Gore starting to even look more like Hitler's henchmen.

fungochumley: << Reader poll: Is it just me or are Flannery, Hamilton and Gore starting to even look more like Hitler's henchmen. >>

Dear oh dear - why does just about every discussion at OLO lately descend into Godwinesque comparisons with Hitler, Nazis, brownshirts etc etc?

So it's not just fungochumley. Undoubtedly he'd be joined by Ding Ah Ling and the rest of OLO's increasingly rabid denialist crew.

Why should civilisation's primary goal be to see how many humans we can cram onto our planet? Runner implies that the proof that the world is not overpopulated is that there is excess food some place. Why not use the excess food and other excess resources to cure cancer and diabetes, improve our education and justice systems or hey, what-the-hell, all of the above?

Wing ah Ling just doesn't seem to want a sustainable world. I assume that means we just let the chips fall as they may and the free market will sort it out. China knew they needed a one child policy. It is working out a lot better for them than if they didn't have any policy. They reckon there would be 300 million more people in China now and all of them would be living in poverty. Maybe that is the chips falling as they may and the Chinese getting the benefits.

The problem with waiting for the free market to make the world sustainable is that the free market has no mechanism for saving anything for future generations. I assume Wing doesn't think that is important. I do. The only people represented in Free market exchanges are the buyer and the seller. Nobody who hasn't been born yet is considered. I think we need to consider future generations in order to have the best society we can have. I don't want my children to ask me why I didn't consider their futures when I was using up all the cheap easy resources. I hope I can say that we at least tried to do something and perhaps even tried to cure cancer and diabetes.

KEEPING PEOPLE IN THE THIRD WORLD IS BETTER. TAKE SOMEONE IN THE third world. They burn fire and collect firewood,etc. Bring that person to Australia and he drives around in a car and uses a plasma tv.

Also Australia increasing 1 million in population is more significant than taking 1 million people out of india.

This is an excellent article which probes a lot of issues which few others are prepared to although I might not agree with all of it.

The fact that governments including our own, deliberately encourage population growth when our own common sense and intuition and the hard evidence, tell us that it cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet, is a indication that the interests that they serve are inimical our own.

---

Whilst Christopher (correctly) takes issue with those who deny the evidence of the harm caused by population growth, he has elsewhere, shown himself to be a "rabid denialist". See, for example, his denial of the mountains of evidence which implicate senior members the (pro-population-growth pro-high-immigration(1)) administration of former President George W Bush in the 'false flag' terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 in the forum discussion "9/11 Truth" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=76

1. See "The legacy of Bush" at http://candobetter.org/node/222
"Bush slashes US family planning aid budget" at http://candobetter.org/node/400.

I extended my previous post into a brief article which may be of interest. It is:

"How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" at
http://candobetter.org/node/1002 http://candobetter.org/GrowthLobby

Comments there or here are welcome.

James, while it's pretty obvious that you have a pathological obsession with your 9/11 conspiracy theories, to assert that the vast majority of rational, informed observers who don't share your crackpot obsession are engaged in denialism is stretching the meaning of the term just a bit, don't you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

Wing Ah Ling,

If you doubt that human societies have collapsed in the past due to overpopulating and overexploiting their environments, then you need to do some reading. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is a good start. Another good read is Steven LeBlanc's book "Constant Battles". LeBlanc is a professor of archaeology at Harvard University and has done excavations at many sites around the world. Some of these sites were in the American Southwest, where he found, as elsewhere in the world, extensive evidence of nutritional stress and warfare over resources, and of warfare as a leading cause of death for men (more than 25% chance) over long periods. All of this, by the way, happened long before the evil white man ever arrived.

We did get lucky with more productive crops from the New World and later the Green Revolution, but there is no evidence that technological progress can always overcome any challenge. In Europe, real wages were much higher (sometimes twice as high) in 1400, and especially 1450, after the Black Death than they were in 1800, despite 400 years of technological progress. See the graphs in

http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/Faculty/Sevket%20Pamuk/publications/Pamuk_EREH_Black_Death.pdf

My problem with Libertarians debating Socialists is that I believe both of them. Government has given abundant evidence that it can't be trusted, but the Libertarian minimalist state would simply lead to a very nasty feudal system. The real worry for the would-be lords is that the peasants will go on a reproductive strike and start demanding to be paid in silver, as they did after the Black Death. That is why, with some honourable exceptions, Libertarians like high population growth and open borders.

Thanks Ludwig.

The problem with the sustainability school is that they are not making a coherent argument, and they don't understand that they aren't. I have been following these threads, and they simply ignore the arguments that show their arguments are false. But perhaps you can do better.

The starting point seems to be invicible logic itself: you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base. Fair enough.

But nothing that they are contending for follows from that. There are so many gaps in the reasoning between the premise and the conclusion that it's hard to know where to start. But surely the onus should be on the people making the argument to make it, and not leave it to others to make it for them, and then show the defects in it.

Can you see any fundamental objection, any fatal flaw in the methodology, epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, economic, politics of the argument?

1.
For example, implicit in the argument is the idea that people, acting voluntarily through the market, are too stupid to have any interest in the future, but *the same people*, acting through government, suddenly become possessed of superior wisdom and prudence. Huh? Make sense!

2.
Implicit in the argument is that government has not only the superior wisdom, but the *capacity* to co-ordinate the necessary use of resources. But we already know that *total* government control does not have the necessary capacity. So answer the question: how is *partial* government control going to be in any better position? Where are they going to get the competence from? How are they going to know out of billions of transactions which particular resource use is to be sacrificed for which particular purpose? Make sense.

3.
The resource uses that the greens want to ban are currently supporting many millions of human lives. Please answer the question and stop evading it: who is to decide what human life is to be sacrificed to the value of conservation, and how?

4. How is future value to be accounted relative to current value? Is a person expected to deny food to their baby now, so as to leave enough for a hypothetical human being stranger in ten million years time? If yes, then why permit any resource use at all? If not, then how is the fair amount to be calculated? If by total government power, how is it to be stopped from degenerating into ecological and economic disaster. If by partial government power, how is that any improvement on the original problem? Please answer the questions!

5. In calculating it, what value are we to give future resource use, future human happiness? According to the logic of inter-generational equity, if future generations live better than we do now, owing to technological improvements in the meantime, then that means we have a moral right to use *more* natural resources now, so as to get even with them. Yes?

6. Seriously, why don't the sustainability school just kill themselves? They think there are too many humans, and some or all resource use is unwise or immoral. Well? What makes them think that any amount of resource use is reasonable? But if it is, then how are you to judge which particular human action is okay, and which is not? How is that any improvemen to on the original problem?

Underlying the entire belief system is the double absurdity of
a) yearning for a steady-state world, a static ecology, a static economy, a static climate. This is so far from the nature of reality, so far from any reasonable expectation that it can only be characterised as religious mysticism: a holy paradise in which the scarcity of natural resources, and therefore all economic problems, have been permanently banished, and
b) the real hilarious part is, it's to be acheived by political action! The Nathan Rees's, the George Bush's, the Kevin Rudd's, the Robert Mugabe's of the world are to lead us to this promised land. What a joke! What an absurdity!

Wing –

I can’t speak for Ludwig or divergence. These are my ideas alone. These are ways that would lead us to being more sustainable. They are easily within the power of the Australian government that is now in office.

1) Net zero immigration. If 60,000 people leave Australia in 2009, the target immigration for 2010 is 60,000.

2) Discontinue the baby bonus.

3) $20/tonne carbon tax increasing $5/tonne each year for five years. This would raise about $10 billion so decrease income tax by $10 billion in the first year, and then by $2.5 billion each year after that for 5 years. Australian economy is over $1000 trillion so not likely to be a significant factor.

4) 2% of all government purchases (federal, state local) be recyclables. Slowly increase.

5) 5% of all government vehicles that are in cities (including Canberra) be electric. Slowly increase.

6) All government electricity use be 10% renewable, slowly increasing each year.

7) Fine people (appropriate to the clean up cost) who increase salinity and erosion on their land, when it damages other land or impacts watercourses.

Wing Ah Ling

My goodness how does someone like yourself who is obviously immensely impressed with his/her own intellectual superiority come up with phrases like "just kill yourself" as a solution to overpopulation and sustainability.

Yet this minor concession: "The starting point seems to be invicible logic itself: you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base. Fair enough."

I think Ludwig has a point this poster is welcome to his views and if he can debate with reason why we are not overpopulated and why sustainability is not a worthy goal by all means do. Otherwise it is nothing more than trolling (I think that is the cyber term) or baiting.

Wing Ah Ling your own assumptions are false. You have assumed that the advocates for sustainability are about killing people with ridiculous statements like "How many people should have to die to fulfil your dopey concept of a sustainable world?".

The only dope around here is the one looking back at you from the mirror.

But welcome anyway - best of luck with your machine-gun approach to debate.

The author says “there is a lack of informed public questioning of Australia’s population goals”.

Not so – there has not, even over the course of the whole of the last century, been a lack of questioning. What has been lacking is the ability to have it given a fair airing. The goals have constantly been set for ever-expanding numbers in the face of evidence and rational argument against unlimited growth – of human numbers multiplying whatever consumption patterns they adopt.

The genuine evidence has been both downplayed and distorted out of self-interest by influential lobby groups and politicians – with strong bias to their benefit by almost all media groups. The most blatant example of this in recent years was the conduct of Rudd’s 2020 summit, where participant Ian Lowe found that development of discussion on the issue was prevented by the moderator of that section (Penny Wong).

One of the most successful of those lobbyists has been the Vatican, which has striven hard, for so long, to deny women the right to control their own fertility. The success of others has also been evidenced by Rudd’s massive increase in immigration (with no pre-election commitment) since coming to power – as indicated by his manipulating that increase into a reason for abrogating his election commitment to counter global warming.

As long as the antediluvian growth lobbyists successes continue, our numbers will go on expanding. Consequently, even without induced global climate change we will be left with less and less capacity to deal with adverse weather, let alone the ever-restless climate in the longer duration.

Ludwig
The posts by Ericc and Pelican are perfect examples. They assume what is in issue, and when someone shows them what the issues are, they either don't understand it, or deal with it by just ignoring it, and go back to insisting on the original fallacies. I think you all need to answer WAL's questions.

Ericc
You are assuming what is in issue. That is circular argument, which is a logical fallacy, which means the argument doesn't make sense.

Recycling, electricity and so on, will only be more sustainable if they use less resources than the original alternative. For example, if recycling something uses double the natural resources than making it new, recycling will be less sustainable, not more. Private businesses figure out whether something wastes resources through profit and loss. But there is nothing about governmental provision of these services that enables one to know. How would governments know? Try answering the question specifically.

You simply assume that government has the knowledge and capacity to solve the problems. But then total government control would fix the problem, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?

Pelican
You are assuming what is in issue. The onus is not on Wing Ah Ling to disprove a negative, it's on you to make sense in the first place. The Malthusian theorem is not enough.

The world's population has greatly increased since modernisation, powered by fossil fuels. It is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, if greens want to reduce the availability of these fuels by 50%, how is that not going to have a cost in human lives? It surprises me that you don't seem to have thought of this.

You are conspicuously failing to answer WAL's questions. Why don't you try answering them? They are numbered. Try. Make an honest try.

“The problem with the sustainability school is that they are not making a coherent argument.”

Agreed Wing Ah Ling. There is no coherent effort to address sustainability.

We are at a very rudimentary point in addressing a genuine sustainability paradigm….in Australia and around the world. Major environmental organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and aid organisations such as the Gates Foundation still don’t get it!

Just what is your ‘sustainability school’?

“…you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base. Fair enough”

Wonderful. At least we agree on that.

“…implicit in the argument is the idea that people, acting voluntarily through the market, are too stupid to have any interest in the future…”

Implicit in whose argument? Certainly not in mine. I’ve often said that if our illustrious leaders would just espouse sustainability, they’d get enormous support from the general community, including those with short-term vested interests in population and/or economic growth.

The ordinary person knows that continuous growth with no end in sight is just profoundly stupid and that a sustainable existence, as opposed to an unsustainable existence that will bring us all unstuck, is just eminently sensible.

“…but *the same people*, acting through government, suddenly become possessed of superior wisdom and prudence”

Huh? I don’t see much wisdom at all in government in relation to sustainability…. and I’ve been a scientist and public servant in an environmental capacity for 21 years! ( :>|

“Huh? Make sense!”

Um….no it doesn’t really make sense so far Wing.

“The resource uses that the greens want to ban are currently supporting many millions of human lives”

The ‘greens’ that you refer to are one small group (or disconnected set of individuals?) of environmentalists…and certainly not true sustainabilityists!

You have a tendency to tar everyone with the same brush….to see the most extreme point of view and then project it as if it was being espoused by the whole environmental movement!

I’ve reached the word limit. Too many questions at once. Let’s approach this more gently.

PS You and Peter Hume aren’t one and the same person by any chance, are you?

Peter I generally don't respond to posters who's prime motivation is to belittle others just because they do not agree. Wing Ah Ling is one of those posters.

You say the onus is not on Wing to disprove a negative, which reveals your own stance on this issue. The need for sustainability is obviously not a 'negative' to those arguing for sustainable populations, but a positive, in that you first have to recognise a problem before you can solve it (if a solution is indeed possible).

If there is an increasing number of deaths/accidents at a particular intersection generally the relevant authority ensures traffic lights are installed. The proof is in the statistics. I don't know what more proof you need that human lives in the developing world are already at risk due to overpopulation and inequities in the distribution of food resources.

I am not here as an advocate for the Greens and if you have read any of my other posts on OLO I am against the ETS for various reasons. As such, I cannot comment on the Greens 50% reduction in fossil fuels. In a general sense I am not sure how replacing one form of energy source with another renewable source in a gradual approach would cost lives.

Like Wing Ah Ling, I don't have great faith in governments to control resources any better than the private sector who often see short-term gains override any long term effects.

When speaking about regulation I am talking about the economy and the idea of 'growth economics'. We have unfortunately devised a system that is highly dependent on consumption and increasing consumption - "growth". There has to be a better way where profits do not come at a greater cost and where it is recognised that resources are not a bottomless pit that we can plunder at will over the long term.

Continued.

The basic idea behind the need for sustainability is Malthus's theorem: population increases at an exponential rate, while the means of subsistence increases at an arithmetic rate.

But the problem is, it's wrong. Malthus wrote in the 1770s, and like the current crop of people fretting over sustainability, he thought we faced a catastrophe then. But it didn't happen. Ehrlich took up the theme in the 1960s. By the 1970s, there will be food riots in the USA, we're all going to run out of resources etc. etc. etc. But he was wrong. On the contrary, both the human population, and the standard of living have increased.

The means of subsistence - such as crops - are also living populations. They also have increased exponentially, or at any rate, much more than arithmetically.

We currently measure the depth of mining in hundreds of feet. But technology is improving all the time. If and when we can mine to kilometres of depth, the resource base will thereby increase exponentially. We already have hundreds and hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels - more than the entire amount used since the Industrial Revolution. The idea that we face a critical shortge is simply rubbish.

One of the differences between science and religion is this. With science, if the facts don't fit the theory, we keep the facts and throw out the theory. With religion, if the facts don't fit the theory, we keep the theory and ignore the facts.

That's what people fretting about sustainability keep doing. They don't seem to ask why Malthus's and Ehrlich's predictions were wrong, and therefore why their own belief system might be wrong. They keep assuming that we face an ecological catastrophe. But this is religion, not science. They keep on insisting on the Malthusian premise. But the Malthusian premise doesn't prove what they are saying.

Don't just ignore the disproofs. Actually try to answer the numbered questions I have asked, or have the intellectual honesty to admit that you are wrong.

Wing Ah Ling wrote: "We already have hundreds and hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels ..."

Rubbish!

Queensland's coal reserves are roughly enough to continue mining at the rate we did last year for 210 more years. Hardly "hundreds and hundreds of years".

Yet Queensland's Premier Anna Bligh stated in July last year that she intended to triple our coal exports by 2030! How long will our coal reserves last then if Bligh gets her wishes? I would suggest roughly 80 years from now unit all of our coal is dug up if we are very lucky.

The world's gas and oil reserves are even more limited.

All these issues are discussed in "The Final Energy Crisis" (2nd edition, 2008) edited by Sheila Newman (see http://candobetter.org/TFEC)

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "If and when we can mine to kilometres of depth, the resource base will thereby increase exponentially."

It takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy to bring ore up from those deep mines. When oil runs out we may get by using far more polluting coal powered machines, but even that will run out much sooner than people realise -- if the planet doesn't fry first.

When fossil energy runs out, we are not going to be able to move any where near as much dirt as we do now from those deep mines with donkeys or human labour.

Wing Ah Ling wrote: "They don't seem to ask why Malthus's and Ehrlich's predictions were wrong, ..."

Of course we do.

Malthus never anticipated how coal, which was solar energy captured by plants over tens of millions of years, would make possible the expansion of agriculture and Ehrlich never anticipated that the Green Revolution would further increase agricultural productivity using fertilisers manufactured from gas and petroleum.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

Effectively our agricultural system has greatly expanded by using energy captured by plants millions of years ago, and, in the process, the soil has become degraded and had many nutrients drained from it.

No-one knows how it will be possible to continue to feed all the extra people who were born because of the Green Revolution once fossil fuels run out.

Let's hope we can, but let's not count on it and, at least let's not add to the problem in the meantime by increasing the numbers of mouths to be feed.

---

Christopher, if your refusal to, even once, acknowledge any of the mountains of evidence of the 9/11 Truth Movement of the complicity of the Bush administration in the 9/11 attacks is not 'denialism', then the word no longer has any meaning (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0).

Wing Ah Ling,

Your first two questions make some assumptions about government. Sustainability crises existed in hunter/gatherer and tribal farmer societies before there was anything that we would call a government or a free market, as described in Prof. LeBlanc's book. At this sort of level, people really have no choice, whether they are intelligent or stupid, because if they limit their numbers to avoid putting too much pressure on their resource base, more populous neighbouring groups will simply wipe them out. In the states and chiefdoms, the elite are more concerned with their own wealth and power than the welfare of the people under them. There were a lot more people in Europe in 1800 than 1400 and a lot more wealth and resources for the elite, but the average person was worse off. Currently, the common people are having fewer children and are largely against mass migration, the other population boosting measure favoured by the elite, all over the world. See

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258

Example of a Malthusian collapse: If your soil and climate are really suitable for potatoes, you can feed up to four times as many people to the hectare as with grain. The population of Ireland grew from about 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million in 1848, with most of the increase entirely dependent on two varieties of potato. The Irish may have been aware that they were in a precarious position. Peasant farmers know very well that they need genetic diversity in their crops and livestock. The Andean farmers who domesticated the potato have more than 250 varieties. Population growth was especially fast in Ireland because inheritance customs and colonial laws required land to be divided among all the sons. In the 1840s, the late blight arrived from Mexico and devastated the potato crop. 1 to 1.5 million people starved and 1.5 to 2 million had to emigrate. It is true that Ireland's British colonial masters made matters worse, but hundreds of thousands of people starved in the rest of Europe too.

Daggett: you mention Queensland alone. A more comprehensive all-of-world review is in The Skeptical Environmentalist. The author was a card-carrying member of Greenpeace and an academic statistician who, provoked by an article saying the environmentalist panic is not evidence-based, set out to disprove it by surveying the best data sources in the world. What he found surprised him, and he changed hi mind. There is no imminent ecological crisis. People are just indulging a fashionable ostentatious fret-fest.

Just counting known resources, there are hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels alone; there's plenty that hasn't even been found, there's plenty the use of which is banned, and what about new technologies in the next 200 years? Yours is just more of the assumption of a static world, and the bland extrapolation of curves to a panic.

The 'we' everyone keeps talking about is not a decision-making entity. It is a fallacy to identify society with the state, and the state with society. No-one is ever confronted with the choice, that you pretend to make in the abstract, about what 'we' should do. Short of a gods-eye view, the only way such a view could be possible in the real world, is if the world's population were to be united in one decision-making capacity, backed up by force. People talking about how 'we' need to curtail consumption are merely expressing the view they would like to be seeing from their position as world dictator.

Wing Ah Ling don't know where you get the idea that there is thousands of years supply of fossil fuels, we have past peak oil, the known end of coal reserves was predicted 50 years ago but we transferred our dependence from coal.

If you look at Australian food markets we are spending many more resources to feed ourselves than we did 50 years ago.
50 years ago all vegetables eaten in Sydney were grown in the Sydney basin, all vegies eaten in Melbourne came from surrounding areas. Now we import all our fish, our vegies are grown in China, our biscuits and icecreams are made in China. All dairy product bought from Coles or Woolworths goes through Swires Cold Stores in Sydney and it takes 6 weeks from factory to supermarket. In short the food miles for what we put in our mouths is massive and not at all sustainable. Most European countries have policies to ensure food security but not us.

Wing Ah Ling, please answer my questions. You insist that others don’t avoid your questions. It has got to work both ways.

Are you playing devil’s advocate? The reason I ask is that you seem to understand basic ecological principles, but don’t appreciate the problems of humans continuing to live unsustainably. This seems to be just about as conflicting as anything can be.

I also strongly suspect that you are just pulling our legs as no one on this forum during the three years that I’ve been debating sustainability issues here has previously come out against the very concept of sustainability.

And then there is your pseudonym, which really does make one wonder if you are genuine debater.

I don’t want to waste my time here if you are just playing silly buggers.

So please, tell us honestly, are you expressing genuinely held views?

If so, can you give a bit of insight into your background?

Poverty & environmental destruction is caused by population growth!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=---=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

All the poorest countries, countries with desertification and growing exploitation of the fragile environmnet have the highest fertility... And it is THE CAUSE of poverty, not a RESULT of poverty.

Imagine, that our government had top build 5 time more schools, 5 times more hospitals, roads and somehow make 5 times more farm land each generation? Our wealthy economies would simply collapse! Our National parks would be opened up for food farming to fend off starvation...

But that is the burden we allow the poor countries to suffer from...
Rwanda's growth means that every 25 years, there are 5 times more people!

Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)
SOURCE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_fertility_rate
For a list of "fertility" rates by nation.

The highest fertility rates have the highest poverty (with some sexist muslim nations with religious-ly motivated high fertility)

The other thing to note is the bottom of the list - nations who are committing genocide against themselves by failing to produce children are the richest nations (and some with social issues, repression etc).
These are the most feminist nations... If education of women reduces fertility (basic feminims), then stronger militant feminism causes low fertility.

PartTimeParent@pobox.com

Page 122 of “The Skeptical Environmentalist:”
“Thus it is expected that the oil price will once again decline from $27 to the low $20s until 2020.”

Lomborg looked back 30 years, found things that some environmentalists said, that were wrong, and wrote a book about it. In 20 years somebody will write a book about all the things that he said, that were wrong. For his oil price prediction, we didn’t even have to wait 20 years.

To be fair Lomborg recognises several problems and recommends reasonable solutions. He says on page 157 “We need to stop mining groundwater, estimated globally at 160 km3 annually.” All that water is used to grow food (enough to feed a billion poor or 200 million rich) and the amount of food we need is increasing.

Still that is not the main point. Will Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney be better places to live with 2 million more people? Will there be less congestion, more space at the beach, less pollution, better access to services, cheaper, cleaner more plentiful water, more parkland, cheaper electricity? Will the world be a better place with 3 billion more people?

You’ve noted that “you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base. Fair enough.” We have to stop population growth someday, so then when is the time we start taking some steps to limit population growth? Slowing it down gets harder, the longer we put it off.

You say that there are plenty of resources if we dig deeper with new technologies. Why not use those new technologies and extra resources to cure cancer and diabetes, reduce poverty, improve health care and education? Why should it be our goal to just pack more people onto the earth and use up the resources faster and faster? Does there have to be an imminent crisis for us to do the things that will be best for our children and grandchildren?

Check out Mark O'Connor's comments on 'Breakfast' as expressed on ABC Radio National this morning.

Mark is the author of the about-to-be-released book; Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2009/2475805.htm

The arguments I have faced in this thread include:
Circular argument (assuming what is in issue. Ludwig has not yet tried to prove the basic contention, nor shown that he recognizes the issues of ethics, values, time preferences, resources, technology, futurity). He, and the article he cites, just assumes that his contention proves itself.
Mind-reading (eg Pelican telling me what I think)
Misrepresentation (eg billie telling me I said we have thousands of years of fossil fuels)
Appeal to absent authority – ‘The ACF think it’s true, so therefore it must be true’
Argument by fractions of data sets. ‘Queensland is running out of fossil fuels therefore the world is’
Magic: assume a magic quantity x, like a magic teapot, which can fix all our problems without the need to rationalize conflicting priorities over scarce resources. Call that quantity government. There is your argument.


There are two basic problems:
• The fact that we can’t have indefinite growth on a finite base does not mean in practice that we are faced with a crisis over sustainability, and
• Even if there were, that would not provide any justification whatsoever for political action.

1.
Malthus’s theorem (population growth exponential, food growth arithmetic) is wrong; that’s why predictions based on it didn’t come true.

The theorem that indefinite growth can’t take place on a finite base is true but tells us nothing about the time-frame. If it’s 100 millions years away, so what?

You believe that a crisis is imminent. But I know you don’t know.

You reach that conclusion by ignoring the fact that values, potentialities, resources and technology are not static.

In 1777 there was not enough kangaroo meat to support a population of 20 million. Should the population have restricted their consumption accordingly, so as not to detract from our standard of living? That’s the level of your argument.

The point is, you can’t just extrapolate curves: that’s what Malthus and Ehrlich did. They were wrong, remember? Because their methodology is wrong

So the first problem is that your argument merely assumes that a crisis is imminent on the basis of demonstrable errors, and when challenged, endlessly repeats the assumption as if self-proving.

2.
But even if it is true that an ecological crisis is immiment, that still provides no justification whatsoever for political action as a response, for a number of reasons.

The original problem is how best to rationalize conflicting priorities over the use of scarce resources.

The assumption that we can improve our capacity to do this by using government, is simply false.

Government does not bring superior knowledge, or moral virtue, or capacity to solve the problem: it brings a much more limited knowledge set, and only a greater concentration of power, of force. But that can’t solve the problem.

The only reason it seems able, is because people use a double standard: they ignore the costs of governmental action. They baldly assume it is a net benefit, without ever examining their assumptions.

Government cannot economically calculate by itself. It relies on private markets to be able to do so.

This means governments in taking action have no way of calculating whether they are using more or less economic resources, including natural resources.

Every step towards greater government control is a step towards a *more* unsustainable outcome, both economically and ecologically.

This is critical. My opponents do not even recognize the issue, or understand the argument.

I can at least understand and make a fair representation of the arguments I am facing. But my opponents do not seem able to understand or to say what they are.

And these are the ones whose clear thinking and far-sightedness are supposed to save the planet – if only they can get enough power!

They do not even recognize the issues of ethics, epistemology, methodology, economics, metaphysics, or politics.

This thread shows that the sustainability paradigm cannot withstand critical scrutiny, and is a form of religious fascism, not a humane or sensible political movement as it understands itself.

Now please answer my numbered questions without evasion or fallacy.

My concern is that a growing population may adversely affect living standards. Surely a benefit for the population must be proven for a policy of population growth? Perhaps Wing Ah Ling could prove that a growing population is good for all Australians and ally my fears of adversity? I am very optimistic about the promise of technology, but I dont think it a good idea to be taking flight reservations before the aircraft has been invented. I also think it far from morbid to consider problems that may be faced: Solutions to problems may have benefits for humanity. So if agrichar improves soil fertility, a carbon nanotube membrane desalinates water using a quarter the energy of conventional reverse osmosis, or an efficient solar cell and storage battery give people cheaper power, will people think more about the benefit they receive or the crisis that may or may not have been averted?

Wing –

Will Australia be a better place to live with high immigration than with low or net zero immigration? I believe it will be better with net zero immigration, both environmentally and economically.

Is government capable of reducing or increasing the immigration rate? Will reducing the immigration rate, increase government control of our lives? Government already controls the immigration rate, so there will be no change in the government control of our lives.

Will the world be a better place to live with 9.5 billion people or 8.5 billion people in 2050? I believe it will be better with 8.5 billion, both environmentally and economically, and I believe that it is hypocritical to say to another nation, "You should attempt to reduce your population growth rate, but we are determined to increase ours."

Wing Ah Ling, here’s my response to your post on the ‘Fresh idea on remote gardens’ thread. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8410#133728

“The difference between your questions and mine, are that mine are all on-topic, and yours are all off-topic.”

Not at all Wing Ah Ling. The questions you failed to answer are totally on-topic. Here they are again:

“Just what is your ‘sustainability school’?”

“Implicit in whose argument?”

You then put up two posts without addressing these questions at all. So I asked:

“Are you playing devil’s advocate? The reason I ask is that you seem to understand basic ecological principles, but don’t appreciate the problems of humans continuing to live unsustainably. This seems to be just about as conflicting as anything can be.”

Still totally on topic.

“The onus is on you to prove it…”

No it is not! I am highly tempted to say that it is you that must prove that sustainability is not a sensible thing to strive for, because it really is blitheringly obvious that we should be striving directly and unambiguously for a sustainable future, and obviously not just continuing to live in a grossly unsustainable manner.

Er… but I won’t say that. Instead I’ll suggest that we should conduct this exchange on a neutral footing…with both of us trying to prove that our positions prevail.

So, operating on this neutral and equal basis, I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine. I’ll now answer your original questions. Please address mine. Thanks.

“You can assume my good faith”

Alright. Good.

Like your work W-A-L. Ludwig, I find it quite astounding that a person supposedly talking about science could believe that someone simply has to be pulling your leg if they challenge the fundamental assumptions around which your whole world revolves. In the middle ages the church had enormous power because even king's and queen's feared God's wrath. I reckon you would have been the kind of person back then who would have found it incomprehensible that someone could question the existence of God - (Interesting that you use the term 'devil's advocate'). And Copernicus wouldn't have gotten a hearing. You may find it hard to digest, but I find sustainability as it is generally used to be a hollow, unhelpful and fallible concept. Until you can grasp this, you are going to find it very hard to make sense of anything much that is being said here. Envirofundamentalism is the new religion, given modern cred only by appeal to and faith in virtual science, and people who dismiss those "useless" Arts subjects, like those W-A-L mentions, need to step away from the computers and get an education.

Wing Ah Ling, in response to your original questions of 25 Jan:

I’ve answered 1 & 2.

3. “…who is to decide what human life is to be sacrificed to the value of conservation, and how?”

What aaare you on about? NO human life is to be sacrificed. Any ‘greenie’ that advocates cutting off essential resources that will lead to people dying is not a person I want to be associated with. Why do you assume that those who advocate silly end-of-the-spectrum things are speaking for whole conservation movement or representing the cause of sustainability? They’re not. This is a major flaw in your reasoning Wing. Unfortunately, in my experience, very few greenies or environmentalists are true sustainabilityists.

4. There are six questions under this one point!

“How is future value to be accounted relative to current value?” I presume you are referring to the value of resources. We can’t meaningfully compare future value to current value for non-renewable resources or potentially renewable resources that are being consumed too fast. All we can say is that they will have greater value as they become scarcer and the demand for them increases. If they become scarcer but the demand drops, due to alternatives becoming widely used, then their value may indeed fall. Or if the demand drops due to population stabilisation or reduction and/or improved efficiency and/or greater frugality, to the point that some currently overharvested resources become renewable and hence ongoing, then their value will not change that much.

“Is a person expected to deny food to their baby now, so as to leave enough for a hypothetical human being stranger in ten million years time?”

Of course not. But we should be expecting people worldwide to have fewer babies.

“If yes, then why permit any resource use at all? If not, then how is the fair amount to be calculated?”

continued

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "The assumption that we can improve our capacity to do this by using government, is simply false."

"Government does not bring superior knowledge, or moral virtue, or capacity to solve the problem: it brings a much more limited knowledge set, and only a greater concentration of power, of force. But that can’t solve the problem.

" etc. etc. etc"

This is all anti-democratic neo-liberal ideological dogma. What Wing Ah Ling is telling us is that we can't possibly arrive at a solution to the problems by using our collective intelligence through democratically elected and accountable political representatives.

Rather, everything has to be left to 'the market', that is, greedy private corporations.

I don't know what planet Wing Ah Ling has been on for the last five months, but if he had been on planet Earth, he would have surely noticed the total shambles and the economic meltdown caused precisely by what he is peddling as the solution to all of our problems, this the winding back of Government controls over the financial sector since the days of Ronald Reagan.

---

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "This is critical. My opponents do not even recognize the issue, or understand the argument."

Well I sure do and it's been shot down in flames by, amongst others Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007.

Her work shows conclusive that the claptrap that Wing Ah Ling is peddling above was just an ideological smokescreen to allow corporate thieves to steal publicly owned wealth and and money from the poor ever since Pinochet with the support of neo-liberal advisors, from Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics, seized power in Chile in 1973.

It's a sinister, sociopathic and anti-democratic belief system and has been rejected out of hand by every thinking decent person around today.

continued from my last post…

Everyone should be entitled to access the resources needed to raise a healthy child and to have a decent quality of life. No calculations are needed, just the general philosophy of stemming the ever-increasing pressure that humanity is exerting on the global environment and resource base.

“If by total government power, how is it to be stopped from degenerating into ecological and economic disaster [?] If by partial government power, how is that any improvement on the original problem?”

I’m really having to guess what you’re driving at here. You’ve come up with the quite ludicrous notion that in order to achieve sustainability, we have to start cutting off basic resources to some people to the point of starving them. Then you’ve pondered on how much resource restriction is needed to preserve resources for the future, and how we calculate this. Then you’ve pondered on just how these restrictions could be implemented. Is this somewhere near your line of thinking Wing?

You’re building your whole argument upon a totally whacky premise.

5. “In calculating it, what value are we to give future resource use, future human happiness?”

See above answer to question 3 under point 4.

6. “Seriously, why don't the sustainability school just kill themselves?”

And it is at this point that I feel that I am totally wasting my time in responding to you. Seriously, this statement just destroys any credibility that you might have had.

“They think there are too many humans, and some or all resource use is unwise or immoral. Well?”

I certainly do think that there are too many humans and that some resource use is unwise and downright immoral. And you have a problem with this! Dear oh dear!

”Who is “They”? Who are you referring to? What is your ‘sustainability school’?

“What makes them think that any amount of resource use is reasonable? But if it is, then how are you to judge which particular human action is okay, and which is not? How is that any improvement to on the original problem?”

You are repeating yourself.

Fungo -

You say "I find sustainability as it is generally used to be a hollow, unhelpful and fallible concept."

Wikipedia has the following: "In 1989, the Brundtland Commission articulated what has now become a widely accepted definition of sustainability: "[to meet] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

I'm not sure what you mean by "sustainability as it is generally used." I think of the Bruntland Commission definition as the way sustainability is generally used.

Do you think that we should do things now that compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs?

ericc, I'm afraid I don't have the time or space here to elaborate on my views around such a complex question. The point I was merely trying to make was that the question of ecological ruin and "unsustainability" is debatable and debated, and I find it astounding that someone could find it inconceivable that anyone could even question the concept. This smacks of fundamentalism to me. Perhaps I could ask you and Ludwig which particular "future generations" you have in mind given views on population control? How would say the absolute survival needs of 10 million currently living humans be valued against some other less urgent need of 1 million future people?

Daggett: is that the best you can do? Wipe the spittle from your chin man.

Obviously if you get your understanding of the philosophy and economics of liberty from Naomi Klein, you won't understand what you are talking about on the topic.

You are failing to understand the issues. Governments are also corporations. They have all the same problems of greed as other corporations, with none of the redeeming features.

Ludwig
By 'sustainability school' I meant to refer to anyone, including you, who argues for political action on the ground of the value of sustainability. When I say implicit in the argument, I mean implicit in the argument of anyone urging political action on that ground.

Your entire approach is to assume what is in issue. This is logically fallacious. It is religious faith that is immune against rational disproof. No matter how much it is disproved, the belief system just keeps popping up again, as if self-proving.

Your premise is that our current lifestyle is 'grossly unsustainable'. But you don't seem to understand that:
- that fact is itself in issue, and it is not proved by merely insisting on it
- you do not have knowledge of the resources, technology, human values, and all the relevant potentialities to know that the time-frame means any problem is imminent – it could be millions of years away; you have not proved otherwise
- 'we' (the human population) is not a decision-making entity; putting the onus of proof on others effectively asks them to justify their existence, and their liberty, to you on pain of imprisonment so you can have a fret about something that you haven’t shown is even a problem in the first place.
- the state is not society, and vice versa
- political or governmental action necessarily means forcibly stopping productive activity
- human life depends on much of the productive activity that the sustainability school wants to stop,
- rationalisation of the conflict over the different possible uses of resources is required if the issues are not to be decided by arbitrary power and brute force

- without calculation to figure out which resources uses to be sacrificed, the ecological and economic waste will be *worse*, not better (repeat of Soviet problem)
- government is not magic, it is not all-knowing, it is not omnipotent, and it is not morally superior. It does not have the knowledge, virtue, or capacity to do what it would need to do to distinguish what are the 'needs' as distinct from the 'not needs' of everyone in the world.

The common thread running through all the arguments from sustainability is utter economic illiteracy.

For example millions of hectares of Australian land put out of production for ‘native vegetation’; Australia is a major food-exporting country; people overseas starving; but the economic ignorance of the sustainability school does not make the connection.

Underlying your belief system is the assumption that issues of scarcity of resources can be magically conjured away by government forcibly re-arranging property titles.

You have not refuted the arguments that show that
1. sustainability is not necessarily a problem in practice because of the time-frame, and
2. if it is, government is not magically going to know how to fix the problem, of balancing the competing needs any better than the status quo ante.

The argument for political action for sustainability is a religious fantasy of totalitarian control that cannot be achieved and that is anti-human in practice.

The idea that Kevin Rudd controls the weather if we just give him enough money is deluded.

As you have not stopped assuming what is in issue in this entire thread, as I have informed you that that is a logical fallacy, as you do not seem to understand or to care, and still persist, therefore I end my participation in this discussion, and declare myself the winner in this sense: I have shown reason why the sustainability argument is invalid, and you have not refuted my arguments

Fungo, you say to ericc:

"I'm afraid I don't have the time or space here to elaborate on my views around such a complex question."

So, for once in your FOLO life, fhut the suck up ... watch and learn.

The problems we (humanity) are having is not about science. There is more at stake.

I'm giving it to Luwig & Co so far by trumps (although WAL et al are putting up a valiant fight) - I tips me hat to ya'll :->

Whoops, looks like WAL's forfeited!

Firstly, Wing Ah Ling, I think the onus should be on you to convince us of the premises that you base your argument on, that is, that by arriving at decisions of how to solve all the serious problems we face democratically through our system of Parliament we will make maters WORSE than if we hand across all the powers to make those decisions to private corporations.

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "Obviously if you get your understanding of the philosophy and economics of liberty from Naomi Klein, you won't understand what you are talking about on the topic."

Since you are so knowledgeable about Naomi Klein, then how about telling the rest of us where she is wrong?

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "You are failing to understand the issues."

Where have I "fail(ed) to understand the issues"? Please explain.

Wing Ah Ling continued, "Governments are also corporations."

And corporations are also governments. So what?

Wing Ah Ling continued, "They have all the same problems of greed as other corporations, ..."

How do you define 'greed'? In a properly functioning democracy, a government will act in the interests of all of society and not in the interests of a section of society. How is that 'greed'?

Wing Ah Ling continued, "... with none of the redeeming features."

So, what do you maintain the "redeeming features" of corporations to be, Wing Ah Ling?

I do believe Q & A has blown a fuse.

This seems to be the debate...
1: Can we keep going on like this?
2: If population keeps rising, will living standards and the environment suffer?

How do we answer this argument?
We look at countries that have high population growth and see how if they have poor quality of life (yes) and declining environments (yes)

Poverty & environmental destruction is caused by population growth!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=---=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

All the poorest countries, countries with desertification and growing exploitation of the fragile environmnet have the highest fertility... And it is THE CAUSE of poverty, not a RESULT of poverty.

SOURCE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_fertility_rate
For a list of "fertility" rates by nation.

The highest fertility rates have the highest poverty (with some sexist muslim nations with religious-ly motivated high fertility)

Imagine, that our government had top build 5 time more schools, 5 times more hospitals, roads and somehow make 5 times more farm land each generation? Our wealthy economies would simply collapse! Our National parks would be opened up for food farming to fend off starvation...

But that is the burden we allow the poor countries to suffer from...
Rwanda's growth means that every 25 years, there are 5 times more people!

Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)

The other thing to note is the bottom of the list - nations who are committing genocide against themselves by failing to produce children are the richest nations (and some with social issues, repression etc).
These are the most feminist nations... If education of women reduces fertility (basic feminims), then stronger militant feminism causes low fertility.

PartTimeParent@pobox.com

partTimeParent wrote:

Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)

Dear partTimeParent.

It should be completely acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty. It is one component of a solution rather than the solution.

I agree that people who oppose population management are guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. I do not agree with calling them sadists. I feel they are not sadists and are aggrieved at the pain and death but may neither get pleasure from the pain and death nor see their attitudes as the cause of pain or death.

I know Catholic peace activists who are very concerned with the suffering and death caused by militarism. However, they are completely oblivious to the consequences of uncontrolled population growth. One of them said to me, "We can always use more people."

There is a tendency to demonise those who disagree with us by calling them names such as sadist. Such language cuts us off from having any chance to talk to them.

Dear David F,

Thanks for your agreement on the main point. Rampant population growth is a major cause of poverty and environmental destruction.

When I called those who oppost population management as 'sadists' I was being jocular. As I said "The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death. (now I'm getting dramatic!)"

Cheers.

Wing, your criticisms of flawed logic conflict so totally with the fundamentally flawed logic inherent in your assertion that we shouldn’t be striving for a sustainable future.

Your comparisons with religious beliefs don't help your argument, as most if not all religions are premised on good principles and beliefs.

I’m atheistic. But yes, I have often thought that I have a religious-like passion for environmental wellbeing and the achievement of a balance between all things human and the natural world.

“The common thread running through all the arguments from sustainability is utter economic illiteracy.”

Oh come on! You’d have to have the most contorted understanding of basic economics to say that!

What do you think economics is about? It is about providing a decent quality of life for communities, now and into the future. REAL economists take into account the ever-growing demand side of the equation as well as the diminishing supply side in many resource sectors. They realise that demand has to be stabilised, well within the limits of supply capability.

Pseudoeconomists think that the demand can continue increasing forever, despite the supply capability being precariously stressed in all sorts of ways. Unfortunately, pseudoeconomists reign supreme at the moment.

“For example millions of hectares of Australian land put out of production for ‘native vegetation’…”

Aha! This provides me with some insight. You seem to think that it is Australia’s primary role to feed the world, and that it is just wrong for us to ‘lock up’ land under native vegetation that could be made agriculturally productive. Am I on the right track Wing?

I extrapolate that you have no feeling for the natural environment at all, let alone for a balance between it and humanised landscapes.

You would like to see Australia developed as a food bowl to its fullest possible extent, in order to feed an ever-hungrier world. But you’d never even dream of addressing the main factor that is contributing to an ever-hungrier world – unbridled rapid population growth. Am I right?

continued

“You have not refuted the arguments that show that
1. sustainability is not necessarily a problem in practice because of the time-frame, and
2. if it is, government is not magically going to know how to fix the problem, of balancing the competing needs any better than the status quo ante.”

Not NECESSARILY a problem you say Wing! So you do concede that sustainability MIGHT be a problem, now or at some point in time? What timeframe are you talking about?

Of course governments are not going to be able to magically fix the problem. But they are going to be able to greatly improve on the status quo, if we act quickly and with the necessary united effort.

“The argument for political action for sustainability is a religious fantasy of totalitarian control that cannot be achieved and that is anti-human in practice. …”

You say this sort of thing about religious fantasy so often that it seems that you are desperately trying to convince yourself of it.

What’s with this totalitarian control and anti-human stuff? You equate efforts to strive for the sustainability paradigm with some extremely whacky stuff. Where do you get these ideas?

“The idea that Kevin Rudd controls the weather if we just give him enough money is deluded.”

What the ….??

“… declare myself the winner…”

Dear oh dear ohdear ohdearohdearohdear!

I’ll let other readers and posters decide what it is that you are a winner of in this discussion.

Do you want the human population to continue to grow endlessly? Do you want economic systems and agricultural enterprises to be geared directly towards facilitating this endless growth? Do you want the world’s rainforests to disappear under cropland and the world’s fishing stocks to become exhausted? Is it alright by you for this planet-wide boom in one species to reach the inevitable point where it crashes, with no real attempts made to stop it from happening?

Please, if you don’t address anything else in my current double post, can you just tell us what your vision is in regard to these points. Thanks.

The article I wrote just now "Courier Mail praises Bligh Government's 'solving' of population-growth-driven water crisis of its own making" at http://candobetter.org/node/1028 in response to the Courier Mail's editorial "Labor crisis skills seen in water bill" at http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25000513-13360,00.html may be of interest. It begins:

Andrew Bolt of Murdoch's Herald Sun newspaper Melbourne in his article "Melbourne is wrecked and full" of 30 January 2009 pointed out to his readers how population growth deliberately encouraged by the Victorian Government in recent years had placed too great a strain on Melbourne's infrastructure, causing it to fail during the recent heat wave.

Yet, in spite of this, the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, adamantly refuses to question past and future planned population growth in spite of an implicit acknowledgement in it's editorial "Labor crisis skills seen in water bill" of 3 February 2009, that the recent water crisis was a result of past population growth:

"This was a crisis that was inevitable given the booming population growth of southeast Queensland and the certainty that one day drought would strike."

So, if the Courier Mail acknowledges that the water crisis was 'inevitable', what then were its own reasons for stridently supporting population growth through all those years and why does it continue to do so?

Unsurprisingly this question is neither posed nor answered nor even is the Courier Mail's own past and continued support for population growth even acknowledged.

---

Comments, either there or here, are welcome.

"Why is it 'not acceptable' to talk about 'population management' as the solution to poverty? The people who oppose population management are sadists, guilty of causing immeasurable pain and death."

Yes, claiming the moral high ground in the population/sustainability debate is a bit uncouth. Like Wing Ah Ling's suggestion that people concerned with overpopulation should shoot themselves. I would be similarly uncouth to suggest that population growth advocates fantasised about owning a factory with battery human workers, like a Bangladeshi shipwrecking operation, or of renting out spots of dirt in their yards to fifty or sixty poor unfortunates at fifty bucks a week each. Heck, they might even fantasise about buying the sexual services of the young and pretty ones for a bit of change. None of this moral obscenity would be possible with a smaller population, so the perverted fantasies of these would be amoral vermin would have to remain fantasies, unless they wanted to move to a country with starving masses and indulge their wicked perversions their. And plenty of scum from the affluent west go and do that, dont they?

But enough of this. A position one way or the other in the population/sustainability debate says nothing about one's humanity. Surely we all can agree on this and leave the moral high ground crap in the gutter where it belongs?

Daggett

The usual rule is that the onus of proof is on the person asserting the motion. This is logical since those against, can’t rebut the argument without first knowing what it is.

The issues here are a) whether sustainability presents us with a problem in practice, and b) whether there should be political action for that reason. Therefore the onus should be on those asserting it.

Ecology is the distribution and abundance of species. Any human use of natural resources affects these, and therefore sustainability. If the motion were conceded, government might need to control any given use of such resources, without which, the aim of achieving sustainability could not be guaranteed. So if the onus were reversed, it would require any given person in the world before taking possibly any given action, to prove (to whom?) that it should be permitted, which is neither ethical nor practical.

The question of onus of proof is also important because it is whether our general starting point should be that human beings have a right to be free to do what they want so long as they are not hurting others (liberty); or whether virtually any use of natural resources is presumptively forbidden unless ‘our’ political masters arbitrarily give permission for it.

Therefore the onus must be on those urging for political action, not those against.

Secondly, People already have the right to use resources to live their lives. The issue is not whether to ‘hand over’ decision-making power to ‘corporations’. Most people are not corporations. The issue is whether to deprive people in general, in their capacity as consumers, of liberty to do anything in particular.

Thirdly government, whether democratic or not, involves a claim to a legal monopoly of the use of force, in other words, violence or the threat of violence. The use of government, law or policy, always involves the underlying threat of police and prisons and the risk of further violations in prison.

For example, taxation is a compulsory impost: if you don’t pay, ultimately they’ll imprison you.

(cont.)

By contrast, private entities including corporations, cannot force you to pay for their services if you don’t want to, as governments can and do.

Because of the fact that theft and fraud are illegal, all the revenue of private associations (absent governmental privileges) comes from transactions in which the payers have the legal right not to pay. Therefore commercial corporations are not governments.

Two redeeming features of corporations are that, absent governmental privileges, all their profits are a direct reflection of the behaviour of the mass of the people, as consumers, in preferring their goods and services over all the other options that the consumers could have spent their money on. The same cannot be said of the revenues of government, which are obtained by force (taxation) or fraud (monetary policy).

On the other hand, corporations that fail to serve what consumers judge to be their most urgent wants, face losses and bankruptcy. The people transfer property out of the hands of those who cannot or will not serve best them, and into the hands of those who do. By contrast, government departments continue to forcibly take payment for services that people would not willingly pay for, and often grow bigger as a consequence of their own failure to perform their intended purpose.

Each and every service on offer in the market is the subject of voluntary dollar-votes. Thus the market is far more representative of what the masses of the people want than democracy’s one - compulsory - vote every three years, with no remedy for breach of promise, no ability to withhold payment for services you don’t want, no ability to distinguish in the package deal what you want from what you don’t, the liability to be forced to pay for others’ values that they are not willing to pay for voluntarily, back-room factional power deals, enforced uniformity, and a requirement of general obedience.

I continue to answer your questions with lean muscular arguments, for which the wisdom of our Editors, to promote the virtues of patience, hath decided that you must wait 24 hours.

While we are waiting, an interesting discussion regarding a hoax is being discussed here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/windschuttle_hoaxed.php#comment-1367266

(Read the before and afters)

Tim Curtin seems to be batting for Wing's team, and Jeff Harvey for the Ludwig camp.

Daggett

To continue answering your questions…

Greed is not part of my argument, it’s part of yours. I presume you arbitrarily mean excessive desire for possessions. My point is only that, whatever evil you denote by the term, the same flaw inheres in human action generally. It doesn’t magically disappear by the expedient of force-based governmental, rather than consent-based private decision-making.

The flaw in Naomi Klein’s general thesis, is that she does not distinguish between the problems caused on the one hand by private, and on the other hand by governmental control of resources. She tars them all with the same brush.

For example she rightly condemns the recent obscene bailouts. But she wrongly condemns them as the fruits of ‘capitalism’. I condemn them because they are a massive violation of private property rights by government. Who believes that the people would *voluntarily* pay to bail out these billionaire bankers? The very suggestion is laughable. This proves that the problem is not liberty and private property, it is government using its coercive powers a) to forcibly take property from the whole population and b) hand it out to political favourites on the basis of c) a supposed democratic collective intelligence for the solution of common problems.

That is the opposite of capitalism. It is a perfect example of the arguments *against* governmental central control of economic and natural resources and *in favour of* liberty and private property.

It is precisely this kind of political decision-making that we will get more of if you and the Naomi Kleins of this world get what they are arguing for: *all* decisions on *all* resources will be political!

We are going beyond the question of sustainability, but the point is that Klein calls by the name of ‘capitalism’ a system of government monopoly control of the money supply, permanent inflation with permanent malinvestment, booms and busts, of governmental confiscation of half the entire product of the nation every day, and spending virtually all of it on programs to forcibly override the market.

Thus Klein displays either inexcusable ignorance, or inexcusable dishonesty, by confusing the term with its opposite: the result is a hopeless jumble of good ideas and bad.

To make the best decisions we need to have a clear understanding of the characteristics, the downside, and the benefits of private versus public action. To satisfy yourself with mere ignorant grotesque caricatures of your competing arguments, without being able to show that you know or understand them, merely displays the intellectual level that satisfies your standards. If you want to understand the philosophy and economics of liberty, you can find out about it at mises.org and lewrockwell.com. If you don’t, you are not qualified to comment on the general issue whether governmental, rather than private action is warranted.

While ever this confusion over the meanings of the term capitalism continues, I will not agree to discuss it further unless you nominate a word to be used to mean a system of social co-operation based on individual liberty, private property, sound money, and little or no taxation or government. I don’t care what this word denoting liberty is, but it is completely unacceptable to use the same word to refer to massive interventionist government programs, based on socialist ideas of community, which violate life, liberty and property in ten thousand ways every day.

In short, Klein’s work give us an argument against governmental interventions and privileges, not an argument in favour of more.

Ludwig
Because you have not yet assumed the onus of proof (as you should), you have not yet put forward your argument, nor thought through your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. Your approach has simply been to repeatedly express astonishment that anyone could possibly dare to question your belief system.

Even the irreducible core of your argument, that we can’t have indefinite growth on a finite base, was not put forward by you, but by me.

...

Wing Ah Ling, this has reached the ‘too stupid’ stage. You implore people to answer your questions, but you’ve just completely skipped over my questions. What gives? Are they just too hard for you? I’m trying to further this debate and you’re totally stifling it.

“The usual rule is that the onus of proof is on the person asserting the motion…”

Firstly, you are asserting the ‘motion’; that sustainability is bullsh!t. How obvious is it that something like this, that just seems entirely ludicrous, needs to have some very strong corroboration before you can expect it to be taken seriously?

Secondly, as I’ve said before, the onus of proof, or of the strongest evidence that can be mustered in the absence of provability, should not be concentrated on one side of the debate or the other. It makes no sense whatsoever that one side of a debate should be required to prove a position while all the other side has to do is put forward conjecture.

“Therefore the onus should be on those asserting it.”

You are asserting a ‘motion’. You are failing to live up to your own primary principles.

You are talking about a concept that really does seem to be just entirely off-the-planet and raving on about logic at the same time. What do you think the readers of this thread are supposed to make of that?

Why on earth can’t you at least address the questions at the end of my last post, so that we can gain a bit of a basic understanding of just what your position is? At the moment it is extremely vague, and it appears that you want to keep it that way.

davidf: "I would like to see Australia have a population of 13,000,000. I would like to see a reduction in population all over the world. How do I persuade my many descendants not to do what comes naturally? As an emigrant to Australia how can I say in fairness that I can come here, but you can't?"

Lead by example: get out of the country and/or dispose of yourself.

Unfortunately, the Malthusians are taken seriously in this country, so we may as well write its future off. Most of the world just doesn't listen to the genocidal Malthusian hypocrisy anyway or, if it does, it just laughs.

Yes. People questioning the value of population growth are all morons and should just go and shoot themselves. Wing Ah Ling's effort -I dont have to prove that population growth is beneficial, but you have to prove that it is harmful.- in my opinion is better than -I'd love to show you how wrong you all are, but I dont have the time right now.-, but still falls a little short I think. Also, Wing's complaint about the word limit and only being able to post twice each day is a little curious. Surely the idea is that you post information that supports your position, and surely a few weeks is enough to outline your argument? I cant see how arguing that you dont have to justify your position helps all that much.

Apologies for not responding to posts by Wing Ah Ling and others.

I intend to get back to them.

In the meantime, the forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8485&page=0 in response to my article:

"How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future"

... at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8485&page=0 may be of interest.

Wing Ah Ling, don’t tell me you’ve abandoned this thread…..for the second time!

Come on matey, we’ve got a long way to go yet.

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "The issue is not whether to ‘hand over’ decision-making power to ‘corporations’. Most people are not corporations."

Either large enterprises which provide essential services are controlled by entities (i.e. governments) which are, or can be made accountable to the people, or they are not.

When Telstra was privatised, control was not handed across to the 'people', but to a corporation.

Wing Ah Ling wrote, "Two redeeming features of corporations are that, absent governmental privileges, all their profits are a direct reflection of the behaviour of the mass of the people, as consumers, in preferring their goods and services over all the other options that the consumers could have spent their money on. The same cannot be said of the revenues of government, which are obtained by force (taxation) or fraud (monetary policy)."

Does Wing Ah Ling believe that most of us have any choice but to pay for telephone services, electricity, water, etc?

Taxation is the price of civilisation and most citizens pay taxes willingly knowing that essential services we all depend upon are most efficiently provided by the Government.

A sociopathic minority resent paying taxes and would prefer to see our society crumble to dust rather than pay their fair share.

That is too bad IMHO.

(The above is not intended to be a complete response to Wing Ah Ling's ideological diatribe, rather, it is intended to prevent this thread from being closed before I can respond in full to it.)