“There is an amusing note on the Sustainable Population site about how much return fire an author received when he suggested, in one forum, that families should limit themselves to two children. His experience would be a small taste of what would happen if a member of this anti-population movement ran for Parliament…”

Crikey Mark Lawson, anyone who advocates a limit of two kids per family is not anti-population. And Sustainable Population Australia Inc is not an anti-population movement!

How ridiculous to imply such rubbish.

Someone who advocated no-child families would be antipopulationist!

After reading this, I gave the rest of the article a very quick skim, up until the terrible concluding paragraph:

“In any case, as previously noted, the whole problem is moot because all the proposals by the anti-population push are sure fire election losers. This particular brand of doom-sayers would be better off pushing for adaptation, or finding other windmills to tilt at.”

The notion that we should all just ‘adapt’ to a regime of rapidly increasing population with no end in sight rather than strive to inject some commonsense into this lunatic policy, is one of the worst conclusions to anything that I’ve ever read!!

You can bet your bottom dollar that proposals put forward by SPA, CASSE (Centre for a Steady State Economy) and others, that are based on sustainability, WILL become election winners before too long. As to whether we all have to suffer an enormous economic and social upheaval first or not remains to be seen.

The tenet of this article is just terrible – that those who don’t just blithely go along with massive endless increasing population are anti-populationists and that the push for a stable population and sustainable societies should be given up.

Wow, you get about zero out of ten for this one Mark.

A few points to address in the comments but not many. michael_in_adelaide had an interesting point is saying that production of oil peaked in August 2008.. almost certainly right. That's when the credit crunch affected demand, so suppliers cut back and will cut back further. Saudi Arabia is closing down the pumps as we write, because prices have fallen so low.. You say easy-lift production peaked in 2005. I'd be interested to see a source on that one. If there is/was a peak, you'll probably find its because Russia has mismanaged its oil sector.. There is certainly hint of any absolute peak in any of the international publications. ABARE getting price forecasts wrong may well be right but it is beside the point.
As for the rest, one way to put the issue in perspective is to imagine what Australians in the 1930s would have said about a population of 20M plus in 2009. At the time, remember, there was a serious topsoil erosion problem, which resulted in big dust storms, as well as regular, bad locust infestations (same thing happened in America). Those problems were overcome (although locusts still turn up every now and then) with agricultural productivity increasing throughout, occasional drought aside, despite the much publicised problems of salinity ect.
In other words there is no hint in any of the statistics anywhere for any reason to place a limit on population. Nor is any collapse due to higher temperatures foreseeable. As noted global temperatures have been going down not up for the past decade. One response was to point out that there is a drought in parts of Australia. Yes, Australia is subject to droughts - always has been - and no, global temperatures are not going up. They are going down.
Admittedly there may be a problem with water infrastructure in some cities. If so, instead of moaning that there are too many people, we should get busy with planning. In other words the anti-population lobby should make a useful contribution to public debate - for a change.

Mark, I've only got one thing to say to you.......... You're a bloody idiot!

Some of the suppositions in the article are ludicrous .
Take China as a population example look at your Globe , do a guessamation with your fingers it's about the same size as Oz , sure it's got one hell of a River but we have Broad Acre Ag. status they haven't , they grow rice on Mountain sides ! Yet we import Vegetables and Processed food from China ? So we must need development not Population controls .

Our big Problem is Laziness , no Imagination , no Spirit , no Ethics , no Community Spirit .
We are leaning towards becoming Greens , Homo's and TV / Computer Addicts . We want to vote for people who can "Spin" us , who look terrific on TV . Imagine Abe Lincoln turning up at an OZ election as a candidate just the look of poor old Abe would lose his deposit .

People don't stop any more , if they want to think they consult their Computer , second hand ideas .

We don't exploit our position yet we call quite happily ourselves "The Lucky Country", we are not entitled to do that because Luck is the result of having Dreamers , Thinkers and Tinkers amongst us who persevere to undo the ignorance that impedes us .

Our Greatest Asset is Water we have it all around us we could irrigate Oz in its entirety .

For People who worry about CO2 imagine an irrigated Forrest covering half of WA , when I was a kid we were taught that the Amazon was the Worlds Air Filter , WA already has the worlds largest Forrest lets turn it into a real carbon collector hundreds of times larger and more effective than the Amazon .

All we have to do is emulate Nature eg; add some intellect and mechanics , forget about RO that was designed for Ships and Submarines .

@ curmudgeon
'global temperatures are ...going down'. I guess the Wilkins Ice Shelf must have developed osteoporosis after being under observation for a century.

TASWEGIAN

Changes in sea water currents could be melting the ice ?