Yabby wrote: "The 80 million per year or 880 million extra people per year over 11 years, is something that many avoid commenting on."

Well I never have. As a member of Sustainable Population Australia (http://population.org.au), I have long argued that excessive human numbers are the biggest threat to the global environment and to the long-term viabiity of human civilisation.

Also note material on my own web site at http://candobetter.org concerning population and immigration.

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Yabby wrote: "If you are travelling 20 minutes without seeing a shop, thats all due to Govt planning. ..."

It's always possible to find examples where town planners have not done a good job, however to undemocratically hand over the responsibility of town planning to the private sector rather than to the democratically elected political representatives of the communities concerned would be the worst possible mistake.

Brisbane's the pits today precisely because past Governments handed too many of their planning responsibilites across to land speculators and property developers.

Wiz, I can think of plenty of regional areas around the world that
create huge amounts of wealth, including in Australia. Australia
got wealthy based on farming and mining after all. Its just that
cities have more people, control the purse strings etc, so city
voters can easily outvote country electors, certainly that is the
case in West Australia.

If State planners change their planning, I don't have a problem
with that. Its just their notion that high density living is
the future, that I have a problem with. I lived in Paris for
two years in my teens and all those mega high rise apartments
surrounding Paris are little more then human zoos. I compare
how those kids grow up, compared to country kids for instance,
its like night and day.

Large scale logistics is a pretty fuel efficient way of moving
things around, far more efficient then everyone jumping in their
cars and driving long distances to go shopping.

Energy crunch? In my town a friend of mine is opening a biodiesel
plant, using tallow, mustard, canola etc, grown locally.
Another friend now powers all his vehicles on self grown crops.
These guys are pioneers no doubt, but thats the future for you!

As to my own energy use, my house was designed to suit the weather,
so no large energy costs. My hot water is solar powered, my water
is all from rainfall. Solar power of the air conditioner would
make sense to me, if somebody starts to build them. My point was
rather that alot of people go on a guilt trip if they use a bit
of energy for something, I certainly don't. We need mega global
solutions and the rise of the global population is right out in
front there as a problem. Why was it not even mentioned in Kyoto?
IMHO Catholic politics is the real problem and everyone is too
polite to address it, so nothing gets done.

I have mixed views on overpopulation. Perhaps naively, I believe that each of us individually has the potential to be an integral part of the Earth’s ecology, that enriches and contributes towards it, rather than acting as a strain or demand upon it – and that achieving this is more realistic and more desirable than any attempt to deliberately reduce our numbers. Nothing (other than a planetary-wide calamity) is realistically going to stop the human population hitting at least 9 billion by mid-century, so it’s absolutely critical we learn how to adopt a mode of existence that doesn’t continually strip away at our planet’s ability to support us, or we will pay a terrible price.

OTOH James, I think it would be wrong to assume that private developers are incapable of designing and building sustainable and livable communities – as community attitudes change, and with sensible government oversight and an informed regulatory framework, there is profit to be made from developing housing estates that genuinely put sustainability first. Where the free market fails here is that builders are not the ones paying the energy bills, hence have little incentive to build well-insulated, well-situated housing. Once that failure is allowed for, via tax breaks/subsidies/mandatory building codes etc., then I would much prefer to see housing built by creative and innovative private developers than by government departments staffed by bureaucrats and politicians.

Ideal density of living is always going to be a subjective judgment. The apartment towers of Paris were definitely not what I was referring to when I said “many cities in Europe”, and a definite example of government planning gone wrong. I have a hard time accepting that Australia’s wealth was “built on farming” – agriculture has never been responsible for more than a small fraction of our GDP. Even mining only generates ~5% of our GDP, and I would argue that if we were to better value-add to our raw resources in our cities, we could be a good deal more prosperous. At any rate, I think a city-vs-country debate is rather pointless – both need each other.

Wiz, I have to disagree with you about population. Humanity has gone
from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion in 100 years, based on cheap oil.

In nature, if something is not sustainable, it eventually collapses.
At the moment we are simply stealing more and more resources from
other species. Its a moral argument for me and morality is
subjective, but I believe that other species should have a right to
a bit of this planet too. At the moment in Africa, with its surging
population increase, they simply shoot the wildlife for food, its
easier then farming. Whole forests are being shot out in the name
of an ever increasing human population. We are a destructive
species, we really are. At the end of the day, without biodiversity
there won't be a humanity. Its something that economists don't
understand, when they try to value biodiversity.

So why not provide women of the third world with family planning?
The Catholic Church is the problem.



As to farming, yup, Australia's wealth was built on the sheeps
back. Before nylon came along, wool was worth up to a pound a pound,
that was alot of money in the 1950s.

The last figures I saw, every export $ multiplies itself about
6 times, as its spent in the community and passed along etc.
So farming does not need to be a high % of gdp. Perth basically
exists to service farming and mining communities. As West
Australia creates around 40% of Australia's export wealth, without
us you would be a banana republic!

Because of mining and farming, nearly all exported from here,
you then have service industries that provide machinery, parts,
services etc to those two industries. But the people who provide
the services, once again need service providers, stores, teachers,
lawyers, etc. etc. Take out the farming and mining, what is
left? Virtually nothing

"At the moment we are simply stealing more and more resources from
other species"

Well a) all species arguably "steal" resources from other species, and b) we are capable of doing better than that. The reason for the massive destruction of forests in Africa and elsewhere is because of a lack of technology and knowledge that allows more intensive farming of smaller areas. The choice is not even necessarily "more artificial fertilizers/pesticides, diesel-powered farm machinery/GM crops" vs "chopping down vast tracts of forest for hopelessly inefficient centuries-old farming practices" - farm machinery can be run off renewable energy sources, and modern organic and permaculture farming techniques are beginning to realistically match the crop productivity of fossil-fuel based farming. And of course eventually we may have little choice but to accept GM crops, if the alternatives are mass starvation and wholesale habitat destruction.

It's easy to blame the Catholic church for the world's population, but look at Italy - the home of said church: it now has below replacement fertility.

50 years ago I accept that much of Australia's wealth stemmed directly and indirectly from farming. But I would not be surprised to see Australia's agricultural sector to gradually shrink down to providing only what is necessary to keep ourselves feed, and our economy will be no worse for it. But "export wealth" isn't a necessary measure of anything - an economy can be perfectly prosperous with no external trade at all – as is our global economy (we haven't yet started trading with alien species that I'm aware of). Nor is resource mining an essential driver of wealth creation - after all, in principle we could recycle all materials and never dig anything up from the ground: the only thing required is the energy input to drive that process (and of course inventing and mastering the technology necessary to do it efficiently). In that sense, the biggest "base-level" driver of wealth creation in Australia are our fossil-fuel mining and extraction companies. The second most important driver of wealth creation is education and scientific research.

What was the topic again?

"because of a lack of technology and knowledge that allows more intensive farming of smaller areas."

Nope, in Africa its faster, easier and simpler, to just shoot the
wildlife to eat and chop down the forests to export for wood,
required by an ever increasing human population. As the people
of Easter Island found out, eventually the whole thing ends with
a thud and nature has to sort it out.

Most of Europe, including Italy, have told the Catholic Church
where to go jump when it comes to family planning, not so
in Africa, where people are less educated, more supersticious
etc and the Vatican has a larger influence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7014335.stm

Export wealth certainly is required, whilst there are imports.
Manufacture is to some degree about economies of scale. The
products we need are too diversified to make them all ourselves
efficiently, thus globalisation. Whilst agriculture plays a
smaller role in export generation compared to mining, its still
a major player in Australia. No exports= banana republic.

Not only that, but much of the manufacturing industry left in
Australia is to service farming and mining.

Education and scientific research can only happen, if there is
wealth creation to bankroll them.

Its all very well to speculate about what might be possible
if this or that applies, but we need to deal with reality now.

Richt now, an ever increasing population is a global problem leading
to more GHG etc, right now we also need exports, to pay for our
imports