According to a report by the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), there are "no insurmountable technological, engineering or environmental barriers to Australia sustaining a population of 30 million by 2050". Contrary to CSIRO reports, ATSE seems to believe water scarcity and the impacts of climate change aren't an obstacle to population growth.

Interestingly, ATSE believes that the future prosperity of Australia, underpinned by population growth, will depend on our ability to maintain social cohesion in a society with even more cultural diversity than we have accommodated historically. This is due to high immigration levels driving population growth, as opposed growth derived from natural birth rates. Never mind sustainable development, population growth has to be turbo-charged for instant economic growth - importing consumers is easier than growth driven by innovation, like Finland and its Nokia phones. ATSE is basically surmising that such high population growth is inexorable, even at the expense of national social cohesion.

Such a grim high-growth scenario reminds me of Jared Diamond's warning that a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power. Diamond states: "Because peak population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production are accompanied by peak environmental impact, we can now understand why declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."

I wonder if Finland will accept Australian high-growth refugees.

Article:

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20071804-15098.html

The first major problem with this study: It was all about determining whether we could accommodate 30 million people by 2050. It wasn’t at all about the advantages or disadvantages of this. So the very objective is fundamentally flawed. Surely the question should have been something like: what rate of population growth and what ultimate population should we have and when should we reach it?

Second major problem: ‘Principle finding – No insurmountable barriers’. This suggests that any current barriers can be relatively easily overcome. But in reality some of them will be extremely difficult to overcome and will only be conquered if we really get our technological act together. And there is not a good indication that we are going to do that to the extent necessary.

Third problem: It takes the growth-is-good-doctrine as gospel. It accept that we will continue to have significant population growth end of story, although it states that without immigration, and with current fertility, mortality and emigration rates, our population will not reach 22 million. Any consideration of this stable population, which could be easily achieved, was clearly beyond the scope of the study, which it shouldn’t have been!

It doesn’t take into account the finite nature of many of our resources, declining rainfall and yields in the agricultural sector, the increasing and just about untreatable issues of salinity, weeds, pathogens, declining soil fertility, etc or radically changed economics due to rising fuel prices or real estate prices becoming more and more out of reach for a large section of the populace or the poor and decreasing quality of police and regulatory authorities or the fact that this precious growth dogma has not led to a significant average increase in our quality of life over the last three or more decades, and that we are bound to fall into a declining quality of life when this resource boom ends (phew, a 120 word sentence!).

continued

It doesn’t tell us what is going to happen after 2050. If population growth is so vital, then it is surely just going to continue for as long as it possibly can, which means the 30 million mark is pretty pointless. If population growth is not vital to our future prosperity (and it certainly isn’t), then surely we should have the goal of stopping it well before we reach the ‘insurmountable’ barriers.

The project context: ‘Looking ahead to 2050’ is critically flawed by its acceptance of continuous expansionism not only up to 2050 but beyond with no end in sight. Surely the context should have been how to reach sustainability by 2050, if not well before.

Sorry ATSE, but it’s rubbish.

Like many of these predictions they ignore the reallity of energy decent
that will start with peak oil. It is dreamboat stuff !

How will it be possible to support these larger populations without the energy resources to produce the food and industrial support they
would need.
In the long term it will be very difficult to support the population we
now have.

Lets put things in perspective, the population of the UK is 60 million. That's in an area of 244,820 sq kilometers.

Australia 20.8 million in 7,741,220 sq kilometers.

So basically it means that the population of the UK live in the same amount of space as Victoria. (237,629 sq K)

So to say that in 2050 we could not sustain a population half that of the UK at present is clearly rubbish.