One of the reasons for the current population situation perhaps is that communism got a bloody nose - they can't admit defeat - they need a face saving way of backing down. I sympathise with them as the workers often deserve better leadership. Perhaps business / industrialist leaders should do military training. A general must be humane - but this should be balanced with other attributes.

Marx was a fan of Hegel - Marxists need to make a Hegelian compromise. So do industrialists for that matter.

So the socs and caps are at war - the caps are winning on some fronts - this war will meet a common enemy - the limits of the planet. Hopefully they look up from the fight long enough to see it coming.

Like rabbits on a highway... of mice and men ... we are all straw ... Hysterical. :))

Dear Belly,

According to the BBC - "It's not the number of people
on this planet that is the issue - but the number
of consumers and the scale and nature of their
consumption."

Gandhi once stated - "The world has enough for everyone's
need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

The BBC tells us that world population as it stands now
is over 7.3 billion. And according to the UN predictions it
could reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and over 11 billion by 2100.

Global consumption is unevenly distributed and people
living in high-income nations must play their part if the
world is to sustain a large human population. Only when
wealthier groups are prepared to adopt low-carbon lifestyles
and allow their governments to support seemingly
unpopular moves - will we reduce the pressure of global climate,
resource, and waste issues.

We need to consider that the earth is our only home and
we must find a way to live on it sustainably.

Scaling back our consumption - a transition to low-carbon
lifestyles - only when we've done these things will we really
be able to estimate how many people our planet can sustainably
hold.

It is too late for child-support, not even for one or two. Rather, parents ought to be be punished by paying for all the direct and indirect costs of their procreation habits, including schooling, minding, health-care, feeding and housing.

(but it would not be appropriate to punish existing parents: a fair warning needs to be given first, so the above applies only to children that are conceived afterwards)

Nobody should be killed, rich or poor, but sterilisation and/or celibacy is the order of the day, until human population drops back to 1-2% of what it is today.

I agree with the claim that if desired, even more humans could be fed and housed - someone mentioned 50 billions, but the question is of quality rather than quantity: what is the purpose of all this breeding? If the purpose is to make humans live like ants, then we have ants already, between 1-10 quadrillions of them (10^15-10^16)!

Foxy - I liked your comments - but with respect the BBC can't even protect itself from other trucks coming down the road let alone protecting us from humanity. Pity I generally like the BBC.

Also like I've said previously resources scale arithmetically in time - population scales geometrically T << e^T . Reducing population is always going to reduce the problem faster than increasing resources

Child support? really? in some parts of this world child support is finding enough food to feed them, Australia's support system is not universal and not the reason population is growing too fast,yes we can feed more,true, why are we not however doing that now? aid is at an all time low, but needed as much as any time in history.currently our quest for wealth and constant growth leaves ever more true poor behind us.
Is the answer to pack more in to the rich nations,? or can we plan a system that can support current or some size population in their own country's?