Reducing the population the best solution?
I have been thinking that maybe a solution for ‘Earth out-of-control’ is to halve the population, then we can better live within our resource means and maybe rebuild them. Also it would give us more psychological space. What about a target of halving the population to 3 billion and live within our means? The government’s economic logic of ‘we must have population growth to sustain our economies’ seems a dangerous model. I had a search for information on overpopulation and found this site which has some useful stats.http://www.overpopulation.org/There seems to have been a lot of talking about this problem over the past 30 years and little progress made, apart from awareness in some quarters, which is a start.The population has doubled from 3bn to 6bn today from 1960, so the world I was brought into as a child had ½ the people fighting for the same resources.I also found this fascinating calculation:http://www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews2/carbonnews2_081.htm"July 2007While not advocating genocide, the new head of the Science Museum has an unusual view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people.Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is suggesting that by improving contraception, education and healthcare it will be possible to stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion.'That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity.Researching Mr. Rapley's point, Carbon-info.org has discovered that surprisingly short timescales are involved in reducing the population.It is possible to calculate the time (t) it will take for the UK's population to shrink from 60 million to 25 million based on the number of women, who decides to have 1 child or 2 children.While a controversial subject, the calculations shows that if 40% of women have 2 children, 40% have 1 child and the last 20% no children, then it will take about 34 years before the UK population reaches the 25 million target.It is therefore theoretically possible, by offering incentives to women and families, to reduce the UK population to 25 million in about 1.5 generations!The calculation can also be applied to the world population. And while clearly a very difficult thing to achieve in practice, it is potentially a cheap and quick way of reducing the world CO2 output, if it could be implemented on a voluntary basis."--So things can be done fairly quickly.
Duncan Walker ● 7031d16 Comments ● 7021d