The Oil Drum

I read the article, but I'm still confused. It said the riots were over a reduction in fines for violating the one-child rule?

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}

Well, thanks to the one-child policy in combination with the desire to have male children, there are a lot more males than femals in the country. Unless there is sharing of wives, the inability to hook up with a girl would certainly inhibit your ability to have children. If they keep it up, there might end up being a substantial population drop in China.

Here in the US for instance, population wouldn't be growing if it wasn't for immigration. That 1.X-2 children that each couple has.. lol

But look at what they rioted over:

The latest riots erupted Tuesday in rural parts of the southern region of Guangxi, apparently in the mistaken belief that the government was reducing its fines for violating family size limits, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

(Emphasis mine.)

They were upset because they thought the government was lowering the fine for having extra kids.

Bah, population won't be a problem soon enough.
http://www.emergencyemail.org/newsemergency/anmviewer.asp?a=197&z=1
DR. JULIE DR. GERBERDING, DIRECTOR, CDC: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for this press conference. I'm here today to describe a situation that has involved many public health officials from around the world who acted together to protect people's health in a circumstance where an individual with drug resistant tuberculosis may have served as a source of exposure.

It's obvious that population control wouldn't work in a democratic environment.

Studying the situation and coming to this realisation is what turned Jay Hanson into a doomer. It is possible for humans to come up with solutions, but the imperatives our species have grown up with have made this very unlikely.

On the topic of gas prices, the self styled conservative commentator that comes on CNN mid-evening (Beck, I think his name is) went on a large rant about how we have to do something, a "moon shot effort" to reduce dependency, that some people have technical solutions, that politics and congress are blocking it etc etc (he promised more on that this evening). Lots of awareness that demand is supposed to rise (he quoted the 120 mb/day figures that came up in the studies widely discussed on TOD). Lots of awareness that we are in an energy crisis of unprecedented proportion... ... not a word on the likely inability of the world oil industry to produce 120 md/day under any circumstances, and certainly none on the likelihood that 20 years from now we won't even see production at current levels.

Lots of apparent indulgence of fantasyland pseudoscience, but seemingly no awareness of the real issue, which is limitation of overall supply.

Maybe he just got all that from "supply side economics" which is another name for creating what you need out of nothing. Fiat Lux.

ciao,
Bruce