Not really. Bashing on morals and responsibility is counter productive, for Darwinian reasons. People who answer to the call to 'responsibility' (ie have less children) will reproduce much less than those who don't. Those who have more children will proliferate, and their children are more likely to have more children too. Thus, the effort will result in more population growth.

The only way to do it is by very restrictive birth control, which is a total social and political non-starter. It won't happen, especially not globally.

Population is going to level off anyway. We just have to manage the affluence of a population that's perhaps 40-60 percent bigger than today's.

Are there any truly effective ways to limit population growth that are also politically and morally palatable?

I am going to speak about American population growth only. You won't get the majority of people to immediately embrace a stoppage of immigration because it has been romantized for so long and they have been taught for so long by its proponents that it is "what makes America great". And the proponents have also been very effective in painting anyone who is against immigration as a racist. And business people wield undemocratic influence over politicians since they are allowed to bribe them (euphemistically referred to as a contribution) and these business people absolutely love a never-ending wave of extra workers from which to choose and a never-ending wave of extra-customers to sell to. Even among the sharp number crunchers of this site, you won't see graphs or bar charts or tables comparing energy needs with a stable population (forget declining) versus growing population or captions that say something like "I have factored in an annual growth in US population of 1.5% compounded" or the words "due to population increasing".

But I don't believe it is an impossible task. It has to be done in steps. First politicians and business leaders have to realize there are finite resources that are in productional decline and that the amount of coal we have and can produce is vastly overstated. Then second, some of those politicians that are retiring - like George Bush - can begin to speak the truth about it and start to convince the people that fossil fuels are finite. Right now there is some bizarre thinking that takes place in the mind of both the elite and the common person in America. They somehow believe that there is plenty of oil - we just have to drill for it, both in America and overseas. They don't know how much is remaining, how much we have already used, how much we need now, how much we will need in the future - they only "know" that there is plenty of oil. Prices are rising from "greedy oil companies" or "greedy Arabs" or anything else unrelated to using up a finite resource. But people are amazingly sheep-like in their thinking and also very deferential to authority. Tell them Iraq has WMDs and you are sure of it, even though you cannot tell UN Inspectors a single place in the country where they are, and they will not only not impeach you or try you for war crimes when it is found out that you lied in order to invade and destroy a country, they will reelect you. So they will ultimately come on board to the idea that we don't have enough fossil fuel. Particularly if a Republican President does it. Then you immediately get an entire network, FoxNews, speaking about limited fossil fuels and the majority of a political party coming on board.

Once you have them convinced there is a PERMANENT shortage, then the third step, stopping population growth via immigration becomes much much easier. Years ago in California there were two years of a severe drought. In the second year, amidst bans and restrictions on watering your lawn and washing your car, they stopped issuing building permits in some areas. An amazing amazing thing. The system is hard-wired for builders to pay bureaucrats to issue building permits forever and ever and yet they stopped. In the face of scarcity they suddenly saw a link between population growth and a finite resource. Now this didn't last, because they apparently thought that it was the last drought. So the emphasis would need to be on PERMANENT shortage of fossil fuels. We aren't going to drill our way out. We aren't going to "coal-to-liquid" our way out. There aren't "political factors" or "above the ground factors" causing a temporary shortage. At the very least, even if it turned out population growth was so ingrained in the minds of Americans that it could not be stopped even when people realized that resources were finite and expendable, the population growth advocates (via immigration or lack of abortion and birth control or what have you) would be forced to become the biggest chearleaders for wind/solar/wave/nuclear the world has seen to date.