So your solution for something that may kill the next generation is to kill the next generation yourself ... well I guess it speeds things up.

There is no point to have an earth if you don't have good people to live on it.

I wonder about your sanity. The policy of personally not having children will not do shit. The worst people imagineable tend to have 7-8 children, then dump them on the street (they have a tendency to have a certain religion, but let's not go there). Just look at the nature of the middle east if you want to know how enviromentally friendly these idiots are.

Then again, people with ideas like this are filtered out of the gene pool, probably with good reason. So why am I fighting about this ? You will die alone, and that will be the end of it. I doubt anybody will regret that.

You didn't have children because you didn't want to do what's necessary to care for them. That's all. Don't kid yourself, and don't take others for idiots. Don't depict yourself as a hero for not doing anything. If you think dieing is the solution, then just die, and leave the rest of us alone.

I wonder if the down votes missed the sarcanol, or were because of it.

Boy, this topic always takes the cake, doesn't it?

My next foray into the 'Population-Thread Darkside' is the suggestion that we start to learn and relearn what wiser societies have figured out in how to maintain a healthy population with reasonable birthrates.. AND to model reasonable consumption habits.

Clearly neither of the extreme opinions, either 'Blame the Birthrate' or 'Blame the overconsumption' is enough on it's own.. and both often end up with similar degrees of Puritanical Self-loathing (and 'Other' Loathing in the same breath), an attitude which has an amazing ability to foster denial, addictive overreactions, and more division and emnity. Coming up with angry, Latin Binomials to add some kind of academic validity to how horrible we must be is a fine monument to the efforts of John Calvin, but it still paralyzes us from looking potential solutions in the eye. Instead, it leaves us darkly fantasizing about who will be the despot to orchestrate the newest 'Final Solution'..

Disease, energy shortages, wars... these are the things that will cull the population. Try to tell rice farmers in southeast asia, who don't have the benefits of things like social security, pensions, health care, etc. that they can only have one child. People aren't going to do this stuff willingly. Furthermore, the earth can easily support 10-15 billion people. Of course not everybody will be able to eat meat, but I don't think that's a loss.

Good point Leanan, but you are talking about a VERY sensitive issue here. In fact you are bordering on what your average joe might call "goddam commie shit".

The freedom to give birth would be the last right "prised out of their cold dead hands".

I can't see John Jimminy and his wife from texas giving concession for the sake of some Mongoilian kids!

Marco.

Your point is similar to Leanans. Just remember though it is supposedly the devleoped world that will give aid and help support refugees etc...

If for example there is a mass exodus of people leaving the developing countries then that population becomes everybody's problem. I don't think you can just "us and them" this argument because in the long run it is the entire globe that has to support the entire population.

Marco.

Again Leanan made the resource useage point - see my reply above to the other guy who also made the same point as Leanan.

Unfortunately the urge in us to procreate is genetic - we are here as proof. I'm sure you will counter with "well our sensibilities for what is best for the planet will surely win through" - go ahead and try and tell people in the developed world (democracic states with people believing they have free will and free choice) to recuce family sizes, everyone knowing fine well that birth rates are already so low.

We have a problem in Scotland right now! According to politicians borth rates are too low!

(too low for what? you might ask!!)

Marco

thank you, i think the term homo-insapiens is a better term for our current species since we lack the long term capacity as a whole to deserve the name thinking man. better hopes for the next in the line of sapien's to have that name.

One American child will consume more than ten 3rd world children

Here is a passing thought/question:

Will the resource per capatia ratio always be this high if we enter a period of sustained conservation?

Advocating fewer American children to the internet reading

I would love to know what % of hits on this site are by kids and what percentage of you allow/encourage your kids read this website? My wife would beat the crap out of me if I introduced my ONLY son to this doomer porn!! He is only 3!.

Marco.

One American child will consume more than ten 3rd world children. And one upper middle class child more than thirty.

I think there is a serious flaw in this argument. That one American child will not beget ten grandchildren. At least the populations of the advanaced countries are no longer participating in the rapid exponential growth of the population.

Unfortunately Alan, the US birth statistics are skewed toward the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, while that stated cost is primarily shared by the upper end. To slow procreation in America we have to up the effective education and employment security of the lower tiers AND reduce the incentives for unlimited procreation.

Again, population on both the world and national level is the elephant in the peak-oil room and we are loath to discuss the obvious -- we will NEED to have purposeful population control in order to prevent inevitable natural population control consequences. We will eventually need to be draconian in our immigration control as well if we are to prevent the same local consequences regardless, and doing so would help the birthrate issue also.

Who knew that cheap energy is a favored soporific of the Four Horsemen? Once they sleep off this oil bender they're going to be hung-over and looking to make up for lost time.

And yet, here I sit in the heart of the United States with so few people that we can barely maintain our social infrastructure. By that I mean enough people to even sit on a school board, run the soil and water conservation district, the county public health board, etc... To say nothing of teaching Sunday school and organizing a blood drive.

We are nearly at frontier level populations. We've lost 50% of the population in the last 30 years. And yet, when our county emergency preparation committee meets (required since 9/11) we are preparing for a doubling of population when the next unexpected crisis hits. We are more than one gas tank away from a major metro area and so we aren't planning on the 3 fold increase that counties closer to the Metro are preparing for.

And the reason we are depopulated is not because of lack of resources-- we have deep, rich soils, rain-fed agriculture, our county is one of the most important stepping stones for migratory waterfowl across the North American continent. 10% of our surface area is fresh water in this county. We are on the ridge of a major wind belt and I see the ananometer from my garden.

Not sure where this lead except those places where we could have made a honest, sustainable livings have been stripped of the human capital to make it happen.

they say that you are what you eat.

coca-cola is made of corn syrup, and hamburger is made from corn-fed cows. an american's body is, therefore, made of corn.

the corn energy returned by thermal depolymerization of americans can be no more than the energy in the corn eaten by the american, minus all the energy it took to grow the body, keep it alive, and move it around during its lifetime.

so, yeah thermal depolymerization of americans is likely to have a lower EROEI than corn ethanol.

E-85 is people!

Buckminster Fuller agreed very much with this assessment as well. He liked to give the example of a trim tab on the rudder of a large ship. Just a small change in the trim tab could change the direction of the ship. His life, to him, was an experiment on what one individual could do to change things globally.