Showing posts with label Blueprint for Survival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blueprint for Survival. Show all posts

Sunday, May 17, 2009

The biggest bubble: human population





I've been watching BBC1's "Countryfile" and there was a reference to some CO2 reduction target, required because the world's population will be 9 billion by some date.

This is cart before horse. If we don't want the world to become composed solely of (a) people (b) things we need for food and drink c) weapons and (d) radioactive and otherwise polluted and barren desert, we need to:

1. limit human population growth...
2. ... without creating demographic gender imbalance
3. ... or demographic age imbalance

I read "Blueprint for Survival" in a Penguin edition in the 70s. One point it discussed, which had not occurred to me, was that the deceleration - population stabilisation/reduction - has to be slow and planned, otherwise we will develop serious imbalances that will destroy the economy and trigger a crash - a real, lethal one, not just the loss of some savings.

Time - time long overdue - for a plan to tackle this super-bubble. Wind farms and CO2 targets are near-irrelevancies.