Many think that the US will NEVER return to its halcyon days of consumption because its economy won’t permit that sort of activity.

The focus is shifting to China/India where newly empowered masses are buying cars and petrol based items at a exponential rate. What happens in North America is soon to be secondary (if it already isn’t) …even while North America pays the financial sins of its past consummation binge.

Besides… it you REALLY wish to help the planet, then support limiting/reversing population. Planet Earth groans under the weight of its human masses.

But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.

Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph, but I don’t know how else to inject this new theory into the debate about overpopulation without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.

Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”

and remember, there is a 3rd world that leaves with much less than any american citizen in crisis.

“(3) Technological progress marches on and improvements are always sufficient to meet our needs (including our need for energy)”

Science can tell us what we can do, and sometimes - and this is very important, what we cannot do. Most people cannot accept the idea that there are limits to what science and technology can do. For example: There have been innumerable schemes proposed that violate the Laws of Thermodynamics. Even today I am called a “negative thinker” or unable to “think outside the box” when I point out they are wasting their time on schemes that violates thermodynamics.

This idea that all problems have solutions is pervasive. Problems and solutions are made in matching pairs and the answer is in the back of the book. It shows up in the commonly used, “If we can put a man on the moon then we can surely __” Fill in the blank with the problem at hand. I have heard the president say it several times.

Putting a man on the moon was an outstanding accomplishment but has nothing in common with replacing fossil fuels. (All the calculations could have been made with Newtonian physics with paper and pencil.)

What is our situation today? We have perhaps a couple billion people suffering malnutrition, even starvation. We have water tables receding all over the planet. Our desperately poor number many times the entire world population of only a thousand years ago. Progress?

During the brief period during which everything we have was produced with cheap fossil fuel energy, yet billions still do not have electricity. Alas, they never will. Every solution to the energy dilemma (every solution du jure) costs more than the fossil fuel plants they never could afford.

We cannot change geology – how much our one-shot endowment of fossil fuels we have. We have used fossil fuels to create a world with too many people, an untenable world. When I was born there were fewer than 2 billion, more oil, more water. Today there are 6.8 billion and still increasing at about 0.1 billion a year.

Frank Ackerman
Stockholm Environment Institute and Tufts University

Just wanted to say I enjoyed your article. One thing I would like to note (my optimistic opinion) about the road that lies ahead is that the growth of information technology has made all of these pressing issues extremely transparent, to everyone. I believe that the exponential growth of the information age is creating an unpredictable and highly unprecedented future both in the way economies function and our BAU behavior, ascertained from the 20th century. Because of this amazing emergence of information technology, I read your article today! This free exchange of information gives me hope that tomorrow truly will be better then today. How could it not? We are all on the same page….right?

Anyways enjoyed the article, just thought I would share my opinion of our future.