There is another answer then.... we need another war to wipe out a couple of billion of us.

The world is obviously overpopulated....

This comes back to a comment made by Wol earlier, and is indeed the huge woolly mammoth in the room when it comes to climate change.

The population of the world is increasing at an unsustainable rate, increasing the demand for power, water and food, which in turn is driving our consumption of resources and the effects brought about by that consumption.

Yet no politician is willing to stand up and say that the party is over in terms of population growth. We need to look at real ways of limiting growth in the future. People decry the Chinese for their one baby policy, but this sort of thing may be a necessity in the future. Costello's "One for mum, one for dad and one for the nation" concept is simply irresponsible. The government should be rewarding people who actively seek to limit the number of children they have, not the other way around.


S

Actually, if we could double or treble the population of Australia, the "per capita" emissions number would drop substantially, making Australia look good in the eyes of the world, unless they then choose to look at overall country emissions numbers

There are nearly a Billion Chinese. There are only 20 Million Australians in a similar land area. The population of Africa is rising by more than the total population every year. Costello is correct.

I'm not sure that I follow your logic. Just because other countries are massively overpopulated, and their population growth is far exceeding the resources available to adequately support them, it follows that we should do the same?

Mankind as a species needs to start thinking about this critically, and beyond the limitations of national borders. Globally, the world simply cannot support and sustain the current level of population growth...


S

I agree. Sci-fi movies depicting terra-forming Mars etc may not be too far off at this rate.

I have seen various estimates - and they *have* to be estimates - of the longterm sustainable population for Australia and they vary from ten to fifteen million, depending on the standard of living they put into the numbers.

Of course, by carrying on digging up WA and half of QLD and ferrying them to China, you can feed and water a lot more than that - but by draining down the capital the country has.

Don't know about terraforming Mars... how about terraforming Australia first.

Dig a bloody big hole where all that desert is... fill it with sea water... and at a stroke you have reduced global sea levels and doubled Australia's beach front properties.

I have been a proponent of this for some time. Not only will you develop more beach properties, but you will also generate internal weather patterns over the new sea that may help to develop the currently wasted land through higher rainfall etc.

All lovely in theory, but how do you go about digging a sea sized hole in a continent without the help of a Death Star set to low?


S

Mary MacKillop?

That's not a stupid an idea as it first sounds. There were plans afoot some years ago to blow a canal inland from the sea in South Australia and flood the low lying land. The idea being it would create rain.

Yes, that's the idea. But what would you use to do it?

I guess we do have all that uranium lying around doing nothing...


S

... and I seem to remember that the Soviets were once planning to dig a canal between the Barents sea and the Aral sea by - wait for it - exploding hundreds of atomic devices in a line.

Would have made a nice YouTube page!

Hmmmm.. A Death Star you say. How about, as an alternative to the cooking and hairdressing route to PR, PR is granted to anybody who completes the 'bulldozing for beginners' course and spends 12 months in Woop Woop putting it into practice?

Don't you guys have jobs to go to? <g>