Maybe I'm being picky: it's late, my time....

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

And I agree, this isn't diary material. It should go in the open thread.

you are the media you consume.

(If so see link here.)

The powers behind the US government certainly have a plan, but quite obviously they do NOT intend to talk about their developing an option to take global population reduction into their own hands.

(Yes, mass-murder, a.k.a. genocide.  What ELSE would such a plan be?)  

But the rest of us?  

If you were serious about population reduction you would put the decision-making about population, specifically about decisions about childbearing and childrearing and about matters impinging on childbearing and childrearing into the hands of women.  Collectively and individually.

When women make these decisions, overpopulation does not happen.  Equally obviously, women do not make these decisions in any of the world's major societies.  

And if you wish to reduce population through die-off, it is better let nature make the choices, and not try to manipulate the outcome to your own benefit.  That latter is a zero-sum game that results in MORE population.  

The Fates are kind.

diet change to reduce population?

that's a new one...

i view (and vouch for) diet change as the prime potential factor that could help us sustain burgeoning populations.

You can't talk about economics and ignore "growth as cancer."

no, you can't, and we most emphatically don't.

in fact, that's why i come blog here, ET is mercifully free of such dangerous delusion, a glowing little island in a foggy sea.

ymmv

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

At some point I have stated that governments should not encourage, nor subsidize having children, as Spain has just done, offering a €2500 check per new baby.  Apparently Germany is also embarking on the procreation craze and France has been for a long time.  This current vogue seems to be based on economic studies that say social security pensions must be shored up.  Not very farsighted, or creative.

Reproduction exists naturally regardless of policy and governments should be creating awareness campaigns about misuse of resources and climate change.  

How about adding your views in a diary update?

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

I have not seen anything that contradicts this, except for earlier, more rudimentary and therefore less accurate models.
http://www.ilea.org/leaf/richard2002.html

Now, the essential fact you are missing is that, theoretically, we have unlimited resources. The constraint on resources is technology. We are completely dependent on the sun's energy - petroleum is nothing more than very, very old biomass that used the sun's energy to grow, then died, and was converted over a few million years into a goop we find ourselves addicted to today.  The sun's output is unlimited. There are only two real constraints. The first is atmospheric attenuation and diffusion. The second is our technology for capturing and using sun light. The problem is we don't capture very much of it. We need to be doing a much, much better job of research and development of finding better ways of capturing and using the sun's energy, to move us off of a fossil-fuel economy. It would be interesting for some trained economist to sit down and figure out what the lost opportunity cost has been of having some of the best minds in physics, mathematics, and computer science, devoted these past 20 or 30 years to modeling and gaming the financial markets, rather then working on the fossil fuel problem.

The other big limitation, as Stirling Newberry has pointed out a number of times, is that we have reached the limit of using the atmosphere as a carbon sink. However, if you go back to the first link above, you will find that we stand a good chance of overcoming this by an aggressive program of energy conservation. Thus, the problem is political, not a physical "limits to growth."

I am certain that you are in extreme disagreement with what I write here. Please calm down. You sound much too much like some 18th century colonial lord sipping swill on his plantation verandah and worrying about there being too many darkies.

The real problems are political - forcing the financial system to support real research and development, rather than speculation, arbitrage, and usury; and getting enough buying power into the hands of all classes, including the poor, so that more energy-efficient technology can be more widely deployed.