The Texas thing was ridiculous, but the population bomb really is garbage and the population bust theory really does pose a lot of serious issues.

It's unfortunate that the Christian Right is sticking their hand into this mess to discredit and muddle all this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23iht-edjacoby.1.139 15242.html

I don't get that article baleen. If lower population meant lower entrepreneurship and some sort of mystic ratio of inspired individuals, wouldn't the Renaissance have happened in Japan, China or India where urban populations could reach > 5 million while Florence had less than 100,000 citizens in the fifteenth century?

As for the welfare crisis as masses age, that's a problem that has to be dealt with until there's a stable population, that's all. Sounds like that's actually what the article is afraid of, not enough zombies in the work force to support us in old age. That problem is a lot more manageable in my opinion than overpopulation and squandering what's left of the planet.

Having higher population and our of control, traditional consumption methods are different issues, wouldn't you say?

And yes, while the plague created higher employment in Renaissance Europe and allowed for fewer people to acquire more resources (and thus have more leisure time to innovate and invest), I don't think that's really the model we're looking for...

I think it's a little cynical to say people are just going to "become zombies" to support the elderly. I don't have a free market attitude toward population anymore. I don't think that the "market should fix itself" and we should simply allow billions of people to die so that the next generation can have a nicer quality of life.

Instead, we could maybe address how we consume resources and manage waste while continuing to innovate novel ways of managing and tapping resources with lower impact on our immediate livelihoods. I don't think we'll reach any kind of resolution on here. I do think we'll be looking at a really fucked up country if we do not have enough young workers to pay for the things we take for granted.

In that regard I am pro-human and a little optimistic. I believe science can continue solving a lot of our problems if we give it a chance and strip away the special interests that force us to continue leaning on destructive habits.

We can always just continue watching Japan and see if we want that to happen here, as well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2548-2005Mar2.h tml

Using Japan as a model for the world would result in the ocean becoming lifeless even sooner than if we started dumping straight dioxin into the Pacific.

And it'll never happen in places like the U.S. unless the area in question has some outside force making land/city space ungodly expensive.

Well they aren't overpopulated if you take the population and their land mass into account.... and that's where the people who made this video stopped. Of course you couldn't live with your house and yard in a desert.

Quite a bit of that area mentioned in the Texas example is uninhabitable.

that's what they said about las vegas, aka the mojave desert

Yeah, but it's still Texas.

Las Vegas, riiiiiight.

You know how much water they pump into that place a day? It, and other places in the desert southwest, might as well be lunar colonies for all the resources that have to go into keeping them running and habitable.

correction, the whole planet is about 50,000,000 square miles.

Doesn't matter that we could all have a suburban home all inside Texas. I notice they neglected to mention how much of the earth's surface is covered in farmland, let alone other necessities like industry, Nascar tracks, and Wild Water Kingdoms.

Given that Roundup is highly neurotoxic and GE crops are treated with it in order to trigger insecticide mechanisms within the plant, it might be a good idea to stop it, and any other extremely dangerous chemicals used to douse are food. In addition to causing cancer rates to rise, they are also causing deaths around the Third World, mainly in children, because of their contamination of the water supply.

should be "our food"

I'm not against GM crops as a whole, but those that use a gene to make them resistant to RoundUp really are harmful. RoundUp isn't good for people, GM crops that are able to survive RoundUp have more of it in them because farmers use it to kill weeds... GM crops aren't at all bad, but we do need to come to better decisions about which ones we accept and why, or just strengthen the FDA, but they are socialist assholes who want to take our freedom to eat poisoned meat.

I'm not too concerned about the healthaspect of eating GM crops. But they're a terrible deal for farmers. Monsanto is a big ugly crop bully.

My two cents.

The harm to farmers is a pretty damn good point to avoid big agricultural companies like Monsanto. Probably the best point.

But, my two cents: Nitrate and pesticide resilient bacteria.

They can't avoid Monsanto. Not and make a profit with the volume they need. I think the use rate is something like 90%.

Then there are those "terminator" genes that mean the crop isn't fertile. Farmers can't carry seed over to next year. Thank you, Monsanto, may you burn in hell.

PRI is funded by the Bradley Foundation, along with other Ministries of Misinformation the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Tell them to adopt.

Hahaha, keep on pouting you fucking goober.

you are the dumbest person in the world

For what, saying overpopulation is a problem? Because uh