What do you mean by "panic of law"?
Sorry, I was thinking one thing and typed another. It was supposed to be du jour not d'jure. Though I guess one can say that the panic du jour usually leads to the panic d'jure.
Congrats on the big "K"
I absolutely agree with you that "green solutions" are usually not solutions at all. The political agenda is concerning and I really don't think any politician is thinking straight these days. They care more about getting votes than getting results. Empty promises rule this country.
I am very skeptical when it comes to biofuels, they cost a lot of fertile land, they are still polluting and it's really a renewable, less efficient form of earth-oil. Besides that they stink. I still think hydrogen is the future, fuel couldn't be cleaner, and all it takes is a huge amount of electric energy, which is solvable.
However, overpopulation is something I take seriously. It all depends on what meaning you attach to the word. I don't think the world is overpopulating, what I do think is that there are too many people here. It's the complicated feeling of chaos, mainly, that I find disturbing; then there is the agricultural-land-space-problem and those darn 3d world countries that just won't stop killing each other and having make up sex creating more babies than they already had. It's like the Irish Catholics with their 20 children families and just one dad working at a lumber mill to provide for them all. It's not very clever. Just try to have three children survive and go to school instead of throwing 20 into this pit and see which pull through.
There is just no end to this growth, people won't think for themselves and say: "Geez hon', the world sure is growing crowdy these days: let's not have a thirteenth baby." We've invented government to think for the less intelligent.
Most people will always feel that where they live has too many people. The reason is that most people live in heavily populated areas and not in sparsely populated areas. There are reasons for both the activity and the assumption.
We live in dense settlements because under the division of labor we all benefit from the presence of other people. They provide goods and services when we need them or are customers if we sell them. Increasing the number of potential trading partners increases the likelihood that we can make the exchange that will best suit our purposes. This is a major reason that wealth tends to increase with population density. This also explains why migration patterns increase the percentage of people in urban areas and decrease the percentages in rural areas.
As for the Third World I should correct a misconception. Birth rates are falling rapidly in the third world and have been for several decades. Birth rates tend to be set by life expectancy/death rates. As death rates drop birth rates follow. This has been so in every country and the Third World is no exception. There is no region of the world where birth rates have not fallen by a substantial amount. A second factor is that poor people tend to have more children because only poor people can afford them.
That seens counterintuitive but the economics of poverty explains it. Poor people have children because they tend to live in labor intensive systems. The more laborers the more wealth. Children are an asset who start working early in life and provide not only for themselves but for the parents in their old age. In rich nations children are liabilities who produce nothing and consume vast amounts of resources. You, for instance, have cost your parents lots of money. Had you been born to parents in a poor country you would have provided them with lots of labor, growing food etc., and taking care of them as they age.
And having 20 kids with the hopes that 3 survive is how every culture (including your own) dealt with high death rates. When the economies developed the cost of children increased and people started having fewer and fewer children until they became so prosperous that they were no longer replacing population and saw it decline.
The one major incentive today to increase birth rates is that the welfare state needs more workers than beneficiaries and they are actually getting to the point where they have more people taking out of the pot than putting into it and are facing a looming crisis.
Commenting by HaloScan
