On Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:01:10 Carl Turney wrote:
Also, Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" cites a large number of major cities throughout the world that have grown up by "mining water" (i.e. drilling wells), and how most of them are now "getting close to the absolute bottom". Then things will get =really= "interesting", as many aren't by the ocean and/or can't afford desalination plants.
How many cities are there that aren't near an ocean and are in arid countries? As for not affording desalination, populations can migrate and spending our tax money on desalination and other water resources would be a much better use of money than spending it on wars. The supposed aims of most wars (removing despotic governments etc) will be better achieved by providing food and water security.
But the vast majority of people still believe that population growth isn't a bad thing, and extremely few politicians and policy-makers who'll dare to educate them.
Population growth doesn't have to be a problem. Educate women and provide a decent standard of living to everyone and the population isn't going to grow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territor... Quickly scan the above page and you'll notice the correlation between standard of living and birth rate. Now if we want to continue to have a small number of mostly white people (US, EU, Australia, etc) hog most of the world's resources and at the same time not have overall population growth then it's probably not a solvable problems. But if we were to be a little less selfish and use more renewable resources then this shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/