I never said anything about you smothering children or either of us killing ourselves. The point is that having additional children (by procreating, rather than adoption), whether your present number is 0 or greater than 0, is that the best way to give the future generations (that's YOUR children and their descendents, if any, along with everyone else on earth after we're both dead) a chance at survival and maybe a decent lifestyle and some space to breathe. I don't get where I asked anyone to smother their kids for my benefit. There is this fallacy that promoting non-procreation in an overpopulated world is somehow anti-human, as if it were humanist to blindly breed like lemmings until we've taken up all available resources and there is a mass die-off.

You said that the "no children set" is the greatest enemy of environmentalism, and I responded to this ridiculous charge, and now you come back with a nonsequitor that I advocate murder and shouldn't answer you. You finished off by saying that my "message is fairly sound" and that you would educate your kids about birth control and population growth. Alright, then we are essentially in agreement.

As to who the message is for, it is for anyone with future reproductive potential or anyone who is interested in policy. It is certainly not just for those in developing countries with higher birth rates; overpopulation is a global problem, the USA still has a robust population growth rate, even if driven in large part by immigration, and each person in developed or highly industrialized nations uses as much as several in developing nations. You also hit the nail on the head as to these developing nations not having enough resources; the USA should be sending lots of money and experts to help deal with the problem. Instead Bush cut UNFPA funding to $0 and reimplemented the Mexico City policy. This is more environmentally disastrous than his better-known policies of stacking the EPA and pushing drilling in Alaska etc. If the "message is sound" as you say, then people should talk about it when they talk about environment, rather than dancing around the issue like it was some unholy taboo.

Also, living in NYC, I don't really agree with you about the Wall Street set, although Wall Street types may have a fairly negative contribution to society in many ways, most of the i-banker types I know walk or take the subway to work and are way too busy for kids (although granted this probably changes as they get older and marry). In any event I fail to see how this topic would be more welcome on an investment discussion board than in a thread on lifestyle choices that effect climate change where the issue has already arisen.

To echo futhark, I don't know whether the current population is 3-4 times what may be sustainable with future technologies, but it is clearly much higher than is currently sustainable; and most alarmingly, it continues to grow exponentially. The slow linear decrease in birthrates is small comfort as population continues to balloon out of control.

PETA wrote a letter to Gore to complain that he is silent on the massive environmental and climate impact of meat consumption. They are right to point that out and that he is silent on it, but they miss the point. We can only decrease consumption through individual conservation so much. The real driver behind the massively increasing effluvients of our industry and our cities is the growing population. Even if we somehow reduced our carbon emissions to zero tomorrow (which can't happen), we would still be faced with the fundamental limitations of fossil fuels, fresh water, arable land, open spaces, and every other resource on this planet that is rapidly being exhausted by unsustainable population growth, which receives nary a word in his speech or any other Gore speech. To ignore this fact when he is promoting policy change shows that Gore is unwilling or unable to follow his own findings to their logical conclusion.

International projections predict human population peaking at over 9 billion in 2050, plus or minus several billion and several decades, given the inherent uncertainties involved. What will the world be like then?

I respect old Bucky and his balls as next as the next techno-geek, but he was not just optimistic but way off base when he wrote:

As the amount of energy per person increases, the birth rate decreases, so that if the world is completely industrialized by about the year 2010, the total population should peak at about 6 billion & then start declining.

Well, well, well. Here we are at 2007 and the population ( checking http://deleuze.hcoop.net/~ntk/popclock/ ) is 6,636,709,000. And still growing exponentially. The best optimistic scenario doesn't have population peaking until 2050 and at over 9 billion. This is a vastly different scenario than Mr. Fuller envisioned.

There is absolutely no question that population must peak and then decrease. There are absolute physical limitations to population. The question is what ends up limiting population, and what the world looks like when we get there. The best way to limit population is birth control. The bad ways are famine, plague, and war (to name a few). If we don't actively push for birth control, nature will take care of the population problem in a very nasty way, and leave the survivors with a very grim world to face indeed.

Mr, Fuller's observation that birthrates slow with industrialization was correct. Unfortunately he was too optimistic that inequality would cease and that the world's most overpopulated and impoverished countries would manage to industrialize instead of stagnate (in development, not in population). Plus the industrialization of developing, overpopulated countries like China and India only exacerbates the environmental crisis and commodities shortages. Meanwhile the world's number 1 industrialized nation and polluter, the USA, continues to have a robust population growth of 1% (this is not a slow rate of growth), from births and immigration.