1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death

That is not true. Overpopulation IS a huge problem facing the human species.

World resources ARE more or less unlimited. There is oil under oceans and arctic, we are developing new extraction techniques all the time. Arable area is still v. small and undermechanized, more intensive food production can feed ~20 billion people right now. We can have unlimited energy from sun or geothermal sources.

What is more important we wont reach stars if we are satisfied with Earth. So yes, overpopulation is needed for human race expansion.

This is true and the technology should be enhanced. Human species should devote a lot of time and energy toward this.


How can you honestly believe this about oil? There is only so much oil in the mantle. After it is extracted, it is gone forever. It will not be there after it is used and it is being rapidly depleted now. Doesn't matter how much oil is under the oceans because it will be used just as quickly. Then after that -nothing- unless new technology is developed.

Huge oil fields are discovered all the time, it is simply as of now not profitable to develop them. It may change in 20 years or it may not, but oil IS there.

Intensive farming requires energy source to power mechanization. Whether its cheap oil or electric propelled tools doesnt matter. Again, a need to build less oil dependant machines has not yet surfaced.

We can store energy but it is not, again, economical. If there is a need to do so we can find a way.

And most important: technology advance. I am very confident that MANY problems will be solved without us actually doing anything difficult. That may include 'global warming'. 100 years ago feeding 6 billion people seemed impossible, in another 100 years the barrier may well be 50 billion.

I think you need to ask yourself what is "resources".

Bottom line is that decline in population = civilization regressing, in 100/100 cases historically. Birth rate reduction = greater % of non-workers. When 40% of the working population's income goes directly to welfare for non-workers (predicted case of 80s generation in 25 years time), minus maintenance of old infrastructure on top of that, there is not going to be anything left over for new investment.

You know, in Canada they are converting oil sands to oil which is very costly. If they are going to that much trouble, it should be a heads up on the situation and you should realize there isn't a lot of oil left. No one knows how much there is because to find out, one has to drill and hope they get an active well. Many times wells are drilled then nothing. No oil comes out of it. If it were so easy to get this mysterious oil you claim exists, they would have gotten it before converting oil sands. It would take more energy to get the oil than the amount of oil produced.


Solar panels are the best option.


It's not a matter of "workers" more like, "people requiring resources to exist."

To Exist? Why it would be a problem?
Even India has a food surplus that is four times what would be ever required in the time of emergency (and that too as of the 1980s, I don't know what the figure would be now). United States has to throw away half of what they don't export.

In fact, food production is so ridiculously high thanks to subsidies and price supports, just to keep people who don't know anything but farming to continue farming, that the granary stocks in so much of the world drain away billions of dollars in just storage. The cost of that itself pushes food prices. And thus it drains away money that could have been used to market and sell all that food itself, and that's why so much of the world is hungry despite surplus stocks.

In some countries, food production is so high, that in Japan, they have to pay people NOT to cultivate more than a certain amount of rice.

Only 5% of the landmass in North America itself is inhabited by human settlement.

It's LESS in the rest of the world's continents.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Most of the big fields have been injecting water to keep the pressure up for years and geologists are more and more looking at ways to maximise extraction of the remainder. Hence the current boom in Iraq where fields have been underused for decades and there is still a vast amount. Even though we're water injecting there as well. Plastic Pole is right though to imply that the less oil there is left the more worthwhile it will be to get it out. And people will follow the money. Right now it is in places where people (lazy people at that) have as many kids as they can squeeze out knowing the oil rich state will support them.

By the way, food production isn't that high. All food production isn't the same. Countries who consume a lot of meat are the villains here. It takes a lot of land for one cow or sheep.

India has billion people living in 25 states, speaking 19 major languages and over a 100 dialects, practicing over about 6 religions and belonging to thousands of castes and sub-castes. Each state differs so widely in economic and social development that it is difficult to speak of the country as a whole.

Don't be ridiculous. The child will speak in the language he/she uses most. I would seriously doubt its the choice of the parent. It's just reality.

And be honest, what have they got to go back too?

Well, most importantly people need water. You would be surprised at how water is treated around the planet. So much of it is polluted and then what little is left they put a huge price tag on. Water challenges will be paramount in the coming years.

From the ocean floor? From South Pole?
Resources are not finite. Not only is (as we understand it) universe infinite we also have, without need to advance our technology very much, access to our own solar system. Mining just one medium sized asteroid from the belt between Mars and Jupiter could provide more minerals than we have mined in all human history. We can already make fuel out of coal and wood, so we can replace all of our fuel usage with energy plants. Solar power could easily provide all energy we could ever need. Soil enrichment also isn't out of our reach.

Of course there wont be any need to do so. After all developed nations don't have population growth. And people who replace their populations will not care about development.


The only reason more urban development has not taken place in India is because government strictly regulates land use and development, because it just wants a piece of the pie out of every land deal possible, and people in the land department there are always the worst and most corrupt people possible.

They push up land prices by arbitrarily declaring any stretch of land to be reserved for agricultural purposes, and then they try to take as much of the share of big land purchases or sales as possible.

The amount of open space around New Delhi is so much, if all it had been developed in the past fifty years, population density of the national capital region would be one-third of what it is now.

But not oil, That is why the technology is more important. You would need to find a planet that has some kind of life on it in order to find oil and you would need a planet lacking any kind of life capable of utilizing the oil and even then you would be considered an invasive species harming the delicate evolution of that planet. You would deprive future souls of using their own oil. Would that be just and ethical?

Getting oil on the ocean floor? Deep sea drilling? You do know it's easier for men to walk on the moon than it is this?

it's hard enough to get out some of the oil from conventional fields. Getting it from the ocean floor is nigh impossible and fraught with danger. Otherwise the high price of oil would mean we were seriously trying.

Poland won't die if your people will stay in Poland instead going abroad (not talking about tourism) as much they do.

For now. It will not stay always that way.
Why the fixation with oil, anyway? There is also coal, it can be transformed into fuel. And there is nuclear energy.
You still fail to comprehend that 'natural resources' is a meaningless concept.
Was crude oil a 'resource' in the time of caveman hunter gatherers? Was uranium a 'resource' in the Victorian era?

If we limit them to 'resources' that are known and exploited at a specific time, how do you measure their value?

I just noticed that:


The starvation is only because of the fact that a policy of price supports and subsidies has created a surplus which is no position to be sold.

Price supports in India have created a massive surplus of food stock, and they intended to make it available to the poor at subsidised prices. Except the government has only so much money, and so many bills to pay, that it can only be willing subsidise so many and sell most at above price support levels, at which only few can buy.

Consider furthermore that the costs of storing India's grain are so high that even that prevents them from subsidising it. More is spent on storage than on distribution.

Hunger is not caused by lack of food, it is caused by inability to pay for it. And the government has made food far more expensive in return for having more of it. This is the hard fact of reality; we have surplus food, and people die of hunger

This is not true, food is more expensive (relatively) in places where its not subsidised.
In the US people would starve if the agricultural sector were not propped up by government.

Norway, area 385,252 km2, population 5,002,942
Sweden, area 449,964 km2, population 9,415,295
Poland, area 312,685 km2, population 38,186,860

Look at the pictures and spot the differences ;)

Coal is far less cost effective to extract, far less efficient and far dirtier. And insufficient for the domestic and industrial markets. Nuclear energy is a whole different ball game. Much more complicated and risky.

Remember oil just doesn't provide energy. It provides fertiliser and plastic, but hey, if you want much more expensive food and everything around you made of plastic to disappear, that's your fantasy not mine.


No, no, no. You may have noticed a certain inequality in the availability of food. The average Biedronka in a mid-sized Polish town is better than the biggest food shop in some countries. The richer parts of the world consume and waste a shocking amount of unnecessary food and commodities like people always follow the money.

And massively more expensive, nuclear can only exist with government subsidies too cheap to meter was a good slogan but nothing more


It’s been said that it’s too important to burn in engines

There's a lot more work to be done figuring out how to keep it from burning so dirty. Also, it is hard to get. Ever seen the way they top mountains to get it?

Nuclear energy has a lot of potential - just needs some tweaking.

Nothing wrong with coal, Poland uses it al the time.


Of course there can be private owned nuclear plants. And there is nothing really risky about it, there is only hysteria of dumb people, fuelled by oil producers. Nuclear energy is much more clear and cheap.

As for cars, in Poland about half of the cars uses natural gas.


Bull... Your farmers would be unable to compete on the international market, thats all.


Now, thats what I call an argument.


Third worlders would not be able to afford Biedronka' food just as they cannot afford the food produced locally (India case).
Zimbabwe was successful in producing enough food for itself when it was called "Rhodesia" and in the hands of white men. Since it has been in the hands of blacks, it's actually relying on foreign powers to bring them food on the table. Do we want to encourage this kind of expectations?

and better than any you've squeezed out tonight. You might pay attention to the sentence that follows it.


ah. I see you have. But still you miss the poit because it doesn't fit your distorted world view. Have you wondered ever about suppy and demand. Why a greater demand in one region forces prices up and incomes down in another...

Rhodesia, by the way, is a particularly bad example, unless you're going to pretend that everyone there had a decent standard of living and equall access to resources.

The people have their responsibilities in what they are going through, or we would also be living under that kind of harsh tyrannies. And to be fair I do hold Europeans responsible for our own pain brought by the multikult through their own apathy, excessive individualism (I've got nothing against individualism in itself but everything sucks when taken in excesses), materialism (as long as they got a TeeVee they are oh so happy and contented. It's as if you couldn't get the white Frenchs to riot as long as they got a Tv, junk food and stupid games.).

We had our fair share of dictatorships in the past. We didn't ask the help of blacks in those times to get rid of them. Why should we get rid of theirs now ?

There is a reason why Asia is widely more successful in building a civilization even if they used to be ridden with poverty in the past. Japan after WW2 was a disaster but they're now a major power. South Korea. Singapore. Taiwan. China is rapidly gaining grounds.

And there is a reason why not a single African country can do anything without being governed by the white man, like Rhodesia and South Africa. Race.

Again no. For most of human history the whole world has been poor. It's only relatively recently that parts of it haven't been. And those parts increased wealth in a certain order - nothing to do with 'race' and everything to do with human geography. In particular ease of exploiting assets, colonialism and access to markets. Crippling foreign debt and a brain drain also play their part. Nevertheless, Africa is catching up fast.

The decommissioning of nuclear power stations, the storage of the waste plus insurance costs are all underwritten by government. Without these subsidies no private company could possibly make a profit from nuclear.


Agricultural subsidies distort the market and make food cheaper than it would be.

They definitely had better standard of living then they have now, that's for sure... I'm not supporting previous regime, but what happened there is a total and spectacular failure.

Sally1, I think you've quoted between threads.

That's rubbish. Sweden and France have fertility rates mong the highest in Europe.

In France this uniquely comes from the immigrant population.

that doesn't make sense....
how can a birth rate 'uniquely' come from the immigrant population?
how do you know? Is there a link?
God i hate sloppy arguments.
why should we care anyway?
tbh those immigrants are doing France a favour...;)