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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)





> >jw (jwas@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
> >
> posting. Below are statistics... for the planet Earth.
> 
>     Year             Population 
>                        Growth
>                         rate
> 
>     1970                2.07
>     1975                1.76
>     1980                1.71
>     1985                1.68     
>     1990                1.58     
>     1995                1.41     
>     2000 (projected)    1.28     
> 
The numbers I get (from Britannica Annual World Data Sheets) are even a
little lower (1985-1996) averaged over 2-3 years/

'85- '88:  1.38% growth
'88- '91:  2.16% <-- Note DECADE census info available in this period!
'91- '94:  1.30%
'94- '96:  1.39%

It's important to keep in mind that 1.00 IS NOT ZPG, 0.00 IS.  These are
annual percentage growths.  At 1.4% gowth today, we add 80 million people
per year.  Even as the percentage drops slowly, the absolute growth can
still be increasing--such is the nature of such growth.  

As posted earlier, even (what seems like) a modest growth of 1% cannot be
sustained long term (thousands of years) {in 17,000 years there would be
more people than atoms in the Universe!}.  We can argue over what the
ultimate 'carrying capacity' of the earth is for humans, but IT IS a finite
number.  ZPG must be reached eventually either by
societal/governmental/economic pressures or by starvation/disease/war. 
While a stable population causes problems for many current economic
systems, it certainly would be preferable from an environmental point of
view as well as for many societal systems.

Rick Tarara



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