World Population Growth

I was thinking the other day about the rate of world population growth in the context of the natural disasters that have happened recently. Take for example the 15000 people killed in China in the recent earthquake. This is tragic for the people involved, but the world will make up this number in just under ....

2 hours

I don't know about you, but I find this pretty mind-blowing. If you don't believe me, here's the facts. The rate of world population growth in 2000 was estimated at around 75 million people per year, around 200,000 per day.

At the rate we're consuming the planets resources, the best we can say about this disaster is that at least it buys us all a couple of hours. We might use that time to think about how we can buy ourselves some more time ...

Too Many People

It strikes me that the vast majority of our problems on this planet stem from one thing: there are just too many people on it. Perhaps the single most important long term solution to our environmental woes is to reduce the world's population, and this is something we can all act on.

Some things we can do:

• Don't have any more than two children
• Lobby political parties to restrict immigration to maintain zero population growth
• Contribute to contraception programmes in third-world countries

The Green Party's population policy is a good start ...