Balancing Fossil Energy Consumption and Population

I have long been planning to write an essay debunking some myths about overpopulation, but still promoting family planning as part of a larger package for community development. I just watched a TV Ontario show (the Agenda with Steve Paikin, "Population and the Planet") thanks to Miro. This started me thinking about this again, and an outline follows. I could try to write this up and send it to a national newspaper for their editorial page.

- balancing life extension and birth rates
- demographic transition is happening, pace of transition needs managing
- false trade off with economic development, eco growth means fossil energy consumption growth
- Malthus and Ehrlich
- technology, much is
- urgency: hundred months
- illusion of national aggregates in both pop and econ


- draw down natural "capital"
- biocapacity with dynamic technology, footprint
- disaggregate: big-provincial-small islands, urban rural, top-quarter mid-half bottom-quarter income distribution

Solution
- community management capacity building
- participatory planning
- manage consumption-population balance, under dynamic technique
- change the shape of the community population pyramid
- identify state of exploitation-development of natural and built-up resources
- shift from fossil-energy consumption model to sustainable model
- incorporate closest cities, island and income distribution into model
- population side interventions, in order of priority
- education and health of women
- late maternity (pledge and incentives)
- available family planning services (both natural and artificial contraception work)
- health care participation
- spacing (schooling-related incentives)
- explicit fertility reduction targets at community level

Explicit fertility reduction targets at a national level only make sense when over half of communities have been organized to define targets at community level (a community is a metropolitan area or a cluster of similar municipalities within a province, about the size of a congressional district)

Legislative support is a discretionary spending package to municipalities which plan and manage their resource-population balance