Denys Beauchemin wrote:

>I never discuss religion, but today I will put that aside as I talk about
> the Religion of Catastrophism, especially one of its numerous churches,
> Population Explosion.  (Some of its other churches are "Global Warming",
> "Ozone Depletion", "AIDS", "DDT", etc...)

The engineer in me tends to apply the concept of a mass balance to these
sort of problems. This is generally stated as:

RATE_IN  - RATE_OUT = RATE_OF_ACCUMULATION;

In the case of the population explosion the rate of accumulation is the
birth rate - the death rate. If you're talking about a specific country you
would also have to include immigration and emigration rates, but for the
planet earth these can be neglected.

The other chemical engineering concept that I apply is entropy which is that
EVERY change results in an overall increase in the randomness of the
universe. Generally I try to avoid work altogether, but if I must do
something I try to do it in a way that minimizes the change in entropy. I
find it preferable for example to reduce the amount of oil that is used
rather than say, work on car exhaust systems to reduce the amount of
emissions.

Personally, I'd favour a carbon tax as the best method to achieve this
reduction, but I suspect that there will be those who disagree.

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