No matter how much lipstick you slather on a pig, it’s still a pig. Over the next 20-30 years, only drastic population reduction can balance resources, consumption, environment, and maintain quality of life. If the developed world consumes fewer resources per capita, the undeveloped world will immediately seize them and begin converting them into an even larger population.

Where’s the telling argument for the first world population to rush to the bilges and start bailing? Isn’t it obvious that if the first-world abandons the upper decks to begin serious bailing down in the bilges, the third world will rush to the upper decks and delight in taking its place? So, in effect, the sinking overloaded vessel would have to either provide more buoyancy or sink even faster. Of course there will be those who argue that the solution is to reduce the weight of each passenger, especially the bailers, but the truth is third-worlders would promptly convert the surplus resources made available by restricting the diet of first world bailers into greater numbers of hungry third-worlders, who have almost no capacity to bail.

I’m not saying we must start casting all the breeding non-bailers into the sea, but if their numbers are not somehow restrained, and drastically reduced, it’s just a matter of time before the ship of industrial civilization will surely plunge to the bottom.

If I had a magic LENR energy technology, or John Gault’s secret power machine, that produces electrical power at ten percent the cost of burning coal (say an actual working E-Cat-hot), I wouldn’t make it available to global civilization. I would try to ration its benefits only to nations with restricted immigration and falling populations. I would move to New Zealand and try to deal first with Japan and China. I’m very suspicious of India, but something could probably be worked out so power rates would be related to reproductive rates. (Childless Indian couples get free electricity; one-child couples pay one-cent kWh; two-child couples pay four-cents; three child couples pay twelve-cents; four-child couples pay thirty cents, and so on. If such a power cost scheme would work in India, it might work nearly anywhere.) The magic energy machine could power AI mind meld and virtual reality chambers for the world’s billions and save the environment in the process. The problem with that beautiful vision is it’s only possible with magic that doesn’t actually exist. So for the next 40-50 years we are stuck in the real world, with rationing electronic AI mind meld and robotic nuclear power as the least bad of all possible futures.