Biggest crisis facing the planet is in the numbers

Murray Grimwood, of Waitati, calls for disincentives for parents having more than two children and zero immigration as a world population crisis looms.

It would appear that climate change is now accepted by our current administration, but there are earlier cabs off the rank, energy and resource curtailments among them.

The biggest issue of them all though - the biggest herd of elephants in the room - is population.

We have trebled global population in 300 years, doubled it in my lifetime, and no serious thinker is suggesting we can double it again from here. I was at a panel discussion last year, at the University Staff Club - the kind where each speaker gets a few minutes, followed by an all-in question and answer session.

Visiting Professor Ellen Mosley-Thompson was one of the panel, and swiped the microphone to answer this from the floor: "How many people do you think the planet can support?"Her reply?"That's not the question."

You could have heard a pin drop.

She went on: "The question is, at what level of comfort do you want to live? You tell me that, and I'll tell you how many people we can support."

What a woman.

What an answer.

She is undeniably correct, of course.

No species can continue exponential growth forever - ask any algal bloom.

Those who have given the matter some thought, offer these rough rules of thumb: We are currently chewing through resources at three times the renewable rate.

Put another way, there are three times too many of us.

At six-point-something billion, that means we should be hastening towards two billion.

But there is a catch - there's always a catch.

At two billion, we are so close to the renewal state, that the livin' is anything but easy; in fact it is subsistence-level, mere scrabbling to be alive.

For a continuum of existence at our current levels of comfort, the sad guess is that the carrying capacity of our planetary paddock is about one billion.

Five out of six of us have to go, and volunteers will be - if you will excuse an inappropriate metaphor - thin on the ground.

We owe our short-lived blossoming to the one-off extraction of stored resources, particularly fossil fuels, and autumn approaches.

While I suspect it will forever be a too-hot political potato, population is at the root of all our scarcity issues - food, water, energy, land.

If there were just two of us, there would be figs and snake oil aplenty.

We do not see the real effects of global scarcity here, and few New Zealanders associate pictures from Bangladesh, Rwanda or Haiti with their own consumption levels.

We do not, for instance, associate the price we pay for petrol with the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, nor with the poverty-stricken indigenous oil owners he fought for.

We should.

Present inequality aside, further dilution of the resources available per person is undesirable.

Put more bluntly, if we do not do something about population levels, it will be done for us - via war, starvation, or pandemic.

Which means a pending showdown with those belonging to religions which urge increased procreation, a debate that I suspect will take us well into injury-time.

The short history is, of course, that we invented mythical deities who knew the answers we contemporarily did not, and offloaded responsibility for our wellbeing on to them. Now that we have many of the answers, the responsibility is firmly back in our court.

After all, is not the power to annihilate all species the power of a god? We can also predict a show-down with those who eschew the "nanny state", a group unsurprisingly cross-pollinated with the believer types. A good political start would be a disincentive for parents of either sex to have a third child, initially through fiscal measures but presumably moving on through penalties, and eventually to forced medical intervention.

Unacceptable and monstrous? I say not.

Zero immigration has to be part of the equation too, an easier first step by far, but one I do not see either major party addressing anytime soon.

Recently, our finance minister was seen squirming in the spotlight over a few paltry thousands of dollars in rent money.

To me, that was not the news, or the problem.

He has six children - a trebling of the planetary population, and from my perspective, there goes a finance minister who cannot count.

We can expect the subject to be put where Moses was - in the "too hard basket" - until it is too late.

Maybe it's for the best.

The fittest will survive, and the politicians of the future may have more gumption.

We know for sure they will have less figs and snake oil.