Population Debate I

The inter-bog debate kicks off with Waq’s view on the topic: “There are too many people on Earth. It’s international an issue. Governments should enforce laws to control human population growth.”

I remember during my younger teenage age, the world population was 5,821,946,536(July 1996 estimate). However, the population has expanded to 6,525,170,264 as of July 2006. We can see an increase of 12% over the decade. Why has there been a drastic increase in the population? Is the trend following Moore’s law regarding the number of transistors in an integrated circuit? (In other words, exponential increase).

The good news is that the population growth in developed countries are slowing down, but unfortunately developing countries, mainly 3rd world countries have to deal with increasing population. They can take a view that this is good for their economy as they would have more workforce and ability to create more job opportunities and market creation – main aim is basically economical focus to compete with more developed nations.

Now, this increase in population does have an adverse effect, or rather many adverse effects that can create a chain reaction. We all share a limited number of resources and these resources are depleting. The main current issue is the sustainability of oil and gas, as the main resource of energy. This non-renewable energy is facing a downward sloping trend and we have to collectively deal with these scarcities of energy as a global occupier and not base our decisions on national or local economy. Hence, can the world sustain and support the existence of the increasing number of inhabitants?

It is true that we can’t make up for the previous usage of non-renewable energy sources, but we can prolong the life of the existing sources by cutting back on consumption. We have to act fast! While all other animals and plants are facing extinction, the human population is the only inhabitants in the planet that is not faced with this problem. We are actually the problem creators! We are using up earths resources, displacing the natural habitats that used to be home to various species of flora and fauna just to make way for development of human activities.

In the next entry, I would talk about CO2 emissions, global climate change and various global problems which can be rooted back to population growth and industrial revolution.