Here’s the 5th installment of questions from our Solving Overshoot webinar. I’m sharing the questions we didn’t have time to address, and I’m including comments received from Madeleine Somerville and Paul Ehrlich, our panelists. If you missed the first few installments, start here with installment one. Your comments are welcome below. I think today’s questions are particularly important, so I’ve jumped in and offered some of my own thoughts. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

16. Chris Bystroff asked: “Paul– Will accelerated growth lead to a cataclysm, like a nuclear war or something else, sooner? And if so would it be less damaging than waiting until the population doubles again?” . . .

Here’s the 4th installment of questions from our Solving Overshoot webinar. I’m sharing the questions we did not have time to address, and including any comments I received from Madeleine Somerville and Paul Ehrlich, our panelists. If you missed the first few installments, start here with installment one. Your comments are welcome.

12. Brian Sanderson asked: “Which is easier to alter, per-capita consumption or overpopulation?
Ultimately, if nothing is done, nature will force a reduction in per-capita consumption.
On the other hand, if the question is which we as human agents will find most easy to alter, it’s population that is easier. The data are clear on this.”  But it would take something like a century to get significant shrinkage, and we likely don’t have a century. . . .

I’m continuing today to share leftover questions from the GrowthBusters webinar, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption. I’m including responses later provided by our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville. Find more information about the panelists, plus the first 3 questions and answers here.

4. Karen Pitts asked Paul Ehrlich: “Paul Ehrlich, how much money do we need each year to meet the worldwide unmet need for contraception? How much are we spending?”

Paul Ehrlich:  Haven’t time to look up, but it would be a trivial bit of the U.S. arms budget.

5. Brian Sanderson asked: “Wouldn’t you also consider poverty as an indicator of overpopulation/overshoot?    Aggressive warfare, also…   Mass migrations, also…” . . .

The second in the GrowthBusters webinar series, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption, went by too quickly. At the end of the hour there were 26 questions we hadn’t had a chance to address. Our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville, were kind enough to provide written responses to these. I will share these here on the GrowthBusters blog over the next several days.

I recommend you subscribe to the blog now to make sure you don’t miss any of these. See the subscription box to the right. Subscribing will also ensure you get notice of the next webinar in the series. While I’ll post nearly every day to get through these questions, normally the blog posts are pretty sparse (subscribing won’t clutter your inbox in 2017). If you’re a GrowthBusters member, you will get webinar invitations regardless. . . .

One of the three podcasts I host is called The Overpopulation Podcast, a project of World Population Balance. One episode this year featured a conversation with author Laura Carroll about making the choice to be childfree. One listener emailed this comment:

“Dear Dave, It’s not population as population is leveling off. It’s consumption, consumption, consumption.”

I’m writing about this today because this is a fairly common occurrence. That’s one of the reasons I’m hosting a free webinar this week:

Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption?

I suspect most people think they know the answer to that question. I think I do. So I doubt many will attend hoping to actually find out the answer. I think most who attend will be there to make sure someone doesn’t offer the WRONG answer. Interestingly, there are differing opinions on what the correct answer is. . . .