The National Academy Of Sciences Would Be

If We Were Redesigning Around People Instead Of Around Automobiles, Which I Think The Market Is More Or Less Going To Do, Although Too Slowly, Than I'd Be A Lot Cheerier.

It Turns Out The Population Issue Is An Easier Thing To Deal With Than The Consumption Issue. Some Obvious Extremes In Consumption We Can Deal With. The Standard Cure For A Stuttering Economy Is To Go Out And Buy An Suv And Three More Refrigerators. That's Obviously Not The Way To Go.

After The Bomb We Developed A Fairly Good System For Moving Food Around And Have Avoided The Kind Of Massive Famines That Attract The Media. Although Of Course We've Had A Fair Number Of Them, Particularly In Africa, Since The Bomb Was Written. But We Have Had A Steady Level Of Attrition Of Malnutrition And Malnutrition-related Disease. Probably Something On The Order Of 5 To 10 Million People Starve To Death Each Year, But They're Spread Out; They're Not Dramatic News Events.

Chinese Are Already More On Board Than We Are. China Is The Only Country That Actually Discussed In Formal Government Documents How Important It Is To Control The Size Of Your Populations If You’re Going To Limit Emissions.

Historically, Things Were Moving In A Pretty Good Direction Until The Reagan Presidency. And Then It All Got Reversed. The Mexico City Policy Was Instituted - The Idea Of Wrecking The Environment For This Generation's Profit And Forgetting About Our Gets Got Firmly Embedded. I'm Sad To Say The Clinton Administration Didn't Turn It Around And The Bush Administration, Well, I Think They're The Worst Administration We've Ever Had, And I Used To Be A Republican.