I don't believe that billions will starve if we don't implement a one-child policy. If someone wanted me to believe that, he or she should provide some evidence.
Sir, I have provided the evidence that the planet could face severe overpoulation in the future which could lead to mass starvation many times in this thread.
I post 258 I quoted this book:
Without hydrocarbons, much of the world's farmlands would quickly become unproductive. But hydrocarbons are a nonrenewable resource, and growing evidence indicates that world hydrocarbon production will peak around 2010, followed by an irreversible decline. The impact on our agricultural system could be catastrophic. As the cost of hydrocarbon production increases, food could be priced out of the reach of the majority of our population. Hunger could become commonplace in every corner of the world, including your own neighborhood. [Eating Fossil Fuels, p 2.]
In post 260 I quoted this book:
The twin forces of rising petroleum costs and inaccessible freshwater are likely to cause grain prices to increase dramatically, beyond the doubling and tripling of prices seen in recent years. The consequence will likely be starvation among the world's poorest people, who will be unable to afford to buy food in the marketplace. In mid-2009, the World Economic Forum issued a report stating that in fewer than twenty years the world may face freshwater shortages so severe that “global food production could crater” because the world could “lose the equivalent of the entire grain production of the US and India combined.” The report warned that half of the global population will be affected by water shortages, millions will die, and water wars will increase over diminishing supplies. (William Ryerson in The Post Carbon Reader)
In the same post I also quoted this book:
for sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion people to 2 billion--a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race. (Michael Rupert in Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World)
Each of these books provides a detailed analysis of the problem, with numberous endnotes. The information was certainly made available to you if you had been interested.
I also wrote:
Our problem is that we not only need to advance in technology to keep up with world population growth, but also to account for the losses in resources that have occured in the last 50 years. How will we water our fields when the undergound aquifiers and glaciers are gone? How will we get phosphorous for fertilizer, when easily accessible supplies are gone? (And no, the answer is not that we will just put molybdenum into fertilizer instead.) How will we get nitrogen into fertilizer when supplies of natural gas used to retrieve nitrogen are depleted? How will we power combines without diesel fuel? With batteries the size of small asteroids? Where will we grow oranges, if much of the tropics dry up? Where will we get fish, after the oceans have been overfished? Those are some of the problems we will face.
These are the problems we face. If you will look at some of the sources I mentioned, you will see how these are huge problems for an expanding population.
Those are the issues we face, and I have been explaining to you why they are a problem. You can read more about them in the books I mentioned or at the oil drum website.
In post 151 I quoted another good source:
The more we degrade the planet, and the more we build up the average consumption per person, the greater the danger that we will overwhelm the planet and risk collapse. See Amazon.com: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (9780143117001): Jared Diamond:
That books details how past societies have collapsed, and how the same could happen to us.
.
In post 75 I reference the following books on my Kindle which are also good sources for peak oil:
Fleeing Vesuvius by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon
The Crash Course by Chris Martenson
The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg
The Econtechnic Future John Michael Greer
I also recommend
The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg and
The Last Oil Shock by David Strahan.
In post 77 I explained why we probably do not have as much oil available as many people think.
Sure, there is this little place in the Middle East called Saudi Arabia--I'm sure you heard of it--that appears to have far less oil then expected. Matthew Simmons studied their engineering journals in detail, and documented how they are currently using secondary recovery methods to get out the remaining oil. If they really have as much oil as originally expected, then it should be freely flowing without resorting to the secondary recovery methods normally used at the end of an oil well's lifecycle. Simmons tells about it in his book, Twilight in the Dessert. Amazon.com: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (9780471790181): Matthew R. Simmons: Books . Of course we don't yet know what the final oil total will be, but it looks like it will be far less than expected.
A recent leak from Saudi Arabia confirms his conclusions, stating that we may only get 60% of the expected oil out of Saudi Arabia: WikiLeaks: Saudi Arabia Overstated Its Oil Reserves : The Two-Way : NPR.
In post 185 I detail a statement signed by 1500 scientists warning about the dangers to our environment. They warned:
We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.
In post 194 I mentioned some webpages:
The Oil Drum | Population: Thinking about our Future
The Oil Drum | Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room - Revisited
The Oil Drum: Campfire | Population Growth Must Stop
And as always, I have been asking for the scientific community to take on these issues in more detail. All of this needs to be studied more, and put together to clearly tell us where we stand in the future.
In post 234 I discussed phosphorus limitaions:
As with all mineral reserves, we never know exactly how much is out there, or what new techniques may increase our efficiency. Finding the last bits of reserves and refining low-grade sources are extremely energy intensive, and energy is something we will be running short in. Will we be able to maintain phosphorous levels for crops, when we are use energy intensive methods on low grade sources, in the middle of energy shortages?
For more on phosphorous, see
The Oil Drum: Campfire | How do we maintain adequate phosphorus and potassium levels for crops?
The Oil Drum | Peak Phosphorus
The Oil Drum | Peak phosphorus: Quoted reserves vs. production history
And on and on. I have explained these things repeatedly to you. (the original posts had hyperlinks that did not come through when I copied to this post).
We are living in a world that is rapidly consuming our supplies of oil and other substances, and is rapidly polluting the environment in unsustainable means. When the cheap supplies are gone, and the planet has been polluted, the earth probably will not be hold nearly as many people as it can hold today. If you wanted to learn more about it, you could go to any of those sources.
And my emphasis has always been that I want to see further study on this, not that I am absolutely sure I am right.
So yes, I have explained why I think this is a problem.