Our planet is now overstocked!

…In the long ago – as my uncle used to say, wars, famine and disease kept the population thinned out. Then, when and where overcrowding did occur there used always be a new virgin territory out there for a man, woman or family to go and find their own space. The vast continents of Australia and America welcomed immigrants to their shores. The new world of the United States took in the old world’s excess human stock – nowhere more so than from our own country. Think what the famine and its aftermath would have been like if there was no America to escape to? Five thousand people a day entered the US through Ellis Island and in fact, one day in 1907 that figure reached 11,700. There were eight million people here in Ireland before the famine. What would happen if we had eight million here today?

Anyway, in times past the population kept moving and filling up all the open spaces and most of those spaces are now filled and there is nowhere left to go. No country that I can think of wants any more people, so unless “Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future” comes back with his spaceships and finds us another planet, this planet is, as Gay Byrne used say, “banjaxed.”

Climate change and global warming cannot be tackled without looking at the world’s population which is booming out of control. Mankind is currently adding seventy five million more global mouths every year. Environmentalists (and they are right) can huff and they can puff but there is no way that the present population can meet its food and energy needs without unacceptable damage being done to the planet. I have been to Beijing and I don’t believe for a moment that anything said in Copenhagen will restrict pollution in China. China’s population is now 1.3 billion and when you consider that a rapidly developing country like India is expected to overtake China’s population by 2030, our little ban on burning papers in the garden won’t cure the problem. The acceleration of population growth will spiral out of control because obviously, an increasing population has a higher younger, sexually active percentage. Right now, during the time it takes you to read this column, a hundred babies will have been born. One in every three people alive today is under the age of twenty