Remember those pictures from China a couple months back where the air in Beijing was so polluted people had to wear masks and foreign embassies were telling their people not to go outside if possible? Yeah, that’s a goal to shoot for.

But overpopulation energy via fracking does pollute drinking water and does cause earthquakes too.

The Saudis with $50+ Oil [it went up today] may likely have done America an environmental favor by keeping low cost oil production high. America now has a threat to OPEC, raise your price and we’ll off shore and frack again.

I am always amazed when I hear Americans with at least a middle class standard of living talk about how global overpopulation is not a problem and than dismiss what Ehrlich had to say as completely wrong. This is easy to say as an American with a middle class standard of living. Try surviving as an average person in India or China for about one week and then get back to me and explain why these countries having a population of over one billion people is wonderful. Also tell me why we want the population of the US to eventually reach a billion people which is what it eventually will be if our current insane policy of mass illegal/legal immigration is not ended.

Satellites show groundwater supply at greater risk than previously thought
July 2014

The drought-stricken Colorado River Basin has experienced rapid and significant groundwater depletion since late 2004, posing a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought, according to a new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine.

The research team used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to track changes in the mass of the Colorado River Basin, which is the water source for more than 30 million people and 4 million acres of farmland. The satellites showed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (about 17 trillion gallons) of freshwater between 2004-2013 — almost double the volume of the nation’s largest reservoir, Nevada’s Lake Mead, which itself recently fell to its lowest level since the 1930s. More than three-quarters of the total water loss in the Colorado River Basin was from groundwater. The basin has been experiencing the driest 14-year period in the last 100 years.

“We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the UC-Irvine and lead author of the study. “This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”

….But the NASA/Irvine study, which measured gravitational attraction as a way to assess rising and falling water levels, reveals that a crucial water source for seven basin states and Mexico has been compromised. The study also indicates that declines in the snowpack that feeds the river and population growth could further compound the problem.

….”The Colorado River Basin is the water lifeline of the western United States,” said senior author Jay Famiglietti.

….In a blog for Science, Eric Hand writes:

The groundwater losses, which take thousands of years to be recharged naturally, point to the unsustainability of exploding population centers and water-intensive agriculture in the basin, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

This idea that population growth is healthy in and of itself is false and dangerous. The authors of the Post commentary apparently buy into the assertion that “growth in GDP” is always positive. It’s not when it’s mostly based on population growth.

Which is the case with India and China. Both countries have a small wealthy class but the majority of the people live in poverty. The important guidepost is GDP “per capita”, meaning per person. And the figures per person for those two countries are dismal. Especially India, which is very near the bottom of the couple hundred nations of the world. The so called “India miracle” of high GDP growth is no great deal for the hundreds of millions who live in vast slums without clean water.