http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1485-September-Unemployment-ACTUAL-LOSS-995k.html

But the Household Data is VASTLY worse than reported. Here are the month-over-month changes, and they're in the realm of frightening. (all numbers in thousands)

Civilian Labor Force: 154,879 to 153,617 this month.

Employed: 140,074 down to 139,079 this month.

That's a loss of 995,000 jobs, not 263,000, and the labor force contracted by 1,262,000 people!

The participation rate was absolutely decimated, down 0.6% this last month alone. The people "not in the labor force" rose by a staggering 1,516,000 in the last month.

We've all known that the stated unemployment numbers are a sloppy long-term indicator, but damn. That's rough.

Actual unemployment estimates are over 25% in Oregon and probably around 20% nationwide. Comically you have Ron Paul on the Daily Show of all places admitting that the government numbers are basically a lie and the real rate is much, much higher, but good luck seeing any of that on a "real" news show.

http://www.shadowstats.com/ is probably one of the better resources for real economic indicators, sadly enough.

I'm sure its bad. My girlfriend is still laid off, its been 3 months now, and we're in one of the cities with probably the lowest unemployment in the country.

Though that being said, I am coming off of my best month ever (September) and this month is going to be just as good if not better, though that is following my worst month in 5 years (August). I think its starting to turn around, and probably in the new year we'll start to see some return to normalcy.

There are jobs out there, maybe not in the field, industry or lifestyle that people want to do. But they exist, its just a matter of sucking it up and doing what you need to do to get off the tit. ( think dirty jobs )

Thou I'm sure the tit will be extended further by the goverment and there are many who need it. People just need to be willing to change and not get stuck on the omg its going to screw my whole career path whatever philosophy.

I was a biology major that ended up in sales. I can run ads for jobs that current employees make 45k a year working 30 hours a week, but no one wants to do them there above it ect.

I love the people telling me I need a job please hire me I can start immediately, Ill send them to the next room. We will be begin training shortly and they make an excuse, dont show up the next day on there recommendation of tomorrow or just disappear until they file a work force commission complaint that there funds are going to be cut off for getting a job and quitting.

Sigh I know its worse in other parts of the country, but I am in sales and support many people by what I do. When people say they cant get a job and I offer them one and they say no way. Well I dont have alot of sympathy. I dont enjoy many of the aspects of my duty especially in 106 degree heat but it pays the bills supports 9 families and my own and allows me to eat well.

As usual Im rambling gl

Getting a job is easy. Getting a job that pays what you need / expect to make is the hard part.

Comically you have Ron Paul on the Daily Show of all places admitting that the government numbers are basically a lie and the real rate is much, much higher, but good luck seeing any of that on a "real" news show.

Here's a link to that for anyone who's interested, BTW: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-29-2009/ron-paul

Didn't want to start a new post about Obama but I found this article pretty interesting to say the least.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/07/rollins.saturday.night.live.obama/index.html



But the real question being debated on cable TV because of the "SNL" parody is this: "Has the media's love affair and honeymoon with President Obama ended?"



This didn't happen all on his watch and a big chunk of the stimulus is not yet spent. But if we don't get Americans back to work, the other promises President Obama made will pale in importance. Focus on jobs, Mr. President.
The highest unemployment rate in 25 years is about real Americans all across this country who are hurting and depressed. That's a topic that's even "Saturday Night Live" can't joke about, because it's tragic. All Americans want to see this president succeed in getting that job done.
The president has made a lot of promises regarding health care reform, even though the final details of the bills are not known. Promises made as president do count;, far more than those as a candidate. And the president will be measured against them. He will be judged not in a skit on "Saturday Night Live" but by his fellow citizens at the voting booth.

The U6 (unemployed/looking + significantly underemployed + haven't looked in the past 4 weeks or more) number was pushing 17%, last I saw - meaning that more than one in six Americans of working age who are nondisabled are out of work. Even among those who are working 'full-time', the hours/pay have dipped below an average of 33 hours per week. My sister has been unemployed for six months after the private college she worked for went belly-up, and despite record enrollments at the community colleges, we aren't hiring and are not filling posts lost to attrition, either. Furthermore, there's *zero* engine to drive job growth currently, other than the last stimulus; the financial oil-wrestling hocus-pocus at the banks doesn't actually create jobs, they aren't lending, and as incomes and home values continue to drop people don't have any money to spend to stimulate the economy, either. Oh, and that health care, one of the few 'growth' (via cannibalism) industries left, costs are making it impossible for small and large businesses that *do* want to start up...

Unless we see some real infrastructure investment and yes, good old protectionism investment made in this economy we should not expect the situation to deviate from its current circling-the-drain anytime soon. It's the economy, stupid?

Regards,
Nydia

I think Bob McDonnell has it right, maybe women should get the hell out of the work place and get married and make babies and stuff - then so many jobs will open up that unemployment will be a thing of the past.

It's one of the interesting accounting questions of the last forty years how much women going into the work force concealed the actual "real" economic losses.

Because more babies would solve a *hell* of a lot of problems ;), and assuming you're at least a smidgin serious, women's employment happens to make a mighty convenient scapegoat when what we are looking at is a decline in employment not because of inter-sex competition, but because we have systematically sold those jobs down the river.

In any case, working class women have *always* worked - and it has only been the movement of women who were formerly working part-time or before/after children into the workforce in steadily increasing numbers and at greater intensity that has allowed households to keep their incomes in the middle class as our wages have raced to the bottom over the past thirty years. Don't conflate the two issues, although they are *slightly* connected; overwhelmingly, women did *not* move into manufacturing and skilled-trade jobs, where the bread and butter was for working class men for decades, but rather those jobs were scoured out of our economy by the greed of others. I've posted in the past about the devastating effects this has had on our society, where, when the jobs for working class *black* men were eliminated by the first waves of plant closings in the major cities and those communities began to break down how the Reagan administration called them 'the underclass' (thus disabusing ourselves of any responsibility to these folks who didn't want to work anyway) and we went and sold them crack cocaine and blamed them for the breakup of their families ;).

Later on, of course, we outsourced even those manufacturing and skilled trade jobs we couldn't actually ship *out* of the country largely to illegal immigrants; and lest you think this is xenophobic grousing on my part, I recommend anyone who doubts that this is part of a large scale carefully constructed and executed strategy watch the documentary 'Food Inc.' I know this industry well, having worked at several major food processors during the 1990s and in that the film the history of a wide variety of food manufacturing industries is documented. In the case of our nations largest pork processor, having gone through all of the rural workers within a 100 mile radius of their plants already located in bitterly impoverished areas in southern 'right to work' states (treating them so inhumanely and for such low wages that even they began to organize) the company now spends large amounts of money *recruiting* via the media in Mexico and Central America and then has INS, like a well-oiled machine, pick up fifteen illegals a day from the decrepit trailer parks around their plants so as not to disrupt production (and concentrating on the 'troublemakers' in the lot). This isn't an isolated case - I witnessed with my own eyes the conversion of a major food processor in the Dallas Fort Worth area's work force from mostly local to almost entirely illegal in the mid-1990s while I worked there as a bacteriologist (they hired all those as temps, cashing them in after a year so as not to have to pay benefits, as they wouldn't pay even H1B wages for them).

Overwhelmingly, working-class and semi-skilled women still populate their traditional 'pink collar' jobs, such as teaching, nursing, retail sales, and various service professions. These traditionally 'female' jobs in 'soft' industries have taken less of a hit in recent recessions, resulting in men bearing more of the brunt, and in addition, yes, many employers in squeezed-to-death industries look favorably (or less unfavorably) on retaining women in grunt-level white collar fields as well largely because they are more compliant, and can be paid less (an average of 11,000 less in entry level managerial positions!), than men doing similar work - as long as they don't have to pay for their maternity leave *or* birth control pills ;).

Upon looking back over this thread I see that Malse has made much of my essential point in a single line - namely that women in the work force have overwhelmingly not depressed wages themselves, or competed directly with men, but rather have largely concealed the decline in real wages and a shift in the dominant employment fields in this country. In the military, where we loudly trumpet what 'great strides' they are making for women's opportunity, they are masking a decline in the ability of the military, even given the dearth of working class jobs, to attract even marginally qualified candidates for many MOSs in this age of the all volunteer service.

I'm certainly willing to concede that this most recent recession has disproportionally affected men due to the continuing collapse of both the manufacturing and housing industries (not to mentional financial industries and small businesses due to the capital collapse); and it would not surprise me at all if the next round of willfully blind self-defeating backlash at our economy's systematic dismantling is marshalled against women by the teabag crowd and their patron saints.

Regards,
Nydia

Just for the sake of argument, though, let's assume that we decide to let the American Taliban take over and send all those wimmenfolk home to raise chicks (never mind what to do with the childless or child-done) and reflect on what the net economic effect of that might be (and by the way, one has only to look at Italy or Japan to see what happens when a modern industrialized country with a high cost of living keeps its imposition of rigid sex roles post-marriage/childbearing on the population, namely couples severely limit childbearing for the sake of keeping the economic ship afloat, and the population implodes, which is infinitely better for the planet than the alternative, not that I don't love the Quiverfulls ;) ).

How many (employment-generating) things would just... go away?

Child care, a large percentage of restaurants, cleaning services, a huge number of other niche service industries, much of retail sales, home health nursing, in short, all the things that women were providing subsidy for when they stayed at home and unfortunately for us make up a large chunk of what passes for our economy today (formalized healthcare, warfare, and money manipulation being the others). Sending women home won't bring the quality jobs back that men overwhelmingly held, but if you guys are dying to be administrative assistants, elementary school teachers, or nurses, a whole world of literal or figurative bottom-wiping awaits ;).

Regards,
Nydia

Well, if we are going to start down that slope, once we have the women out of the work force, we can look to banning *homosexuals*, then flip the coin and decide whether *African-Americans* or *wetbacks* will be banned next, and then we can go after the middle eastern folks including them damn *Jews*.

Then, there should be enough jobs for most red blooded American white males. :rolleyes:

Economic growth is tied to an ever expanding population. More people = more business opportunity. More surfs at the bottom = more loot at the top. Getting virtually all ages and both sexes toiling away gets more numbers into the machine. Its always been like that. Even better if you can pay a female less money and expect them to do as much or more work because they have a social stigma of having something to prove.

Even China is lifting its curbs on births. They need more cheap labor for one, they have a graying population to take care of second, and third, their growing middle class/wealth demands more customers. They keep everyone busy through cultural limitation and other tools. You don't see vending machines in China. You don't see much in the way of labor saving tools. Out side the shiny brand new 120 story symbols of being the economic juggernaut that is China you will still find landscape crews only its the same crew that tended to the Emperor's palace 1000 years go. You won't see power mowers or trimmers or leaf blowers. You see a huge crew of people with shears, scythes, rakes and brooms. The truck is a 3 wheeled lumbering wreck of a bicycle and the sack they wrap the trimmings up in is probably 30 years old. By the way, there is no such thing as a F 150 truck. Your truck is 10 guys on lumbering 3 wheel bicycles with wooden flat beds working all week to do what your truck does in an afternoon. This is a country who have most of the world's wealth and have almost unlimited spending if they so choose and yet they still toe the line of having what takes Americans 2 hours for 20 dollars an hour be performed by 30 Chinese over the course of a week and pay them each 50 cents an hour. You hardly see any Do It Yourself either. If your car breaks, you take it to a mechanic, even if you know how to fix it or its just an oil change. I had to order jumper cables from Amazon just to jump my battery. People having hobbies that overlap into what people can have as a profession is frowned on. Good thing when you work 7 days a week until you die, there isn't much time for hobbies but the bottom line is that China keeps their 1.4 billion employed. Even if its sweeping the street with a tree branch for the equivalent pay of 2 dollars a year.

My point really is....we can all have a job as Americans, but we would have to vastly detune the automation of our society. Most of those jobs would be menial toil. How many of these jobs, that would pay squat and have zero to no satisfaction past the fact that you are employed and living a humble existence, would most Americans want? None. Our society tells us that we are all special and no one wants to grow up to spend their life sweeping the street with a tree branch for 2 dollars a year. Well, there are plenty of others out there in far away lands that will do that....and if you make manufacturing or any other traditionally high paying job as easy as sweeping the street with a branch and you have a whole country of ants....well suddenly the ants take away all those jobs your DIDN'T want and a whole bunch of the ones you DID WANT.

Enjoy your 20% unemployment rate, America. It hurts me to say this but you deserve it.

Economic growth is tied to an ever expanding population.

While this has been true for most of human history, it stopped being such in the middle of the last century and a lot of people haven't gotten the memo.

The productive niches that we earnestly filled in the three centuries of industrial revolution have run out of new room and we've run out of new niches; this resulted in a race to the bottom on costs instead of increased production for profits. Real GNP for most Western nations has been flat for decades, despite increasing populations. Per Capita GNP has been falling. If you remove the fairy tale financial "industry," which is basically a huge ponzi scheme, it's been falling very quickly.

For the first time in a long time, your children will likely have much less economic productivity and wealth than you did.

This has numerous precedents in biological history. We are, in essence, well over our carrying capacity and are going to have to re-adapt to smaller diets as the resources available remain unchanged while servicing ever more.

There are jobs out there, maybe not in the field, industry or lifestyle that people want to do. But they exist, its just a matter of sucking it up and doing what you need to do to get off the tit. ( think dirty jobs )

Thou I'm sure the tit will be extended further by the goverment and there are many who need it. People just need to be willing to change and not get stuck on the omg its going to screw my whole career path whatever philosophy.

I was a biology major that ended up in sales. I can run ads for jobs that current employees make 45k a year working 30 hours a week, but no one wants to do them there above it ect.

I love the people telling me I need a job please hire me I can start immediately, Ill send them to the next room. We will be begin training shortly and they make an excuse, dont show up the next day on there recommendation of tomorrow or just disappear until they file a work force commission complaint that there funds are going to be cut off for getting a job and quitting.

Sigh I know its worse in other parts of the country, but I am in sales and support many people by what I do. When people say they cant get a job and I offer them one and they say no way. Well I dont have alot of sympathy. I dont enjoy many of the aspects of my duty especially in 106 degree heat but it pays the bills supports 9 families and my own and allows me to eat well.

As usual Im rambling gl

Well said.. I am degreeddeded in broadcasting/communications and worked in radio and Tv but still ended up in Prison...lol

Well said.. I am degreeddeded in broadcasting/communications and worked in radio and Tv but still ended up in Prison...lol

This might sound a tad bit better if you say you ended up in Corrections, which is a field of employment; prison is a place, and when folks say they ended up there it usually elicits an immediate mental image in the listeners much different than might be intended.

He landed on the "Just Visiting" side of the jail square.

Well, if you ever want to get back into broadcasting you can be my intern's intern I suppose.

Economic growth is tied to an ever expanding population. More people = more business opportunity. More surfs at the bottom = more loot at the top.

/45 degree tangent on)

As Malse has said, we reached the edges of the resource pie in terms of our population growth/available niches some forty years ago, and what we are doing now in an attempt to create/maintain a decent standard of living (via attempting to increase food and energy production, etc to keep up with population growth) is degrading the resource base itself; in effect, making the pie smaller. We might not have been playing a planetary zero-sum game for the vast majority of our recorded history in terms of available resources, but we assuredly are now.

It's interesting that you bring up China as an example; China, as you may be aware, is degrading its resource base at an appalling rate, literally killing every living thing in long stretches of the Yangtze, creating a toxic soup of air pollution in much of southern China that one cannot see the sun clearly through most of the year, and in doing so ensuring that that subcontinent will be able to support far *fewer* than 1.4 billion people in the future unless they co-opt resources in other parts of the world, which they are in fact aggressively doing in Africa and South America. Ultimately however, even the greatest creditor nation in the world will find out they can't eat money, and several of the southeast asian nations have already placed a moratorium on rice exports, for example. How long before we see real, non-substitutable-resource struggles, involving nations we actually care about? Things are already getting pretty darned toasty between China and Australia regarding control of the world's iron prices...

Pardon my getting off on a bit of a tangent, but as a biologist I get absolutely infuriated, knowing darned well where we are on the population/carrying capacity curve, listening to people talk about how 'growth will solve everything', often simultaneously with them futilely discussing how various 'green technologies' will fix all our resource degradation problems without taking population growth into account, and pointedly ignoring that the last Green Revolution and all the technological miracles of the last forty years that we've applied to, really, miraculous effect and which were supposed to stave off world hunger and help prevent people from killing each other with machetes or drones for that acre of land/gallon of oil haven't even managed to keep us in the same place because population (and 'affluence') growth ate up/degraded all the benefits and then some. (and man, that's a damned nice ranty run-on ;) ) Sure, more bodies means more labor, but as you continue to exceed sustainable carrying capacity you need energy inputs at a steeply increasing curve to continue extracting increasing amounts of the non-substitutable resources at a higher and higher cost from a more degraded base. Eventually, of course, one hits (has hit :) ) the point of diminishing returns; you can play kind of a shell game with the real costs of that for a while, but eventually it becomes inescapable.

Growing yourself more servants, funneling the products of their labor to the top, and furiously degrading your resource base in order to convert it to money only enables you to buy the right to be the last to starve, as numerous civilizations who were on a finite world for their time have found out. Granted, that might not sound like such a bad strategy assuming you're in one of those lifeboats and you're convinced you can sweep the damage under someone else's rug long enough for you to get your lifeboat away from the sinking ship (for your lifetime at least ;) ), but we could, and should, see if we can't somehow climb down from that precipice and reducing population size, while transiently inconvenient, pays proportionally larger dividends in the long run than any investment of worse energy after bad and ensures that we actually have something to *share* when all is said and done.

In my opinion, America's strategy with regard to securing our piece of the resource pie in a sane and at least potentially sustainable manner should be first, to acknowledge the real costs (to our economy, and the environment) of those 'luxury' items we're buying in truckloads at the Wal-Mart, and VAT the living hell out of irresponsibly-produced (and thus deceptively cheap) goods whether foreign or domestic, accordingly, including environmentally damaging hyper-intensified agribusiness). We should support responsible industry at home even if that means paying higher prices and accepting a 'lower' standard of living in terms of the sheer crap we are able to buy (but if we implement this correctly, it won't be crap), eliminate tax breaks for companies who relocate their offices/plants overseas, and do what Mexico and many other nations do and severely limit foreign investment in/ownership of our real resource base - failing to do that is an invitation for creditor nations, given our enormous debt, to make a resource plantation out of us for their own benefit. Most importantly, we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that growth is always good and that more sales (of anything, at any price) for the sake of short term profit is always a net win and stress the return of quality over quantity, even if that means considerable pain as we sacrifice to reinvest in infrastructure-supporting industries and superficially appear to be giving up choices. What we will gain in return is the return of a stable economic base that offers us *real* choices and opportunity, albeit one with less-obscene profits, but if the EU and Japan can do it and weather the bumps in the road, so can we - assuming we start while we still have some control of our own destiny.

This has *really* rambled a lot, and I've developed a headache ;), but the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that every energy transformation increases the entropy of the universe and that that increase in disorder can only be compensated, or paid for, with additional energy inputs. We've been creating a lot of chaos for decades and paying for it via our own Home Equity Loan as it were (but have not, really, begun to pay in the first world), but the rising tide of entropy is overtaking us and we are *already* engaged in a war, as many other nations have known for years, over who pays first, and who pays last. I'll close with a link to a short piece of prose that Margaret Atwood wrote in response to our entropy (in this case, carbon emissions) crisis - the end is a bit melodramatic but her words about how we are currently 'creating deserts' are incontrovertible:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/26/margaret-atwood-mini-science-fiction

Regards,
Nydia

For the click-averse, I'll go ahead and paste her words here, since they're already all over the intertubes:



1. In the first age, we created gods. We carved them out of wood; there was still such a thing as wood, then. We forged them from shining metals and painted them on temple walls. They were gods of many kinds, and goddesses as well. Sometimes they were cruel and drank our blood, but also they gave us rain and sunshine, favourable winds, good harvests, fertile animals, many children. A million birds flew over us then, a million fish swam in our seas.

Our gods had horns on their heads, or moons, or sealy fins, or the beaks of eagles. We called them All-Knowing, we called them Shining One. We knew we were not orphans. We smelled the earth and rolled in it; its juices ran down our chins.

2. In the second age we created money. This money was also made of shining metals. It had two faces: on one side was a severed head, that of a king or some other noteworthy person, on the other face was something else, something that would give us comfort: a bird, a fish, a fur-bearing animal. This was all that remained of our former gods. The money was small in size, and each of us would carry some of it with him every day, as close to the skin as possible. We could not eat this money, wear it or burn it for warmth; but as if by magic it could be changed into such things. The money was mysterious, and we were in awe of it. If you had enough of it, it was said, you would be able to fly.

3. In the third age, money became a god. It was all-powerful, and out of control. It began to talk. It began to create on its own. It created feasts and famines, songs of joy, lamentations. It created greed and hunger, which were its two faces. Towers of glass rose at its name, were destroyed and rose again. It began to eat things. It ate whole forests, croplands and the lives of children. It ate armies, ships and cities. No one could stop it. To have it was a sign of grace.

4. In the fourth age we created deserts. Our deserts were of several kinds, but they had one thing in common: nothing grew there. Some were made of cement, some were made of various poisons, some of baked earth. We made these deserts from the desire for more money and from despair at the lack of it. Wars, plagues and famines visited us, but we did not stop in our industrious creation of deserts. At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.

Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. A stone in the sand in the setting sun could be very beautiful, they said. Deserts were tidy, because there were no weeds in them, nothing that crawled. Stay in the desert long enough, and you could apprehend the absolute. The number zero was holy.

5. You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words:

Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.

I am in complete agreement with you, Nydia. It was not too long ago there was a post about new reserves of oil being discovered, but the hydrocarbon supply curve juxtaposed next to the logarithmic curve that is global population explosion (never mind growth) still has everyone at a huge net loss on a per-capita basis. Still, many developed economies are running scared about how prior baby booms flooded their economies with cheap labor and vast amounts of new consumers are suddenly being faced with not enough offspring being brought into the world by the younger generations. The labor market will become tight, and thus salaries will need to go up. Also, with less consumers, economies of scale will contract, resulting in prices either going up or profit margins going down. The net result is inflation. That is typically why countries want to either have a net population increase or at least maintain their labor and consumer markets at a fixed level. Italy, Japan, and many other developed nations we consider to be friends are not going to be looking very good next to the big Red Ant Farm that is China or even India for that matter. Both countries will probably produce ALL the crap for the world's masses. All the disposable consumer level commodities. All the cars, TVs, cellphones etc. That leaves the remainder of the so called developed world to re-invent themselves into boutique economies where we only produce and sell the luxurious goods and services that ultra rich desire. That is until Chinese and Indian engineering and science surpasses that of the West. Then you will have quite a bit of have nots who used to be haves and a lot of sour grapes. Wars have been fought for less.

Ultimately though, the planet is only so big and only able to provide so much. Either we need to get our butts out into the stars, or we take a more traditional approuch to population management and have a vast global kill off. A war. A plague. I would guess an engineered plague would be one means. Clandestinely introduce an innoculation into your nation's food or water and then release a global killer in which your nation's population is immune. Wipe out all the people but keep the infrastructure in place. Sure, the global economy would collapse and things would be rough for a while, but ultimately you would end up with a global reset button being pushed.

I could really fathom a World War III senario being the more likely, with the US and China as the two opponents. Even though its just a game, Fallout 3 is plausible. So lets all polish up our Pip Boys and get into our Vaults before it's too late because people would rather kill themselves then be forced to drastically take a step back. Killing off vast amounts of humans is easier than telling a whole planet they need to stop having babies and the slow decline of human existance to a level of..lets say...the 1600s. We have all the nukes and soldiers as well as tanks and planes and ships. We have been gearing up to make ourselves extinct for centuries, but no one seems to be working very hard at the easier solution of managed and sustainable GLOBAL (which means we have to all work together. Oh noz!) population reduction and stablization because no one wants THEIR tribe to take the hit. Especially now that we have China and the Sinofest Destiny to be the one nation, since they have the most mouths to feed, to reap in the lion's share of the world's resources while at the same time allowing their uncontrolled pollution and blatant disregard for the global environment kill off the golden egg laying goose. I have to laugh when people toot their horns about how China and Brazil are the world's hardest chargers on promoting global reform for green house gas emissions. Do as I say, not as I do.

Yah right. Is this the same China where I live that I still have to drink bottled water and don't see the sun unless I am in an airplane and above all the shit in the air or its just that random nice day? The same China where in Beijing alone they add 500,000 cars a year? It isn't just the car's emissions either. Most all cars sold in China are made there too. All that embodied energy and pollution from their manufacture.....How about Brazil, the same Brazil that cuts down the world's largest carbon sink and instead replaces it with acres of methane farting cattle in the name of economic development? I would hope they would be the ones most locked on. Between the two of them, our planet is pretty much fucked. So good luck on a global solution IMHO. Fixing the population growth issue is going to pretty much boil down to how we chose to kill ourselves off before the planet finds a way to do it for us.

Sorry if this is so...well...negative a post. Its not a rosy picture of the future. Then again, you can look at what is considered a more positive and upbeat piece of science fiction. Star Trek. Even that global utopia arose from Humanity being brought to the brink of its end and being forced to shit or get off the pot. We have it in ourselves to fix all our problems. Its just how much of a willingness do we have to take the hard steps?