There's another, broader issue here that hardly anyone pays attention to...
overpopulation.

When I was a kid, the world's population reached 2Gcbl, and people were
afraid of starvation, disease, etc. It's now 6Gcbl, and still growing,
partly due to the "green revolution".

You don't need to be Malthus to understand that the Earth doesn't have
infinite carrying capacity. If things don't change, at some point the system
/has/ to collapse.

Somewhere between now and then we will see drastic changes, with governments
controlling the size of the homes we build (probably outlawing single-family
dwellings), how many children we can have, how many calories a day we can
consume, and so forth. (See "Soylent Green". I haven't read Harry Harrison's
"Make Room, Make Room", but the idea of recycling human protein is /not/ in
it.)

You get violently angry when I insist that government force people to do
what's right about trivial things -- such as how you light their homes. Wait
until you see what happens to your /basic/, "inalienable" rights when there
isn't enough land to produce food or house people. And you think Communist
societies are bad...

There are simply too many people. Imagine what things would be like if there
were only 500Mcbl. (By the way, I'm in favor of across-the-board population
reduction. The people in developed countries consume too much of everything,
and there are simply too many people in poor countries.)

The problem of overpopulation is largely due to developed countries
spreading death control, without forcing the people who receive it to
practice birth control. (And I'm not talking about abortion.) If the
potential recipients of death control say "Our religion (or social beliefs,
etc) prohibits birth control," they will hear "Our understanding of biology
prohibits helping people who don't understand what happens when you disrupt
the natural order of things." Which is what death control is -- a disruption
of the natural order, in which disease and lack of food keep populations
from growing rapidly.

If you don't understand this, think of human beings as deer, and disease,
lack of clean water, malnutrition, etc, as wolves. What happens when you
start systematically killing off the wolves?