Population bombs... better get nearly free energy quickly

Also, they concluded that there is hardly any problem confronting America whose solution would be easier with a larger population. Moving toward population stabilizationwould contribute significantly to America’s ability to solve its domestic problems as well as many of those abroad, especially energy and resource consumption, climate change and environmental sustainability. Moreover, without U.S. leadership as demonstrated by domestic efforts to stabilize its population and thereby mitigate further damage to the environment, other nations would be reluctant to adopt policies and practices to stabilize their populations and work toward developmental and ecological sustainability.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.image?id=12614

What’s more interesting is that the overall number, whatever you choose, could be a red herring. Many population experts foresee the next few decades evolving in a way that is very different from the global-scale, catastrophic “population bomb” concept that caught hold in the 1960s.

What they depict is more like a dangerous scattering of cluster bombs, as the world splits into two types of countries: those with aging, shrinking populations, like Japan and much of Europe, and those regions, like most of Africa and parts of south Asia, still mired in poverty, disease, illiteracy or government dysfunction with resulting high birth and death rates.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/the-population-cluster-bomb/