include a significant reduction in the human population on this planet. Theoretically, this could be accomplished by a large number of people voluntarily abstaining from procreating. Realistically that will not happen. We literally don't have enough time to experience a cultural realignment that values the need for a childless existence over having a biologically derived family.

If we remove the "voluntary" part of the equation, and look to an enforced limit on procreation, immediately any number of dystopian scenes of repressive government controls rear their ugly heads. You will find very few people willing to go down that path.

I think that the notion that we are free to choose new behaviors has been greatly oversold. The reality is that even relatively simple changes, such as modifying one's diet by choosing to eat different foods or smaller quantities, are quite challenging for most and impossible for many. And if our choices happen to run counter to accepted cultural norms, the difficulty increases exponentially. If you don't believe it, try eating a strict vegan diet or publicly embracing a non Christian belief system or a new gender identity. And these examples are simply individual changes, radical collective cultural change would be that much more difficult.

It is more likely that forces outside our personal sphere of influence will determine changes in the size of the human population, just like it always has. Wars, pestilence, famine, climate and natural disasters will cause decreases while peace, health, abundance and environmental harmony will encourage our hard wired urge to procreate and be embraced within a family or tribal unit.

It's what the people put into the air.
The way we provide the energy for our industry and society is the problem.
We must transition our world (and we must do this VERY quickly) to an all electric world.
We must stop producing the greenhouse gasses created powering our world, and use only renewable, sustainable, pollution free methods for our energy.
There is unlimited free energy all around us. We only have to collect what we need.
Saving our species by ending greenhouse gas production is only the most important of our ecological challenges.
Following close behind that danger, is the poisoning of our water and our lands.
We must end the processes causing harm. There may be pain involved BUT doing so will be made easier by the abundant energy we tapped into when we saved our species, by stopping greenhouse gas production with electric technologies.
There will of course be societal changes. Changes ranging from how we make and use things, to where we live and how we design our living spaces, our cities and communities. The most important change necessary will be that any cost/benefit analysis must always value the water and the land, over money. Resoundingly. We don't do that now.
Societal changes are coming regardless.

Population control to combat climate change won't work unless you killed all the members of industrialized society, ending industrialized society. The raw numbers are staggering. So few, doing soo much damage. We, the peoples of the industrialized Northern Hemisphere are killing our species habit. We used to be Homo neanderthalensis and we evolved into
Homo Stupid-us-ensis
Again, it's not the number of people, it's what the people put in the air. And we don't have generations to wait anyway.
I think, we'll find that our ability to feed the people and the actual physical space for the people, will be the drivers behind any serious world-wide population control efforts.

If we can end greenhouse gasses quickly enough we can have a VERY cool world.
Tell a friend !!

More and more people are gonna starve to death. It ain't pretty. Reading Paul Chaferka it means we accelerate the decline, because the system is already in overshoot. By far.

When Will it End?
Given that oil is a primary determinant of carrying capacity, the obvious answer is that the situation will stabilize when the oil is gone. The oil will never be completely gone of course, so we can modify that to read, "When oil is unavailable to most of humanity." We know that point will come, because oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, but when will that be?

Based on the model in the figure above I chose an end date of 2082, 75 years from now.

Boom there ya go: Doomsday 2082! The end of his conclusion:

The model warns us that the involuntary decline of the human population in the aftermath of the Oil Age will not happen without overwhelming universal hardship. There are things we will be able to do as individuals to minimize the personal effects of such a decline, and we should all be deciding what those things need to be. It's never too early to prepare for a storm this big.

Last New Year I posted his sage advice elsewhere:

• Stay awake to what's happening around us.
• Don't get hung up by other people’s "shoulds and shouldn'ts".
• Occasionally re-examine our personal values. If they aren't in alignment with what we think the world needs, change them.
• Stop blaming people. Others are as much victims of the times as we are - even the CEOs and politicians.
• Blame, anger and outrage is pointless. It wastes precious energy that we will need for more useful work.
• Laugh a lot, at everything - including ourselves.
• Hold all the world's various beliefs and "isms" lightly, including our own.
• Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. For everything.
• Love everything just as deeply as you can.

Thanks
Peace and Love
http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/transportation-now-biggest-source-co2-usa.html

the problem I have is that those isolated pockets will be populated by the people that caused the crash.
It's no comfort to know that we'll have a Homo Oligarchyian as our legacy.
What would John Galt do?!
Mien Camp was quite clear, so is Atlas Shrugged.

will become more robotic. Putting people out of jobs. Back to hunter-gatherers or early farming with modern methods. We cannot all become potters. New FB group, Brainstorming for the Future.

more expensive than regular roofs, so how many people will be able to afford them? And large-scale conversion to renewable power would make them obsolete. So he may not support that because it would cut into his profit margin.

They are beautiful, though, no doubt.

Yes, this roof is solar!

Hope he was carnival barking in September: Trump’s ‘Take the Oil’ Madness
DailyBeast (WaPo, NBC, LA Times, etc.):

Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump has said repeatedly the United States should take Iraq’s oil as the spoils of war. With him, it’s an old refrain that goes back at least five years.

But Trump never says what “taking the oil” of Iraq really means: an endless occupation army in the Persian Gulf surrounded by enemies, without allies, and isolated hopelessly from the Islamic world. It would have to be an open-ended occupation, which would polarize America more than ever. It would reinvigorate the global jihad, and it would disgrace our fundamental values as a nation.

There have been several foreign policy debacles over the last 15 years, but with this the Republican Party would own the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. [...]

Indeed! I guess the Democrats will then let it happen on purpose. Profit all around for those in the top tiers.

Trump wants to be rid of it so here we go. http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/297755-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-trumps-epa-transition

As the world burns: Climate change fuels insurgency in Afghanistan

KABUL: After two winters without snow, Kabul residents are anxiously scouring the hills for the first flakes, wary that the depletion of this major source of water further fuels instability in Afghanistan.
Historically speaking, a snowless year is highly unusual for this ancient capital, built 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) above sea-level in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. “Kabul can be without gold but not without snow,” according to a local proverb.
But as the world gets warmer, that is changing.

[...]

But only ten percent of the country’s land is still farmable because of the impact of recent climate-related disasters, Salim says.
That increasingly leaves rural folk in a desperate situation, says Kazim Hamayun, the deputy director of Afghanistan’s National Environment Protection Agency (NEPA).
“If they lose their jobs due to drought, they will join the militancy” of the Taliban, he said.

In the 80s these two guys inspired me to stop consuming meat, they are still at it. Howard Lymon appeared in Cowspiracy: http://www.madcowboy.com/01_AboutPS.000.html, John Robbins
http://johnrobbins.info/
Stuck on a fixed income in California, where the Porter Ranch methane leak blew away the entire years' GHG "savings" thanks BP, I will eat whatever I can afford. I'm not proud when I'm so hungry my stomach aches.

Small farmers are the canaries of climate change I think. Just read this insightful comment elsewhere (my bold), keeping in mind Darth Pence is VP now, yeesh:

Thank you, foresterbob. I know this comment will get lost at the bottom of a neverending piefight and scorn for your subject, but I’ll leave it anyway.

I’m the rural demographic, I’m an old white woman, farmer, hillbilly, I don’t have to study these people, I am these people. I have an unemployed adult son and his family living in my basement. He left the farm hoping for greener pastures and now he’s back in the basement, all the pastures are barren.

The economics of the Reagan years started this ball rolling. Actually, Jimmy Carter unwittingly started it by telling us farmers we had to go BIG! and practically forcing folks at gunpoint to expand, buy land and expensive equipment they couldn’t afford, take out loans instead of paying with the cash they had in their pockets because we were going to feed the world. We had to throw off our traditional farming practices, the ones everyone wants back now. But it was Reagan that crushed us. In a convo with FarWestGirl, I made this reply. Notice my last line was “no wonder all my neighbors turned into bitter evangelical republicans.”

I was raised in the Pentecostal church, although I turned my back on it in my teens. When I was growing up in the 60’s, the evangelical movement was in its infancy. We were pretty much scorned in those early days, but it held on and was filled with the poor. The poor turned to the church in desperation.

When the rural death march started in the Reagan years, the evangelicals grew apace. Obama was absolutely right when he said people with little hope cling to God and guns. As small farms were foreclosed on, the pews filled to exploding. And during this time we also got PTL and the 700 Club. They brought us the Prosperity Gospel, opening the fold for those who weren’t yet destitute but could see it coming with the closing of every shop and grocery in their little town and the opening of Walmart. They also encouraged people to scorn the “moochers”, encouraged resentment of anyone who wasn’t one of them. They promote hatred of gays outright and racism in sly ways. The ones who actually got prosperous from the Prosperity Gospel look down and despise those that didn’t. They are bitter, even with their riches. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News were the next natural extension.

Let me tell you a story. When I was a ‘tween, I was standing in the field with my mother with lunch for my dad, waiting for him to make his round on the tractor to notice we were there. Here comes the sheriff’s car, lights flashing, cutting right through the field and made a bee-line for the tractor, swung up in front of it, and the sheriff jumped out of the car and started yelling something at my dad. My dad leaped off that tractor like his ass was on fire, jumped in the cop car and off they sped. My mom and I jumped in our car and followed.

We ended up at the small farm of family friends. Both sides of the blacktop road were lined with cop cars from two counties, livestock trucks and flatbeds and one shiny black cadillac. Neighbors were lined up weeping on the side of the road. Standing on the farmhouse porch was the farmer holding a shotgun and shouting defiantly. His wife was on her knees in the yard begging him to please, please put it down. Cops in those long ago days weren’t the militarized aggressors they are today, not in the country. Some of them weren’t even wearing guns and no one had one drawn. They were mostly looking at their feet.

I watched my dad walk down the driveway and to the porch. He walked up and put his arm around the man, and said things I couldn’t hear and that my dad would never repeat. As he talked the farmer began to cry, and my dad reached over, took he gun and laid it on the porch. Then they turned and knelt on the steps and they both began to pray.

As soon as the gun was laid on the porch, the man in the cadillac got out and started waving at the livestock trucks and flatbeds to go in and start taking the livestock and equipment. The sheriff stepped up into the man’s face, said a few things that I won’t repeat here, he was animated and angry. The cadillac man got back in his car and sat. The trucks didn’t move in to take the spoils until the farmer was taken off for arrest and his wife and children were safely away with people to care for them, where they wouldn’t be able to watch. When the trucks moved in the drivers were weeping.

They were allowed to take the contents of the house, that was it. They had nowhere to go and no money to get there, no job on the horizon. It was the church that took them into their homes, found them a place to live, helped them start over. Their farm was sold on the courthouse steps less than a month later, the livestock went to the salebarn. The banker in the cadillac, the one who couldn’t wait less than a month for the hogs to be ready for sale for a loan payment, couldn’t be bothered to work with this trapped man, got even richer.

This happened over and over, sometimes with much more tragic results. Farmers committed suicide, sometimes killed their whole families. Or they’d go out and shoot all the livestock so the banker couldn’t enrich himself off their misery. It was a bloodbath.

Us liberal types screamed and waved our hands for help. I’m still doing it. We’ve tried to warn everyone what was happening and no one cares. Who cares about those ignorant hillbillies? And since you’re one of them you must be ignorant and backward, too.

I’m here to tell you all that you should care. You should have cared but you didn’t. I’m begging you to find a way to care before the evangelical fire consumes us all. It’s too late for me, I live in the fiery pit of Missouri and there’s no escape. Pay attention to what I and what few others there are like me have to say, and save yourselves before it’s too late.

Are we going to change our habits voluntarily? Nope, but with water and food almost completely controlled by the oligarchs, well good luck! Good luck all.

Peace

As much as I abhor WalMart, shopping there is preferable to starvation. People living in food deserts will live on Red Baron pizza as opposed to walking 5 miles for fresh fruits or veggies.