The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.

Wildfires are a result of temperature conditions, of soil moisture conditions; and, of course, something has to start it.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

Reliable and affordable energy is essential for meeting basic human needs and fueling economic growth, but many of the most difficult and dangerous environmental problems at every level of economic development arise from the harvesting, transport, processing, and conversion of energy

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people, most - than most proposals for involuntarily fertility control.

We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one - whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen - is hardly grounds for complacency.)

The e-mails are mainly about a controversy over a particular data set and the ways a particular small group of scientists have displayed that dataset.