World Population

"Important people" is sufficiently vague as to be meaningless. As for the basic question, one does have to wonder. When i was a child, but old enough to understand the concept of population and available resources, the population of the United States was 180,000,000 and the population of the planet was just under two billion. Now the population of the United States is over 300,000,000 and the population of the planet is somewhere north of six billion. At this time, i suspect that the question of sustainable population is going to turn on the conflict between raising crops for food and raising crops to make alcohol to fuel automobiles. We may have reached the carrying capacity of the planet, but i'm not certain that anyone knows that to a certainty. People in positions of power are likely to come down on the side of their capitalist buddies, though, on the question whether the goal of agriculture if to feed everyone, or to produce "gas-ohol."