The world in 2100 - 6B or 15B people? Our choice

This happy little thought prompted by the above linked article about what the world might be like 90 years from now. The mainstream thought is 10B people, no oil or gas, food shortages, everybody living in mega cities, a quarter of the population over 65 yrs old. Not a pretty sight.

Here's the interesting part. There were two alternate scenarios (from the UN study), either 6.2B people or 15B. No particular discussion of the interesting question of how we would get down to 6.2B (from the current 7B). I prefer to think (hope) that path would be non-catastrophic.

So given the two extremes, how might we get to either of them.

Plan A: The current right wing, christian right, Republican corporatist, bankist (fascist), whatever label you want, will continue to outlaw birth control and family planning education, continue to pursue the oil economy (drill baby, drill), continue to pursue GM monocrop agri-biz, no health care, and of course unfettered wealth accumulation by the already wealthy. The result? 15B people, failed crops from mono-cropping, severe unplanned oil, water and power shortages, increased global warming, war, famine, pestilence.

Plan B: The Democrat, hippie, left wing, (socialist), whatever label you want, will provide family planning education and birth control technology to the world, pursue transition to post-oil distributed power economies**, actively support sustainable agriculture techniques, facilitate real health care to the world, and reasonable distribution of wealth controls. The result? 6.2B people living off of land with improving productivity, plenty of distributed power, water. Reduced CO2 output may ameliorate climate change. With power, food, water, health care available to all, there may be less to fight about, certainly less disease and pestilence.

So, which scenario would you like your children to live in? Act accordingly.

**Parts of Plan B lifted from Jeremy Rifkin's new book, reviewed here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-third-industrial-revolution-_b_964049.html