The U.S. Census Bureau is projecting that the population of the United States will be 305,529,237 on January 1, 2009. According to the bureau, "In January 2009, one birth is expected to occur every eight seconds in the United States and one death every 12 seconds. Meanwhile, net international migration is expected to add one person every 36 seconds to the U.S. population in January 2009."
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The population of the US today is the same as the all-time peak of world population reached in Roman times. From our human, or near human,origins until then we only grew to 0.3 billion. Today world population is 6.7 billion and still growing at about 0.1 billion per year.
The villains are not those who have SUV’s but those who father more than two children.
Allow me to amend the current world growth rate that Don gave. We are down, and still falling, to approx. 75 million net gain per year. About 15 years ago the world was net-gaining about 90 million per year, or about the population of mexico at that time. This is a significant, and continuing, decline in world growth. The big question, of course, is what will be the peak population and how will human institutions handle those contigencies re food, environment, immigration and so on.
Leedurhamstone (I am curious as to what kind of name that is?)
You will notice that I expressed world populations and population growth in billions and tenths of billions. Perhaps your figure for current annual growth of 0.075 billion is precise, (I use 1.34% of 6.7 billion which is 0.090 billion.) I would still call this 0.1 billion. It’s a quibble and not really germaine.
More to the point, we already have more humans than our modern society can support while still seeking to include more (all?) of the present billion of desperately poor.