Not a big fan of Malthusian Logic.
'Are people really hungry because there is not enough food, or is it because they simply lack the money to pay for it? Is it the poor who are destroying the environment, or is it the consumption patterns of the wealthy? Do people in poor countries lack resources because there are too many of them, or because the wealth of these countries is so unevenly distributed? Are women poorly educated because they have too many children, or because of the social and economic policies that international financial agencies impose on poor countries?'
That's not Malthusian logic. Malthus' goal was to show that population can never exceed the "carrying capacity" (there was no such term back in the days, of course) of its environment because the four horsemen of the apocalypse will always keep it in check. However, he was focusing on food only, and he didn't realize that, first, food isn't the only factor that is a limit to growth, and second, a population can go into "overshoot" mode if it has enough resources stockpiled; it will crash, of course, when those stockpiled resources run out (which is what will happen to us very soon)
Anyway, whether distribution of resources is a problem or not (and it is a big problem in our world) is totally irrelevant to the simple fact that we can't grow forever on a finite planet. And this is only much more true given that we're spending so much more resources on canned entertainment, cosmetics, driving 50 miles a day to park our ass in front of the computer and shuffle imaginary money around the internet, and other useful things of that sort, than we spend on space exploration and developing the technologies that can get us out of this planet.
The fact is that by any reasonable definition of overshoot (which is usually defined as something like "the moment when the size of population times the per capita resource consumption level starts compromising the long-term carrying capacity of the environment") we are in overshoot right now, and we've been in overshoot mode for at least the last 20 to 30 years. And it does not really matter whether Joe from Dallas drives a Truckzilla to work, keeps his house air-conditioned to some absurdly low temperature all the time in the summer and eats 7000 calories a day, while children in Kenya starve.
The point is that you can't "contract and converge" to spread the resource consumption evenly and then keep growing. You have to "contract and converge" to a much lower worldwide average resource consumption level and STOP growing.
Neither of these will happen voluntarily and fast enough to avoid the catastrophe. But there are people like you that think it just can't happen. Why? Because we've never seen it happen, yet it is what has happened to every civilization that ever existed safe for a luck few that happened to be situated around rivers that continually replenished soil fertility through the sediments they bring. Everybody else has collapsed in a very ugly way. Archaeologists often find human bones with teeth marks on them, which means that there is a non-trivial, and probably quite high chance that me and you will die either from starvation or will be eaten by other people, and quite possibly both...
