"The battle of the energy titans comes down to one great contest: nuclear vs. coal."

[GliderGuider]

51. That's a pretty strong accusation for a noob, Bob.

Have you looked at the articles I suggested? They would give you more background on my thinking, though they might not be as accessible to someone with the techno-optimistic leanings you appear to have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Carrying_capacity

There is wide variability both in the definition and in the proposed size of the Earth's carrying capacity, with estimates ranging from less than 1 to 1000 billion humans (1 trillion).[85] Around two-thirds of the estimates fall in the range of 4 billion to 16 billion (with unspecified standard errors), with a median of about 10 billion.[86]

In a study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the US National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), estimate the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. And in order to achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States would have to reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population would have to be reduced by two-thirds.[87]

Some groups (for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature[88][89] and Global Footprint Network[90]) have stated that the carrying capacity for the human population has been exceeded as measured using the Ecological Footprint. In 2006, WWF's "Living Planet Report" stated that in order for all humans to live with the current consumption patterns of Europeans, we would be spending three times more than what the planet can renew.[91] Humanity as a whole was using, by 2006, 40 percent more than what Earth can regenerate.[92]

But critics question the simplifications and statistical methods used in calculating Ecological Footprints. Therefore Global Footprint Network and its partner organizations have engaged with national governments and international agencies to test the results – reviews have been produced by France, Germany, the European Commission, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.[93] Some point out that a more refined method of assessing Ecological Footprint is to designate sustainable versus non-sustainable categories of consumption.[94][95] However, if yield estimates were adjusted for sustainable levels of production, the yield figures would be lower, and hence the overshoot estimated by the Ecological Footprint method even higher.

I prefer to advocate for the low end of the range (1 billion or so) because of my Deep Ecology leanings. I think that overshooting that population level since 1800 has seriously damaged the prospects of many - if not most - other species as well as our own.