> As you said, eating loads of soybeans or oil may not be great for you, 
but replacing the worst oils with better ones will help a lot. 

Yes, though so far the franchises like KFC are not really replacing 
soybean oil, they are just replacing one type of soybean oil with another 
(replacing soybean oil that contains lots of trans fats with one that 
doesn't). Apparently, only the method of processing the oil has changed. 
But I would guess that it is at least a small improvement. It would be 
better, according to Cordain, if they used canola or light (cooking) olive 
oil, but that would of course cost them more. So the economic incentive is 
not there until and unless people demand it. I could see that happening 
some day.

> I remember when suddenly oats were the 'heart healthy' fad. Suddenly, in
just one year the price of oats shot up and oat products appeared
everywhere, lots of new oat breakfast cereals. The next year farmers 
planted
a lot more oats, and also the fad tapered off and oats were no longer
expensive. So these changes can happen very quickly if the media gets 
behind
them.

Yes, but as has been discussed, Cordain apparently believes that the 
production of Paleo foods can only be increased to feed up to 9% of the 
current world population. It makes sense that the limits to Paleo food 
production are much lower than for the modern foods. Especially meats and 
seafood. For example, already scientists are saying the seafood stock is 
in danger of exhaustion in the next few decades--and this is without large 
scale adoption of Paleo diets.

> But with the pressure easing off, we will have an easier time adapting to
the population.

Even the most rosy estimates don't see world population peaking until at 
least 2030-2040. With these rosy estimates the population will still be 
above 4 billion in 2150. If the goal were to just stop world population 
from growing, that would be achievable in our lifetime. The evidence is 
accumulating that the goal should be very different.

After reading the works of Ben Wattenberg, Julian Simon, and others, I 
used to think that the a global population of 6.5 billion is not a problem 
and that the "birth dearth" was the real problem, rather than 
overpopulation. One of the birth dearth argument advocates, Steven W. 
Mosher, predicted that population will peak at 7 billion in 2030. But 
after reading NeanderThin, The Paleo Diet and Ishmael, it became quite 
apparent that the world population target needs to be much lower than 7 
billion. Based on Cordain's estimate, it looks like we should aim for a 
world population below 600 million and probably significantly lower than 
that if we want humanity to be able to live and eat the way it was 
designed/evolved (Paleo-like foods), and to return to a fairly harmonious 
balance with nature. At 600 million there would still be people who want 
to eat modern foods, but at least everyone would have the choice to eat 
Paleo if they wanted to without causing exhaustions or extinctions of 
Paleo-like animals and plants. 

If we want to set an easier target than the ideal, perhaps we could say 
about half the people eating relatively modern diets would be acceptable 
and therefore say that around one or so billion would be a reasonable 
target. And perhaps with serious dedication to developing greener 
technologies and preserving biodiversity hotspots like rainforests we 
might find a way to live sustainably and harmoniously around the 1 billion 
mark. Of course, for those that think that the modern foods are fine and 
that we don't need a lot of biodiversity, my points are moot. 

> Not sure about this. China is developing rapidly, leapfrogging ahead, and
>
> they are reportedly experiencing a massive increase in pollution.

> I am still hoping that China and India can make the jump faster than we
did, using our tech to skip some of the intermediate stages.  

They are making the economic and technological jump much faster than we 
did, with massive new factories sprouting up and whole new industries 
developing in less than a decade that took a century to develop in Europe 
and the US. Unfortunately, China is making that jump in a dirty fashion, 
though at least the government there has publicly stated recognition of 
the problem. I'm thinking you mean that you hope they learn to make their 
industries less-polluting in less time than we did. My guess is that would 
require China to switch from using coal energy to using mostly nuclear. 
It's possible. Nuclear fusion is a hope for the future, though miracle 
technologies often turn out to be less miraculous than they had been 
predicted by their boosters.

> That initial stage is when most of the species loss occurs. It makes me 
sad to think of all the species we must have lost when the plains states 
were all pretty much completely plowed under, marshes drained etc. Of 
course they have a lot more population pressure now than the US or Europe 
ever did, so it won't be easy.

Now the rainforests are being plowed under, which causes a much higher 
rate of species extinction than when the plains were plowed under and 
converted to monoculture, because the species in the tropics tend to have 
smaller ranges than North American species.

> In another post, someone mentioned the idea that it takes ten calories of
energy to produce one calorie of food energy. I have to say I don't
understand the comparison. 

Lynnet may be able to answer that one. It is a new concept for me.

> When the cities get cold, the eco-fantics who live there will be the 
first
to proclaim the wonderous benefits if nuclear power, I have no doubt at 
all!

I'm not concerned about cities getting cold. I think humans will find ways 
to produce energy, there's too much incentive behind it for them not to.