But the resources in question here (for stability of mid-east countries) are local: there's only so much land along the Nile, and only so much oil in the Saudi wells. Quadrupling the population makes every fight over slices of the pie more intense within these countries.
The miracle is really that somehow they have almost kept up. Here's the green revolution: Egypt has roughly doubled yield, and (if you click around) roughly trebled the harvest, while quadrupling in population:
Pithy response but not in line with reality. If we are talking about climate change in the context of globalized economies, then it should be understood that US demand and lifestyle is contributing more to the problem than a poor guy living in India.
India still has a number of people comparable in size to the entire US population living without any electricity, and that's arguably a failure on India's part. I agree that this should be understood.
I'd also take it another step and point out as India makes progress on pulling its overpopulated disaster out of poverty it will quickly surpass the US in absolute CO2 emissions because of how many people there are. This is especially true should they utilize their abundant coal reserves in the process.
Just look to China's CO2 emissions. It's already nearly double the US as of 2013 [1], while they still have plenty of room for growth on the quality of life axis.
All this crap is only problematic because of overpopulation across the planet. It requires the huge numbers of people to produce such volumes of emissions that we're altering the global climate. We can bicker and finger-point all we want about which group arrived at the western high-consumption lifestyle first and enjoyed more of it before everyone else got there, but it's ignoring the elephant in the room; that there's far too many people to simultaneously live this gluttonous party globally. The more people there are, the less equal things must be.
Well, some countries are lucky enough to own land apt for large-scale agriculture and agroindustry: Argentina, Canada, Russia, others are not: Jordania, Yemen, Libia... So, having large populations in these less fortunate countries is not sustainable at all, and this regardless of how selfish are those 20xconsumption countries
If 1m have profligate Western lifestyle, the planet and climate would cope just fine.
If 7bn desire and are advertised at to desire a profligate Western lifestyle, then the climate is going to break long before all get there.