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After virtually abandoning the issue for three decades, the environmental movement got a bold reality check this week from a new book highlighting relentless human population growth as a driving force behind global warming.

This wouldn’t have raised eyebrows in the 1970s, when the modern environmental movement had its genesis and Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” was on just about everybody’s bookshelf.

Since then, however, overpopulation has dropped from the vocabulary of most environmentalists despite a near doubling of the world’s numbers to an estimated 6.8 billion people today.

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Rampant population growth and rising wealth in developing countries are driving up demand for food, a UK official says, while global warming also imperils food stores through decreased rainfall and crop failures.

The agriculture industry is going to have to double food production, but with less water than today. Another big threat to food supplies is biofuel production.

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As dust settles from the recent UN climate-change conference in Indonesia, some observers are looking to China as the looming pivotal factor in the global-warming struggle.

The world’s most populous nation, now also neck-and-neck with the U.S. as its biggest greenhouse polluter, was the subject of a recent news article under the banner “As China goes, so goes global warming.”

The best the Bali delegates could achieve was two more years of talks on setting emission curbs, but with China building new coal-burning plants at the rate of one a week, in what states of peril will the planet be two years hence?

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Bjorn Lomborg, who recently claimed that polar-bear numbers were actually increasing and then had to abandon his claim when science intervened, says the best climate-change strategy is to “make the rest of the world as rich as New York” so all the people of the world can afford air conditioners.

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Leaders at the 21-nation APEC forum will enter their annual two-day summit this weekend in Sydney, Australia, hoping to agree on a statement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. With the world’s two largest polluters still at loggerheads, however, they might have accomplished more by staying home and not spewing CO2 to attend the conference.