Earth Resources

I have been thinking for a while about the exploitation of earth's resources. We're consuming oil, coal, forests, water, fish, etc at an extremely fast rate. We far exceeded earth's capability to re-produce those resources. Even something like nuclear energy sources, they seem to have no side effects, but in fact, we are releasing huge amounts of energy. Think of it like that, there is a certain amount of energy trapped in the doomed uranium atom that went into the reactor, that energy was released, part of it is released as heat, and is dumped into water or air, and the rest is converted to electricity. But the story doesn't end there, this electricity eventually finds its way to someone's home, where he will use it to generate heat, or turn a motor. Even the energy that goes into turning a motor or lighting some place, this eventually is absorbed by something that transforms that into heat.

We need concrete, we need food, we need wood, we need iron, we need .... And the world population is so big that we are using the resources faster than they are generated. I personally don't see any way out of this death trap except by decreasing the population of earth. Countries don't only need to maintain a stable population, they need to decrease their population. I believe that some studies should be done to estimate the optimal population for earth that grants a decent quality of life and at the same time consumes resources at a pace less than or equal to earth's capability of reproducing those resources.