Prosperity Vs Population

On Saturday, I talked about a loose constellation of Great Reset beliefs that some combination of human population growth and increased human prosperity threatens the climate. As I've looked futher into this, I've come to see that there are two schools of thought on overpopulation among radical environmentalists, the "hards" and the "softs". However, I don't trust the "softs" a bit.

The "hards" are best represented by Paul R Ehrlich, the grand old man of population control. In a Stanford University press release from the 1990s, he and two co-authors announce:

Until cultures change radically, the optimum number of people to exist on the planet at any one time lies in the vicinity of 1.5 billion to 2 billion people, about a third of the present number, three California ecologists estimated in an article published in the journal Population and Environment.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University and Gretchen Daily of the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California-Berkeley said that figure, "if achieved reasonably soon, would also likely permit the maximum number of Homo sapiens to live a good life over the long run."

"Determination of an 'optimum' world population size involves social decisions about the lifestyles to be lived and the distribution of those lifestyles among individuals in the population," the scientists wrote.

However, three decades later, the current world population is headed toward 8 billion, and assuming the optimum number remains at 1.5 to 2 billion, that means it's more like a quarter of the present number, and that proportion is shrinking. Ehrlich is still around at age 90, and I don't know if he's updated his estimate, but even if these numbers seem wackily apocalyptic, we need to recognize that this is still the current state of the Overton window; this sort of theorizing is well within the acceptable range of opinion.

I think there are two perfectly reasonable questions that can be posed here. The first is, "How urgent is this problem?" We're currently talking about goals like 30% reduction of X (choose your stuff) by 2030 or 50% reduction of Y by 2050. Most discussion of climate goals envisions the end of the current century, or 2100, as an outer limit beyond which any potential remedies will be moot, and the world as we know it will end.

The second question is, "If the environmental crisis is so urgent that we must reduce the world population by up to now unthinkable amount Z in a matter of decades, how do you propose we get there?" As I said Saturday, the Black Death is thought to have reduced the European population by maybe 30%. Now we're talking about reducing world population by maybe 75% in a matter of decades. The expression "nuke 'em all and let God sort 'em out" comes to mind.

It was a technological stretch and a strain on the German war effort to conduct systematic extermination of only 6 million Jews and 6 million others. Now we're talking about eliminating 6 billion -- and the ecological "hards" are thinking rainbows and unicorns will be the result? Someone needs to make these people articulate their position clearly. What do Ehrlich and his coauthors mean by the "social decisons" that need to be made, for instance? Drag queen story hour ain't gonna reduce births enough to get us there.

But they were writing in the 1990s. Here's a 2020 review of a recent book, A Planet of 3 Billion by Christopher Tucker:

In chapter 8 Tucker discusses Earth’s maximum carrying capacity. He relates to the world in 1950, with about 3 billion people, and refers to markedly increasing ecological debt since then. Comparing 2010 with 2030, a projection (see Figure below) suggests the rich and middle class will have grown by 1.7 billion people, and the poor and vulnerable will decrease by 1.05 billion. Such growth will likely increase current ecological debts considerably. But will the projection come true? Tucker concludes, “I have no doubt that capitalism could generate enough food and water to keep 9 billion or 11 billion people served well above their minimum… requirements”. But the dramatic negative consequences of this scenario are clearly presented in his book.

Farther down, the review presents this graph from the book:

The implication here for anyone not among the "hards" is remarkably optimistic, and it bears out common-sense observation: since the 1970s, the world middle class, especially in places like India and China, has grown astonishingly. According to the graph, since 2010 alone, the numbers of the poor and vulnerable will have shrunk by over a billion as world population increases, while the world middle class will have grown by 1.7 billion in just those two decades.

If nothing else, this is an empirical refutation of Malthusianism, the view that population growth is exponential, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. Malthusians, or their successors the radical environmentalists, can insist that the problem isn't the food supply -- if anything, the current war on agriculture argues there's now too much food, contra Malthus -- but it's that very surplus of food that's generating too many nitrates, and that's what will cause the planetary crisis.

The problem for the revisionist Malthusians in the environmental movement is that Malthus himself and his moderate successors promoted only abstinence or birth control as a means of reducing population growth, while the environmental "hards" now advocate radical population reduction by unspecified means -- and clearly in any transparent debate, they must avoid any clear proposal of what means they have in mind. Thus the "softs". Their basic argument is we don't need to think about this stuff too hard. At the same site as the book review linked above, we have this analysis:

We are currently 7.8 billion people and the United Nations predicts an increase of almost 3.5 billion by 2100 if current trends continue. Our overpopulation is obvious if we compare the population in 1960 (3 billion) to today’s and ask questions such as: “How serious a problem would climate change be if we had kept our population at 3 billion?” “How many fewer people would have died due to famine, conflict and war?” “How much less pollution and plastic garbage would there have been?” and “How much less food would have been needed and how many millions of acres of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems would have been spared conversion to agricultural use?”

The problem for the Paul Ehrlch school of overpopulation is precisely that since the 1960s, Ehrlich's predictions that "in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate" simply didn't come to pass, so enviornmentalists have had to fantasize a world that would somehow have been even better than the improved one we have now if Ehrlich's prescriptions had been followed.

The "softs" nevertheless want now to downplay the population issue and stress the problem of prosperity. From the link quoted above:

It is important to realize that overpopulation exists in many rich countries with too high rates of consumption as well as in many poor countries with too high fertility rates. Every effort should be made reduce consumption rates as well as high birth rates; in combination, these two measures would create a much better future for people on the planet. . . .

The word ‘overpopulation’ is rarely used by political leaders, the news media, or even many environmentalists. . . . The good news is that it is possible to end global population growth, fairly and without coercion.

Note that "coercion" is still in the picture -- as indeed is the "problem" of overpopulation. The solution for the "softs" seems to be that we can maybe avoid, or at least delay, the coercion part if we cut way down on farming -- but wasn't the original Malthusian argument that no matter how hard we tried, agriculture could never keep up with population? So now the solution these neo-Malthusians have in mind is to limit the food supply to Malthusian levels while artifically reducing the population to what the neo-Malthusians think will correspond to pre-Malthusian levels.

In other words, they want to create an artificial Malthusian crisis that they will manage to suit themselves. This is strange stuff. I don't trust these people a bit.