Noah Smith – Why Paul Ehrlich – Population Bomb – Was Wrong

Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.

Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.

Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day. 

‘Data Analysis – Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong

And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes

Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.

And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:

When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:

As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.

Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.

Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968

Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:

Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.

Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.

In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:

The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.

These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions

Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019

So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.

Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)

Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.

What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.

And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.

Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.

In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.

There is a lesson here for the modern day.

Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs

In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.

For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!

Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.

So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.

It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage. 

The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.

This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.

Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.

But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:

When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.

But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong

Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.

First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.

It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.

(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)

But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.

And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene. 

Statistics on biodiversity and habitat loss generally all point in the same direction.

I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.

This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:

But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.

This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.

Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.

So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’

For more blogs and articles on Demography, Environment, Eugenics, Limits to Growth, Political Strategy, Statistical Analysis, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Posted on February 16, 2021

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.

However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Posted on November 25, 2021

We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.

This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Posted on May 3, 2022

In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

Posted on September 30, 2020

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

Posted on April 10, 2020

The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Posted on January 14, 2024

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Posted on January 2, 2024

The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.

Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.

Global Population Decline and Rebalance

Posted on January 17, 2024

The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.

However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.

Population Growth or Decline?

Posted on October 20, 2019

Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?

This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.

Degrowth and Steady State Economy or Eugenics for the Environment Debunked

In recent years with pressure on fossil fuels and the need to transition to renewable sources, now compounded by Russian invasion of Ukraine, has seen renewed promotion of ZPG Zero Population Growth with Herman Daly and Club of Rome inspired ‘steady-state economy’ and ‘degrowth’ as scientific theories; part of a crossover between nativist Tanton Network and libertarian Koch Network.

However, there is little if any evidence to show a direct correlation or causation of the simplistic presentation between economic growth and environmental degradation or carbon emissions; in fact there is contradictory evidence that shows many advanced economies which have grown while reducing carbon emissions.

Accordingly, why are these theories being developed and promoted in the first place?

There are multiple reasons including the citing of ‘population growth’ as an environmental hygiene issue, deflecting from fossil fuels and carbon emissions in the developed world, hence, the need for immigration restrictions on developing nation citizens as the solution, based upon the old pseudoscience of eugenics, masquerading as liberal and environmental.

The following recent article excerpts from Deutsche Welle explain further the contradictions and counter examples. 

‘Can degrowth stop climate change and end poverty?

A growing movement of researchers want to shrink rich economies to stop the planet from heating — but both supporters and critics are gambling on prosperity and climate stability for billions of people across the world.

It is one of the most daunting tasks humanity faces: stopping climate change and ending poverty at the same time.

But the best-laid plans to do so are dangerously speculative, a DW analysis shows. Betting on green growth risks overheating the planet, while degrowth in rich countries could worsen poverty elsewhere.

In 2015 world leaders promised to try and cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century — but temperatures are hurtling toward that threshold, which is likely to be crossed in a decade, and current policies are set to heat the planet 2.7 C instead. Sticking to even that level of heating assumes humanity will suck pollutants out of the atmosphere with costly technologies that are unproven at scale. 

Alarmed, some researchers want the countries most responsible for having warped the climate to abandon their pursuit of economic growth and use less energy — most of which comes from burning fossil fuels. But cheerleaders of degrowth lack the detailed modeling to show what these policies would mean for poverty across the world.

There is no academic literature at a global level to show removing that much carbon or degrowing economies works, said Yamina Saheb, a lead author of a review of climate solutions published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in April 2022. “We don’t have the answers.”

Decoupling GDP growth from greenhouse gas pollution

Supporters of green growth — the pathway most world leaders are taking to tackle climate change — want to break the link between economic (GDP) growth and greenhouse gas emissions.

Bigger incomes are correlated with higher standards of living. As people get richer, they can afford healthier and happier lives.

But data for many economies around the world shows that more money means more pollution. The more things people buy, the more energy they use.

Most of that comes from burning fuels that clog the atmosphere with heat-trapping gas.

Humanity has begun to buck that trend.

For decades, countries like Germany and the UK have grown their economies while cutting their carbon pollution. Policymakers have shuttered coal plants, forced factories to work more efficiently and built wind turbines and solar panels that make clean electricity. 

An analysis published last year found 32 countries had decoupled GDP growth from greenhouse gas emissions. After accounting for emissions embodied in goods they imported from abroad, this fell to 23 countries.

But in big economies from Brazil to Indonesia, growth and pollution are still tightly linked.

The sluggish pace of change has led degrowth researchers to sound alarm bells. A 2020 review paper found decoupling rates were too low to hold global warming to 1.5 C. 

If governments were to cut emissions fast enough to get there, it would imply a drop in energy use so great that GDP would likely decline, too, said Lorenz Keysser, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich who has published studies on degrowth. “It’s not a goal of degrowth to reduce GDP. It’s just an anticipated consequence — and one which needs to be prepared for.” 

Scientists lack research on degrowth and carbon dioxide removal

Green growth and degrowth supporters agree poor countries should grow richer so living standards can rise. Their dispute centers around whether the rich world — which has eaten more than its fair share of the carbon cake and refuses to divide the rest up equally — should be allowed to grow as well.

But scientists have no clear answers — because they lack in-depth modeling showing what degrowth policies would do to society. All 3000 scenarios for cutting emissions evaluated in the latest IPCC report assume countries will keep growing richer.

That has created a conundrum for scientists trying to show policy makers how they can keep global warming to 1.5 C even as energy demand rises and the carbon budget shrinks. The solution their models came up with is to overshoot the 1.5 C target before sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and bringing temperatures back down later in the century.

This pathway — green growth followed by carbon dioxide removal — is baked into political commitments to reach net-zero emissions. Without relying on these technologies, the remaining carbon budget for hitting the 1.5 C target will be exhausted by about 2044 if countries cut emissions at a constant rate.

The IPCC report found that removing some amount of carbon dioxide is now unavoidable to counter emissions in sectors that are hard to clean up. But the technologies to do so are expensive and untested at the large scales used in the models. Some forms of carbon dioxide removal take up such vast amounts of land that many scientists are reluctant to bet on their widespread use.

Degrowing rich countries could slow fight against poverty

But calls to cut energy demand could make poverty worse, critics of degrowth counter. Protestors pushing for an end to growth often overlook the distinction that academics make between targeting rich countries and not poor ones.

In fact, the net result of degrowth in rich countries and growth in poor ones may be enough to make the global economy bigger. The answer depends on the scale of growth needed to bring people out of poverty.

“To get anywhere close to an end of poverty very large growth is needed, even in a future in which the inequality in the world would be reduced massively,” said Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford and director of the platform Our World in Data. An analysis he published last year found the world economy would need to grow five-fold for everybody to reach an income level of US$30 per day, which is roughly the poverty line in a rich country.

But focusing on growing the economy to end poverty is a poor way to achieve well-being, supporters of degrowth argue.

A 2021 study found world leaders could stop climate change at 1.5 C and raise living standards by consuming less energy. Providing people with enough energy for a decent standard of living – with good food, shelter, health, education and transport – would require one-fourth of the energy demand projected by 2050, the researchers found.

Such a proposal would upend big, energy-intensive economies but reduce pressure on the climate. It will be very difficult to stay within planetary boundaries if we take our inefficient way of delivering wellbeing in rich countries and continue to scale it up, said Jarmo Kikstra, a climate modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and lead author of the study.

So far, calls for degrowth have been limited to activists and academics rather than policymakers in countries suffering most from climate change. They have demanded rich polluters cut emissions and pay for the destruction wrought by violent weather extremes — but have not demanded they consume less. 

Experts fear that cutting growth in rich countries could also hurt growth in poor ones. Stopping luxury consumption like fast-changing fashions and foreign holidays would be a blow to industries that form the engine of growth in countries from South Africa to Sri Lanka.

In response, degrowth researchers say they are trying not just to stop climate change but also fight for economic justice. Curbing growth in the rich world would need to happen alongside policies to support domestic industries in poor countries and end unequal trade relationships, they say, though they do not have models to show these effects.

The economic hit could be offset if the countries most responsible for climate change paid reparations in the form of money and patented technology needed to decarbonize, said Fadhel Kaboub, an economist at Denison University in the US who studies financial sovereignty in poor countries. “We’re really talking about a climate debt that needs to be paid.”

Yet even while scientists are undecided on the need for degrowth to stop climate change, they are clear that technological solutions alone are not enough.

In homes, for instance, improvements in efficiency have so far been matched by increases in living space. On roads, the pollution avoided by electrifying cars has been offset by the rise in heavier SUVs.

The latest IPCC report found policies to slash energy demand can cut emissions 40-70% by 2050 through measures like flying less, insulating homes and replacing meat in diets with plants. It highlighted the need for policies to increase sufficiency — meeting human needs within the boundaries of the remaining carbon budget — as well as continuing to improve technological efficiency.

“The choice today is between saying we need sufficiency policies right now … or continuing with incremental improvements,” Saheb said.

For more articles related to demography, economics, environment, GDP growth, limits to growth, population growth and white nationalism click through below:

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Economic Growth of Transactions vs. Consumption of Resources

Greenwashing – Club of Rome – Limits to Growth – Astroturfing Fossil Fuels – The Guardian

Adam Smith – Classical Liberal Economics or Conservative Calvinist Christianity or White Christian Nationalism?

Buy Local – Not Global – Issues of Nationalist Trade Policies

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Tactics Against Bipartisan Climate Change Policy in Australia – Limits to Growth?

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’ 

Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.

However, by 2012 Randers had revised own his global population peak estimate down to 8 billion or so which concurs with more recent research of Bricker & Ibbitson presented in ‘Empty Planet’ and The Lancet peer reviewed research paper by Stein Emil Vollset et al. titled ‘The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power’ which states that fertility rates have declined much faster than expected.

‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?

Giles Parkinson 7 November 2012

What will the world look like in 40 years time. In 2052, will we have enough food and water? Will there be too many people? Will our standard of living be higher. Will we have taken decisive action on climate change.

To briefly summarise Jorgen Randers, the renowned Norwegian futurist, the broad answers to those are yes, yes, maybe, no and no. But it’s the way he reaches those conclusions that makes his latest book 2052: A global forecast for the next forty years, so compelling.

Randers made his name as the co-author of the book “The Limits to Growth”, which underpinned the Club of Rome’s work on resource depletion and helped spawn the sustainability movement. Not that he thinks the book and his work had that much impact. “I spent 40 years working on sustainability and failed. The world today is a much less sustainable world,” he lamented during a visit to Australia this week.

Now 67, Randers runs the centre for climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School.  And having outlined 12 scenarios for the world running from 1970 to 2100 in his first book, he now feels there is enough information to make more concrete forecasts.

It is not a picture he finds particularly attractive, but one he sees as inevitable because of mankind’s inability to look beyond short-term solutions and the obsession with growth. “I’m not saying what should happen, but this is the sad future that humanity is going to create for itself.”

Here are the base numbers for his predictions. Unlike others that predict a world population of 9 billion in 2050, he sees it peaking at 8 billion in 2040 and then declining, because he says the rich world will choose jobs over children, and the poorer urban families will choose fewer children.

He expects the world economy to grow much slower than most, because it will be harder to increase productivity at the same rate as has occurred in the last four decades. The low hanging fruit in the agricultural, manufacturing and office sectors have been picked. And he does not believe the poor countries will “take off”. He says that by 2050, the world economy will be no more than 2.5 times bigger than it is today, rather than four times bigger as many assume.

The US has a bleak outlook because their average disposable incomes will not grow, because they have already gone further than most in productivity and have a huge debt to China. And, Randers says, because the US is not capable of making simple decisions, it will also be not capable of making difficult decisions. He puts the current debate around climate change, or the lack of it, as an example.

“China is the real winner and they will be 5 times as rich in 40 year time,” Randers says. That’s because of China’s ability to make quick decisions that are in favour of the majority. 

The rest of the world, he suggests, remains poor

Still, while the economy and the population will not grow as fast as some predict, and there will be no huge shortage of food, water or energy, it will still grow fast enough to trigger a climate crisis, because the short termism of the political class and business means that greenhouse emissions will not be addressed. He expects emissions will peak between 2030 and 2040, and will have only returned to 2010 levels by 2050 – pushing the world beyond the 2°C scenario and locking in disastrous climate reactions in the second half of the century.

“We will spend more money repairing the damage of climate change after it has occurred instead of spending up front avoiding the climate damage,” he says. “We know what to do. The only reason we do not do it is because it is slightly more expensive than doing nothing, so we don’t do it. It is very frustrating.”

He says capitalism is design to allocate money in the short term, and any efforts by politicians to suggest that capital be allocated to the longer term is usually rejected by voters. (He could be talking about the Australian political debate). And he doesn’t hold up much hope for international agreements, at least not of the sort being sort by the UN from 192 nations on climate policy. “If you had 192 wives and were deciding where to put the sofa in the living room, you would understand the problem.”

Click through for more articles about Demography, Environment, GDP Growth, Limits to Growth, Population Growth & Younger Generations.

Population Growth or Decline?

Much about population growth and fertility in the Anglo world has negative connotations or perceptions from the mainstream due to inflated (forecast fertility rates) data from the UNPD Population Division, ZPG/Club of Rome, Population Matters, Sustainable Population Australia, nativist conservatives, eco-fascists and white nationalists spruiking at best supposed environmental degradation, at worst the ‘great replacement theory’ or ‘tipping point’.

In fact during the past ten years credible demographic research and/or writing from Rosling, Lutz, Pearce, Bricker & Ibbitson et al. has debunked the idea of exponential growth in population as it is based upon inflated UNPD fertility rates, and we are headed for a peak mid century followed by a (potentially precipitous) decline.

From Project Syndicate almost a decade ago an article by former Deutsche Bank demographer Sanjeev Sanyal:

The End of Population Growth

Oct 30, 2011

Sanjeev Sanyal was Deutsche Bank’s Global Strategist and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He is the author of The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline and Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography.

‘The UN forecasts that world population will rise to 9.3 billion in 2050 and surpass 10 billion by the end of this century. But such forecasts misrepresent underlying demographic dynamics: The future we face is not one of too much population growth, but too little.

NEW DELHI – According to the United Nations’ Population Division, the world’s human population hit seven billion on October 31. As always happens whenever we approach such a milestone, this one has produced a spike in conferences, seminars, and learned articles, including the usual dire Malthusian predictions. After all, the UN forecasts that world population will rise to 9.3 billion in 2050 and surpass 10 billion by the end of this century.

Such forecasts, however, misrepresent underlying demographic dynamics. The future we face is not one of too much population growth, but too little.

Most countries conducted their national population census last year, and the data suggest that fertility rates are plunging in most of them. Birth rates have been low in developed countries for some time, but now they are falling rapidly in the majority of developing countries. Chinese, Russians, and Brazilians are no longer replacing themselves, while Indians are having far fewer children. Indeed, global fertility will fall to the replacement rate in a little more than a decade. Population may keep growing until mid-century, owing to rising longevity, but, reproductively speaking, our species should no longer be expanding.’

On a similar note, a decade later, from Danny Dorling in New Internationalist:

Hitting the population brakes

In early 2019 awareness that human population growth was ending began to spread more widely. To much acclaim, Darrell Bricker, the chief operating officer of the polling firm Ipsos Public Affairs, and his colleague John Ibbitson published the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline….. 

…….Bricker and Ibbitson had amassed a wealth of evidence for their central claim that the United Nations had simply got its future projections very wrong. 

In particular they quoted Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic who in 1972 had predicted a sharp rise to an unsustainable world population of 15 billion people by 2030, but who has now changed his assessment because fertility rates have fallen so rapidly recently, saying: ‘The world population will never reach nine billion people… . It will peak at eight billion in 2040, and then decline.’

Randers, a professor of climate strategy based in Oslo, now believes that birth rates will decline faster than UN demographers currently project. Randers is no utopian……

……Wolfgang Lutz, one of the world’s best-respected demographers, along with his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, now believes that the global human population will stabilize by 2050 and then begin to fall because the human slowdown is currently accelerating.

In 2018 Lutz and his colleagues stated that they would now forecast the world population peak to occur shortly after 2070. Their projection would mean between two billion and three billion fewer humans by 2100 than the UN currently estimates…….

……The global point of greatest change, the international pivot point, came around the year 1968. The evidence that slowdown is upon us with a vengeance is now so strong that Bricker and Ibbitson were able to quote a recent Deutsche Bank report by Sanjeev Sanyal that suggests the peak in human numbers on Earth will be reached at just 8.7 billion in 2055, and decline to 8 billion by 2100…….

…..Because this fact is so very important, it is worth reiterating that the slowdown in global population was evident some time ago, and it has been well known among demographers for all of this current 21st century…..

…..UN demographers currently believe that the whole world will move toward a two-child norm.

However, that key assumption has no historical or scientific basis. This, above all else, is why we should not necessarily expect to peak in our numbers as a species at the population maximum of 11.2 billion people in the near future. Everything has changed so much that choosing to have no children, or just one child, is for the majority of women worldwide now just as easy as – if not easier than – choosing to have two.

Sometimes insight can be found in the most unlikely places. Commenting on a February 2019 story in the British Daily Mail newspaper, sensationally headlined ‘Will the world run out of people?’ ‘Paul’ noted that there is no question that this is true, and that it has been obvious for a long time to anybody with a population chart and a basic understanding of mathematics. He said that the ‘negative second derivative of population (namely, a decline in growth) is as clear as day and must lead eventually to a negative first derivative (a decline in population itself),’ concluding, ‘Why otherwise intelligent people (eg Stephen Hawking) can’t/couldn’t see this is astounding.’’’

For more blogs and articles about climate change, conservative, critical thinking, demography, environment, fossil fuel pollution, nativism, NOM Net Overseas Migration, population growth, populist politics, science literacy, statistical analysis, white nationalism and younger generations.

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Article titled ‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism’ summarises ZPG Zero Population Growth in Australia, US white nationalist links, citing Paul Ehrlich and John Tanton. A symptom of US based radical right libertarianism and eugenics, presented as liberal, environmental and science based, but in fact supported by oligarchs.

 

The clearest signals emerged in the US in the ’70s when simultaneously fossil fuel companies became aware of global warming due to carbon emissions (and threatened by Nixon’s EPA), ZPG was established with Ehrlich, Tanton et al., supported by Rockefeller Bros. (Standard Oil then Exxon), Ford and Carnegie Foundations (according to the Washington Post), Club of Rome promoting Limits to Growth PR construct (including carrying capacity, Herman Daly’s steady-state economy suggesting protectionism to preclude global competition etc.) hosted on Rockefeller estate, sponsored by VW and Fiat, while James Buchanan and later Koch’s et al. started promoting libertarian economics (also Friedman, Hayek, Rand and Chicago School), nativism and developing think tanks for influence in politics, academia and media (according to MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ and Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’), including ALEC, Heritage Foundation etc..

 

‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism

 

Tony Goodfellow | 22nd February, 2019

 

With the backdrop of dramatic decrease in migration to Australia in 2018 to a 10 year low, the population debate has reared its ugly head. In recent months Dick Smith has run an advertising blitz with the title ‘overpopulation will destroy Australia’ that compares population growth to cancer and recently took stage at Dark + Dangerous Thoughts at Mona arguing “no” for the proposition “Do We Let Them In?”. Dick Smith’s intervention comes as members of the far right continue to focus on immigration as a major issue. For example, the newly minted Katter’s Australian Party senator, Fraser Anning, praised the White Australia Policy in his inaugural speech and echoed Nazi rhetoric saying “the final solution to the immigration problem of course is a popular vote”. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also recently spoken about reducing Australia’s immigration intake.

 

The two views, although, coming from different perspectives, one nominally in the name of “sustainability” and the other a throwback to colonialism steeped in racism and xenophobia, arrive at the same destination, a hermetical view of the world projecting fear onto an outsider. In Dick Smith’s view the outsider is coming to destroy the environment and it Anning’s version they threaten the “European-Christian” ethno-white state.

 

The environmental rhetoric of the population debate might be alluring to progressives. Who would argue against clean air and clean water? Who wouldn’t agree that the current paradigm of growth is unsustainable? The problem is that an analysis based solely in population is superficial, creating solutions that end up marrying with the worst parts of Australian politics – far-right populism. If unchecked environmentalists focused solely on population threaten to be co-opted and driving a wedge in the environmental movement – because on the surface the arguments sound appealing.
Debate about population within the environment movement has played out many times, with many of the arguments not being new. Dick Smith’s manifesto proclaims “The prime reason for the decline in living standards for many Australian workers is our population growth.”

 

However, whose environment is he trying to protect?

 

Background to the environmental population debate

 

In the late 1960’s and onward a debate raged in environmental groups that threatened to tear them apart. The hotly debated issue was about population, spurned on by the publication of the neo-Malthusian The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich.

 

The Population Bomb is an easy-to-read polemic written for a popular audience and a guide for organising. In Ehrlich’s view over-population is leading to societal and environmental collapse and the issue needs immediate policy action. It thus begun with the famous lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and the pace continues:

 

“Overpopulation is now the dominant problem.

 

Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values.

 

…regardless of changes in technology or resource consumption and distribution, current rates of population growth guarantee an environmental crisis which will persist until the final collapse.

 

There are some professional optimists around who like to greet every sign of dropping birth rates with wild pronouncements about the end of the population explosion.

 

Many of these countries, some of which are the poorest, most undernourished, and most overpopulated in the world, are prime candidates for a death-rate solution to the Population explosion

 

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

 

He argues that population is a geometrical ratio:

 

“If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the earth…Unfortunately, even 900 years is much too far in the future for those of us concerned with the population explosion. As you will· see, the next nine years will probably tell the story.”

 

He graphically compares population growth to cancer, just like Dick Smith:

 

“We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.”

 

In “Chapter 1 The Problem” Ehrlich writes that “I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago.”

 

It would be hard not to be terror-stricken after reading The Population Bomb and it inspired many to action – perhaps prematurely. One argument, coming from a milieu of a white middle-class that some scholars have called an “apartheid ecology”, could be characterised as the “Green anti-immigrant” position. This position argued that there needed to be a national population policy in the United States that centred on radically reducing immigration.

 

This debate had echoes of the 18th century where many often turned to population control to solve social ills. This movement was famously satirised by Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ or its longer title ‘A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick’. It also had echoes of Thomas Malthus who posited in An Essay on the Principle of Population that population would exceed food supply:

 

“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race

 

Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and subsistence as — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable, though the produce in that time would have increased to an immense extent.”

 

An Essay on the Principle of Population expressed a view where empathy to certain groups, such as the poor, would spell disaster. His ideas led those in power to look at famine as good for society and that support for those not well off as creating “the poor which they maintain” . Marx famously argued against Malthus:

 

“The hatred of the English working class for Malthus—the ‘mountebank-parson,’ as Cobbett rudely called him…—was thus fully justified and the people’s instinct was correct here, in that they felt that he was no man of science, but a bought advocate of their opponents, a shameless sycophant of the ruling classes.”

 

This account was pretty accurate considering Malthus has been used to wage war on the poor. “Over the last 200 years” according to eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster “Malthusianism has thus always served the interests of those who represented the most barbaric tendencies within bourgeois society.”

 

Malthus’ view would end up marrying with Eugenics to form an ideological base for the Nazis. From early on Hitler fetishised the idea that population was the problem:

 

“The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger.”

 

Tragically his solution to his manufactured population problem was to violently enlarge the borders of the state, encourage higher fertility of anyone who was in Arthur de Gobineau’s ahistorical category of the true Germans or Aryan race while offsetting this by genocide of certain populations he deemed too foreign, not nationalistic enough or inferior.

 

Brief History of the rise of concern for population to be anti-immigration.

 

After The Population Bomb was released the new wave of the population debate played out in the one the largest and oldest conservation groups, the Sierra Club, leading to a decades old internecine struggle. The publication solidified for many that overpopulation was the most important issue for environmentalists. The polemic had a forward by David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club. He tied the Sierra Club’s mission to the call to action of the The Population Bomb, writing:

 

“The roots of the new brutality, it will become clear from The Population Bomb, are in the lack of population control. There is, we must hope and predict, a chance to exert control in time. We would like to predict that organizations which, like the Sierra Club, have been much too calm about the ultimate threat to mankind, will awaken themselves and others, and awaken them with an urgency that will be necessary to fulfillment of the prediction that mankind will survive. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.”

 

One scholar writes that the Ehrlich’s polemic “convinced many people that population expansion would eventually transcend the earth’s carrying capacity, leading to ecological disaster”. In doing so population became the pre-eminent concern for many environmentalists. It wasn’t long before environmental groups split on the issue. Population policy brought up many difficult questions that advocates could not address. On the question of scale, for example, should population be addressed globally or nationally? How do you address it nationally when the fertility rate is so low? Some proponents of addressing overpopulation decided the most politically acceptable way was to address it nationally, primarily through drastically reducing immigration. This focus on immigration somewhat overlook the arbitrary nature of both the new population goal and narrowly focusing on national population instead of consumption. There was no evidence that immigration size was related to ecological damage but the fear of population getting out of control was an overriding logic, and immigration provided a useful political tool……. continues……

 

Further reading

 

I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. – Here’s why: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question

 

Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism and the Hypocrisy of Hate: https://www.splcenter.org/20100630/greenwash-nativists-environmentalism-and-hypocrisy-hate

 

Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it: https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224

 

Here’s what a population policy for Australia could look like: https://theconversation.com/heres-what-a-population-policy-for-australia-could-look-like-101458

 

Other related sources:

 

Betts K, Ideology and Immigration, Volume 1, Number 4 (Summer 1991), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0104/article_56.shtml

 

Betts K, Population Policy Issues, Volume 8, Number 2 (Winter 1997-1998), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0802/article_698.shtml

 

Betts K, A Conversation With Jean Raspail*, (Reprint) Volume 15, Number 4 (Summer 2005), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1504/article_1340.shtml (* Steve Bannon’s favourite)

 

Birrell R, Australian Nation-State, Volume 7, Number 2 (Winter 1996-1997), The Social Contract Press, https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0702/article_615.shtml

 

Bricker D & Ibbitson J, 2019, Empty Planet, Signal Books, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet

 

Haney-Lopez I, 2014, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, Oxford University Press USA, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17847530-dog-whistle-politics

 

Jaco S, Anti-Immigration campaign has begun Washington Post May 8 1977 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/05/08/anti-immigration-campaign-begun/

 

MacLean N, 2017, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-chains

 

Mayer J, 2016, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Doubleday, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money

 

Pearce F, 2010, The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future, Beacon Press, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7788578-the-coming-population-crash

 

van Onselen L, MacroBusiness (Australia) many articles about immigration, NOM net overseas migration, international education and population growth using research of Birrell and Betts https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/author/leith/

 

For more articles and blogs about Australian politics, demography, population growth and white nationalism click through.