Noah Rothman writes for National Review Online about the poor arguments emerging from those who advocate population control.
Today, the movement dedicated to limiting the growth of the human species by means of repressive governmental controls is celebrating a rare species of victory — rare because their cause’s urtext, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, is hopelessly flawed. Their victory is such only insofar as repressive governmental controls will not be necessary to curb the growth of the human population. We’ve voluntarily defused the “population bomb” by simply declining to breed.
A recent study commissioned by the Club of Rome projects that the global human population will continue to grow into the middle of the 21st century to reach roughly 8.8 billion. At that point, it will crest and begin to decline rapidly. Sounds bad, right? Wrong! “The new forecasts are good news for the global environment,” the Guardian reported.
Indeed, we should seek to hasten humanity’s collapse. “The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels,” the outlet breathlessly relates. After all, as one of the study’s authors observed, there’s plenty of work to be done to address the “paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”
This Malthusian misanthropy is common among those who remain beholden to a defunct theory of human development that has nevertheless justified some of the most egregious eugenicist abuses that have occurred since World War II.
Surveying the demographic landscape in Japan, where the workforce is shrinking, deaths far outpace births, and the population is expected to shrink by about 20 percent by the middle of the century, Time magazine’s Ciara Nugent found a lot to love.
“I want to be clear that population control is not the solution to climate change,” Nugent wrote in January. “But it doesn’t make sense for developed countries to ignore the positive role that their shrinking populations could play in the climate fight.”
