We’ve all heard that human overpopulation is a crisis. In 2017, Bill Nye warned us about the planet’s “people problem,” and that same decade David Attenborough told us that “we are a plague on the Earth.” Project Drawdown, an environmental nonprofit, lists slower population growth among its top climate solutions.
And now, fertility rates everywhere are falling.
In most of the world, the birthrate is already below the average of two births per two adults needed to stabilize the population. By the 2080s, according to United Nations projections, the global population will be declining. Then change could come fast: a population that shrinks by two-thirds each century. That’s what would happen in a future in which, for every two adults, there were 1.5 kids.
Depopulation might seem welcome. It is true that people caused today’s environmental problems. And it is right to prioritize the challenges of climate change, global poverty and inequality. In our careers, we’ve worked for aggressive decarbonization, reproductive freedom, caste and gender equity and better public health and health care. But falling birthrates are not the answer to our world’s problems. Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.
Over the past few decades, there has been important progress on environmental priorities like particulate air pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion and acid rain. In each case, progress came from ending or changing the destructive activity part of people’s destructive activity. Not the people part.
Take China’s smog crisis. In 2013, with the country’s population growing and economy industrializing, particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants and vehicles darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the “airpocalypse.” The U.S. Embassy gave the air quality in central Beijing a rating of 755 — on an air quality scale that ran from 0 to 500.
In the decade that followed, China grew by roughly 50 million people — more than the entire population of Canada. But air pollution didn’t scale up as the population grew; it declined by half. Leaders and the public in China decided that the smog was unacceptable. The authorities put into effect new regulations and requirements on coal-fired power plants and heavy industry. The government devoted new resources to monitoring and enforcement. Many polluting factories and power plants adopted cleaner technologies already in use elsewhere. Others were shut down.
And it wasn’t only China. Global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen over the last decade, even as the world’s population grew by over 750 million people. These facts challenge the old, sticky idea, popularized in large part by Paul R. Ehrlich’s best-selling 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” that the way to reduce pollution is to reduce humanity. Ehrlich’s book, published with the support of the Sierra Club, declared the only options were “population control or race to oblivion” and floated the idea of poisoning public water supplies with sterilants.
Although overpopulation fears still linger in public debate, most environmental leaders have moved on from the idea that “population control” is a solution to anything.
Of course, someone might say that, in the face of a challenge as huge as climate change, depopulation could at least help.
The problem with such thinking is that the global population is a big ship, slow to turn. Imagine that, in 2030, voices calling for voluntary human extinction persuaded everyone to do something hardly thinkable: agree to skip a generation — no babies for 20 years. What would that do to humanity’s carbon footprint?
Less than one might expect, and far less than we need. The global population in 2050 would be smaller than today’s, yes, but only by about 14 percent. If that were our whole plan to reduce emissions — if we froze progress on policy and technology, to ask only what difference population could make — then emissions in 2050 would be about 14 percent lower, too. That would be a failure, slower than the pace of per-person emissions reductions actually achieved in Europe and the United States over the past 20 years. And, of course, any real shift in birthrates would accomplish far less.
We’re not just working against pollution, we’re racing against time.
Worries about overpopulation aren’t only about the environment. Overpopulation doomers like Thomas Robert Malthus in the 18th century and Ehrlich in the 20th warned of famine and scarcity. But on every continent, more and better food is available per person than when humanity numbered half as many. In every country, life expectancy now is greater than 50 years ago. Of every four children who would have died then, three now live. And the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from two billion in 1990 to under 700 million today.
It is not a coincidence that the world has grown more prosperous while it has grown more populous. Technological and social advancements, improved quality of life — these things didn’t come automatically, simply because time marched forward. People had to achieve them.
We know more than people did 200 years ago, because more minds have been at work, before us and alongside us, discovering, refining and sharing knowledge. We know better how to organize a kindergarten, a cancer drug trial and a parliamentary democracy. We learned it together, as one generation built on the advances of the last, as a mentee expanded on the ideas of a mentor, as team members discovered together what none could alone.
Strangers’ lives are good for them and good for you — even when neither you nor they are innovating. Whenever people need and want things, they make it more likely that you will get what you need and want. That’s true if what you want is good public transportation (because a network of trains and buses can’t operate without enough riders), or green energy infrastructure built on the work of scientists and engineers across generations and borders, or a vaccine for a novel virus, or a cure for a rare disease that only the niche medical specialization of a big world could produce.
Another person may sometimes be your competition. Other people, over the long run, are a source of abundance.
This is not an argument for endless population growth. It’s a progressive case for avoiding depopulation and stabilizing the population instead, while respecting the environment and everything else that matters.
To see people as win-win is not to absolve humanity for its abuse of the Earth. Nor does it mean endorsing the right’s narrow pronatalist agenda, with its nostalgia for outdated gender roles and its blood-and-soil fixation on American birthrates. And it does not imply that any individuals are making a mistake in their lives when they choose few or no children. For a long time, societies have reaped the benefits of a big, populous world, while asking parents, and especially mothers, to shoulder the costs. It could take a very long time — generations — to undo that.
No one yet knows how to avoid depopulation — not researchers, not policy experts, not politicians. The issue is still too new. Governments have tried tax credits, child care policies and paid parental leave. None have brought birthrates back to a level that would stabilize the population.
And yet change is possible. None of us are born with our hopes and dreams for family life seared into our souls. Women and men decades from now could want something different than people want today — if they formed their plans in societies where parenting was easier, fairer, simpler to combine with other aspirations for a good life.
We hope that such a change happens someday. If so, it would be in the same way that air and water pollution has been controlled in many places. It would be in the same gritty way that climate change may eventually be confronted. After decades of research and advocacy, after many careers devoted to overcoming difficulties, and after many political fights over what, if anything, should change — after all of that, and after failures and reversals along the way, we might succeed.
Michael Geruso and Dean Spears are the authors of the forthcoming book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People.” They are associate professors of economics at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Geruso was a senior economist in the Biden White House. Dr. Spears is director of a nonprofit seeking to improve children’s health and survival in India.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Population Bust Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis appeared first on New York Times.
