By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--August 14, 2023
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With all the talk these days about depopulation and how the WEF members are promoting reduction in food supplies and "vaccines" that reduce fertility and kill young people, it seems prudent to ask just how many people are really necessary? Is the world overpopulated? What is the right number of people? How do we know?
The idea that Earth is overpopulated has been around for a long time. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, thought in the '20s and ‘30s that the world would be better off without blacks, the mentally retarded, and other people she considered "undesirables".
Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring" in 1962. Her work was a masterful bit of propaganda against the use of DDT. Malaria had, for decades, been one of the most deadly diseases in tropical environments, killing hundreds of thousands to millions of people each year. DDT, as one of the safest and most effective pesticides ever developed, was being used to eradicate the mosquitoes that carried malaria, and had almost succeeded by the time Carson's book was published.
Carson, using bad science, and worse emotional fear mongering, managed, almost single handedly, to halt the use of DDT. As a result, malaria enjoyed a resurgence, returning to kill as many and more as it had before DDT. It is only incidental, I'm sure, that it just so happened that the people dying of malaria were the largely brown, black and yellow populations living in those tropical environments.
Since then, we have Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" - a book published in 1968 that ignited a worldwide fear of overpopulation. Based on overly simplistic Malthusian ideas of exponential population growth and collapse, Ehrlich forecast disaster unless population growth was curbed and the total population reduced. His was one of the first works to exploit fear of catastrophic population growth to effect social change.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth" which was one of the first works to use computer modeling to forecast disaster in the form of overconsumption of resources by an increasing population. Their thesis was that a growing population seeking a high standard of living would deplete critical resources, leading to a collapse of civilization due to pollution, lack of food supplies, and environmental destruction. Since their results came from a computer, they must be true and valid, and so we should do all we can to reduce resource use and reduce the population to avoid catastrophe.
These, and other works like them, were the influential ideas that formed the thinking of most of today's WEF members. The recent employment of an hypothetical human caused climate crisis, based solely on the results of often wildly inaccurate computer models, has only served to confirm their fears.
In their minds, it is clear that there are too many people alive, that there will be too many people in the future, that we cannot continue consuming resources at our present rate, and that the only viable solution is to drastically reduce world population. Their computers say so.
But are those things really true?
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Julian Simon wrote "The Ultimate Resource" in 1981 where he proposed the theory that the ultimate resource was human ingenuity and the ability to not only solve problems, but also to render them irrelevant. He proposed that human population would level off and ultimately decline as people became more affluent and developed other interesting things to do in addition to making babies.
In effect, he said that more people led to more new ideas led to better solutions led to unanticipated developments that effectively eliminated old problems entirely. In the 40+ years since his book came out, the predictions and forecasts of the doomsayers of the population/resource/climate catastrophe proponents have all failed, while those of Mr. Simon have proven correct and even understated
Unfortunately, the doomsayers have a bigger megaphone. Predicting disaster attracts much more attention than predicting abundance.
Since 1981, world poverty has fallen dramatically, world health has greatly improved, food insecurity has almost been eliminated globally, infant mortality was cut almost in half, the air is cleaner, the world has become over 30% greener, pollution has been substantially reduced, world literacy increased significantly, most people are safer than at any time before in history, all at the same time that world population has grown.
All this has been made possible by human ingenuity facilitated by large numbers of people thinking new thoughts. Fewer people, fewer new thoughts. More people, more new ideas. Some of these new ideas not only solve problems, but actually make problems irrelevant.
Consider Mark Twain. He served as a riverboat captain for a while in the mid 1800s and wrote about his experiences in "Life on the Mississippi". At that time, he wrote of the concern that there would not be enough wood to support river trade. There was a problem of how to obtain enough wood fuel for future needs, and much thought was given to solutions involving planting fast growing trees, and how to increase efficiency of the steam engines. Soon, though, the problem of getting enough wood was made moot by use of a new fuel —coal—that worked much better than wood.
More recently, concerns regarding impending shortages of iron and copper have been allayed by introduction of aluminum and ceramics that have taken the place of steel and copper wires in many applications, reducing and even eliminating the need for iron and copper. Innovations in farming have greatly increased farm productivity while eliminating problems with erosion, parasites, and other issues that seemed intractable at the time. Even many social issues have been beneficially affected by increases in communication resulting from near universal use of cellphones and the internet.
While some of these innovations have rendered old problems irrelevant, they have introduced new problems. Some problems can be solved by a kind of linear thinking, but many of them will be rendered moot by entirely new ideas that not only are unanticipated, but that cannot be anticipated.
What it comes down to is that we need everyone just to have enough people available to generate the new ideas that will solve our problems. Some will say that there are all those people who aren't contributing new ideas, and are actually just consuming the resources the problem solvers will need. Think of all those useless hungry mouths in Africa and Asia and India that contribute nothing but poverty and misery.
To these I would reply, first, there is no way to know who will produce the ideas that we will need in the future, and second, that even if they are not generating ideas, everyone in their own way is supporting those who do. Even the ones who seem useless or worse, contribute to our current level of civilization, often in unseen and unrecognized ways.
One might even say that whatever level of civilization we have can just barely be supported by the population available. Reduce the population and we reduce civilization. Go too far, and civilization collapses, perhaps even beyond recovery.
All the WEF population reduction folk have no understanding of what consequences will follow their plans. In their arrogance, they think they know, but history has shown both the power and the prevalence of unintended consequences and how even the most appealing schemes can go awry. Robert Burns said it well in his ode "To a Mouse". and the ancient Greeks even had a name for the condition: hubris.
It is worth noting, that among those who claim there are too many people and that the population needs to be culled, few, if any, of them are volunteering to contribute to population reduction by example. Just a thought.
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David Robb is a practicing scientist and CTO of a small firm developing new security technologies for detection of drugs and other contraband. Dave has published extensively in TheBlueStateConservative, and occasionally in American Thinker.