POPULATION BOMB OR BUST?

For centuries, assorted obsessive doomsters — from Thomas Malthus to Al Gore to the Club of Rome — have issued dire warnings that the world is careening into an overpopulated nightmare. U.S. biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth publication warned in 1972 of a population crisis within a century, and Al Gore in 2014 called for “voluntary measures to lower birthrates around the globe.”

Two vital new books from Canadian writers on the alleged population crisis suggest we can all relax.

The latest, released this month, is Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, by pollster Darrell Bricker and newspaper columnist John Ibbitson. They argue that global fertility rates are declining in all regions and that the world’s population could peak around nine billion in 2040. By the end of the 21st century, the number of people in the world could be no larger than today’s 7.5 billion. Conclusion: There’s nothing to worry about.

The second book, released last fall, is Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change, by Toronto academics Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak. They argue that a growing world population over the past centuries has generated great prosperity that has dramatically elevated the quality of human life on earth. More people has resulted in more productivity, more innovation and ever-rising standards of living. Conclusion: There’s nothing to worry about.

The two books, both packed with solid references and analysis come from almost opposite perspectives to reach their positions, but both provide the average reader with challenging insights into the dominant policy issues of our time: population, environment, climate, growth and prosperity.

In Empty Planet, Bricker and Ibbitson have obviously chosen a title that is sensationally inaccurate to sell books. It also reflects the brilliantly breezy style they use to make their case that the world is not lurching into an overpopulation crisis. They rip into the usual lineup of history’s failed prognosticators, from Malthus (“completely, utterly wrong”) to dreadful Hollywood epics (Charlton Heston’s Soylent Green, among others) to the Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth in 1972 called for “drastic curbs to population and capital growth, to prevent collapse” based on computer projections that forecast more people would deplete natural resources and bring on “a gen-

TWO VITAL NEW BOOKS SUGGEST WE CAN ALL RELAX.

eral collapse of civilization as we know it.” As Bricker and Ibbitson note, “Obviously, none of this has happened.”

What is happening instead, they argue, is a decline in fertility rates around the globe that will ultimately lead to slower population growth as the world’s people, for various reasons, have fewer children. The result of fewer people, the authors argue, will be “a world to admire. It will be cleaner, safer, quieter. The oceans will start to heal and the atmosphere cool — or at least stop heating.” As more and more people move to urban centres, they will enjoy a “cleaner, healthier world.”

Whether Bricker and Ibbitson are right or wrong in their analysis and conclusions is beyond the scope of this column. But it is a solid, well-footnoted review of the issues — one that at minimum suggests it is lunacy for us to be rushing into Green New Deals and other radical policy directions based on doomsday projections.

The same message is delivered by Desrochers and Szurmak in Population Bombed!, but from a different perspective. They go after some of the same characters from the history of population alarmism (Malthus, Ehrlich, etc.) but they also cast a much wider net and bring them down with greater academic firepower with an arsenal that is more detailed and effective. Their conclusion, however, ultimately contradicts Empty Planet’s celebration of the prospect of population decline.

Desrochers and Szurmak argue that Malthus and his successors have been wrong in their belief that increasing populations lead to resource depletion, human misery and the ultimate destruction of life on earth. On the contrary, more people increase the potential for human achievement and welfare.

They cite what they call “a few uncontroversial data points.” In the last 200 years, the world’s population jumped from one billion to 7.5 billion. Over that time, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 84 per cent in 1820 to well below 10 per cent today. Global life expectancy averages rose from 30 years in 1900 to 70 years today. Food production, environmental conditions and energy efficiency have all soared as population expanded.

Population Bombed! in fact explodes the premise in Empty Planet, which in its own way swallows the Malthusian argument that more population is bad for people and the planet as more resources are consumed and fossil-fuel consumption ruins the environment.

Reached for an interview, Desrochers agreed that declining fertility rates are certainly a factor that might lower population growth rates below those projected by the United Nations and other agencies. But how much of an impact declining fertility will have on future population is a matter of scientific and journalistic speculation.

The conclusion in Population Bombed! is that more people will bring greater achievement, greater progress, cleaner environments, better technology and innovation. And if I were asked to choose between the two books, I would pick Population Bombed! over Empty Planet. But both are great starting points for anyone trying to unravel the conflicts and controversies plaguing modern environmental economics, science and politics.