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EARLIR THIS MONTH, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the US, had become a father again:
“The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse,” Musk said in 2019, referring to the evidence of multiple countries around the world experiencing an accelerating decline in birth rates.
Musk believes that “people are going to have to revive the idea having children as a kind of social duty otherwise, civilisation will just die,” he said in a 2014 interview, per biographer Walter Isaacson.
Vice-president JD Vance agrees.
“I want more babies in the United States of America,” he said in his first address to the United States after becoming vice president.
In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritise projects that ‘give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average’.
A new concept of ‘pronatalism’ is gaining momentum. But it is a false god.
Pronatalism can be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good whereas declining birth rates are a threat to national stability and growth.
While the United Nations reports that the rate of new people being born is definitely slowing down, the global population is expected to continue growing for many more decades.
The real question that is not being asked by pronatalists is whether the global population has already surpassed the ability of the planet to sustain it.
The reality is that growth always ends. There will come a point where the population grows beyond the ability of the planet to sustain it, and there are clear warnings that we have already passed that point.
The UN expects the global population to reach 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. By 2100, the organisation expects there will be 11.2 billion people on the planet.
These figures take into account births and deaths. What is not being fed into the equation is the way in which human growth is finally bumping up against the physical limits of our biosphere. Sooner or later, one way or another, these limits will drive a radical transformation of human civilisation.
Many people assume that the human population can continue to grow exponentially forever. Musk in particular seems to think that we will soon be populating Mars and that will solve the problem of a trashed planet as we move onwards and upwards.
But not only is the population growing exponentially – so too are human greenhouse gas emissions, at a rate of 2.2% per year. Before James Watt patented his steam engine in 1781, the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration was 280 ppm, with a climate that was stable.
At 2.2% annual growth, the cumulative growth of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is doubling every 30 years. By 2014, CO2 concentrations had risen to 400 ppm and three decades later in 2044 are predicted to reach 520 ppm.
In other words, growth starts slowly, but the early 21st century has seen a sea change in growth of greenhouse gas emissions that continues on an explosive trajectory of doubling approximately every three decades.
Peter Kalmus, climate scientist and author of Being the Change (2017) sums up the reality by saying this is why he is ‘certain that global fossil fuelled industrial civilisation will soon end, one way or another.’
The global population growth peaked at 2.2% per year in 1963, the year I was born when there were 3.2 billion people, equivalent to 190,000 new humans per day. By 2014, growth had decreased to 1.1% per year, but because there were now 7 billion people, this translated to 217,000 additional people each day.
The main reason for the slowing of birth rates is the empowerment of women with improved access to both education and contraception. When women gain control over family planning and have career options, they tend to delay having families and have fewer children.
However, the UN predicts population growth to 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100 with growth of about 0.1% per year. The global replacement rate is 2.3 children per woman: if no person had more than two children, the global population would steadily come back down to earth.
At this point, there is a systemic problem. Falling fertility rates challenge the global economy, but continued population growth is unsustainable.
The system that supports continued existence on the planet is called the biosphere. The biosphere provides food, water, oxygen, waste removal, a stable and temperature climate and protection from harmful solar radiation. These systems do not exist in isolation but are powerfully interconnected. You can’t grow food without water, and the distribution of water across the globe, as it is becoming increasingly apparent with the increased frequency and intensity of droughts and floods globally, is dependent on a stable climate. The population has already grown to a point that has put these life-supporting systems under pressure.
Kalmus questions whether we can sustain the amount of food we grow indefinitely. “Nonhuman animals are quite literally under relentless systematic attack from a mechanised and militarised global economy of nearly 8 billion humans; but ultimately the only way to avoid the sixth mass extinction is to address the underlying causes.”
If eight billion humans (living and eating as we’re actually living and eating today) is beyond carrying capacity, what is the sustainable limit?
Kalmus states that some evidence supports the Earth’s carrying capacity at about 4 billion. This is based on the average land required to support one average person globally, including ecosystem services. A paper in Population and Environment (1994) suggested that the 1994 global population of 5.5 billion “clearly exceeded the capacity of the Earth to sustain it.”
Obviously the carrying capacity would increase with more people being vegetarian. Eliminating meat consumption would double the carrying capacity to 8 billion and eliminating food waste (about a third of food is wasted) would potentially increase carrying capacity by another quarter – about one or two billion people.
Exponential population growth in the last century has been intrinsic to intensive agriculture that involves high yielding crops, irrigation, nitrogen fertiliser and chemical pesticides.
Now genetically modified organisms have been added to the mix. But intensive agriculture comes at a cost, with the biosphere under increasing threat.
The real question about global fertility rates is not the threats to national economies and society from falling births, but the absolute imperative for the fertility rate to fall exponentially- particularly in countries with the highest carbon footprint.
Countries such as China, the US, India and Russia need to reduce both their populations and their carbon footprint if we are to have the remotest chance of preventing a global economy that is based on exponential growth from eating the planet alive.
Rather that focusing on ways to maintain consumerism and endless growth maintained by high fertility rates, Trump and his allies would do well to focus all their energies on searching for ways that societies can live on Earth in alignment with the fantastically complex biosphere we were born into.
Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork.
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Great article. The anti science, pro Trump/Musk brigade will be along soon to tell the medical expert she’s wrong because Elon told them so.
@Anthony Curran: Maga stupidly is taking itself out anyway. And the tornado in the Maga state of Oklahoma done a great job
@Anthony Curran: she is wrong though. The UN projects that the world population will peak at approx. 10.2 billion by 2100 not 11.2 billion as stated in this article. The UN did project 11.2 by 2100 about 10 years. This shows the dramatic effect of birth rate collapse. Other population experts claim that it will peak at closer to 9.5 billion in the 2080′s.
@Tomas Barrett: Half the population will be wiped out by extreme weather events by then
@Mike B: So billions people are going to die from weather events?? Ah….no. I think you need to look at actual scientific research not whatever rabbit hole you’ve gone down.
@Anthony Curran: is she an expert on cosmology too?
You will trigger the great replacement conspiracy theories, they can’t phantom that the planet is overpopulating at unsustainable levels
@Housing Hunger Games: It is overpopulation disproportionately in developing countries who already cannot handle or feed their existing people. Our own countries problems with illegal immigration is directly linked to this. You’d be the worst in the world though if you suggested family planning education to help prevent it continuing.
@Longlin: Funnily enough, family planning education *was* being done in developing countries, courtesy of investment from USAID, but Elon decided he didn’t like it, so it was shut down. Make sure you say “thank you Elon” the next time you’re giving out about immigration from these places.
@Jason Memail: and Conor giving out about immigration to 40 million Irish immigrants in America!
@Longlin: developing countries can feed their population. Ethiopia had a population of 30million in the 1984 famine. It now has a population of 130 million. The machine gun and civil war is responsible for more famines than climate change is. Parts or Sudan are suffering famine because of civil war. When they shoot the farmers and their animals there’s nobody to farm the land productively, therefore no food for the people and the supply chain breaks down. The developed world is only two weeks away from famine if the electricity or fuel supply stopped for a month.
@P. V. Aglue: Ethiopia didn’t feed itself. I’m close to 50 years old and don’t remember a time when Ireland wasn’t feeding the “poor babies”. We weren’t alone in feeding them but played a significant part. The thing is, we’re now feeding them in Africa AND housing and feeding them here – all while their population is increasing far faster than ours. Not sustainable.
@Housing Hunger Games: replacement and overpopulation are two different things .
@Housing Hunger Games: Tell me again why it isn’t bad that population replacement numbers are collapsing in 1st world countries, but at the same time, there is exponential poplation growth in 3rd world countries, especially the likes of Nigeria and practically every Muslim country AND the unsustainable populations there tend to illegally move to the western 1st world countries- thereby resulting in a net increase in populations there (a large number of whom are unskilled).
@Jason Memail: obviously the programmes weren’t a rip roaring success if there’s 10s of millions fleeing into Europe, not saying the closing of usaid is a good thing however they were spending funds on mad stuff, all government agencies should have signs in each office stating “you are spending taxpayers money, i.e. your money” cause let’s face it, none of us like paying tax.
@Thomas Sheridan: we had an election, no one cares
@Social Guy: Exactly, everyone giving them aid.
Helping to train in crop farming,small business, Co op etc , but obviously just depending on aid, ruin there own countries and they saunter here, and looked after, with our taxes, while we work. Too many depending on our system that can not look after its own
@Housing Hunger Games: I would say everyone that’s trying to buy a house cares or anyone depending on an income from all the rural hotels that have been repurposed to housing the illêgal immigrants hoarder would also care.
Your average Shari Fein dude in your HAP funded home and lifetime dole obviously wouldn’t care. But the election was hardly a great success for your average open-borders advocate. Mr Lowry was elected as the most powerful politician in the government, instead case you hadn’t noticed.
Good article. I thought I’d read that at the point of 9.5 billion the population growth was going to slow down and it wasn’t likely to continue at the same trajectory. Any person or group that starts dictating about having more children should not be given airtime
@JC O’Connachain: in the west birth rates are plummeting and the population is aging. The costs of pensions, healthcare, care for the elderly will rise massively in the coming decades and may bankrupt many states unless they radically overhaul pension. The only hope we have AI and technology in general. Failing that, the low birth rates in the west will pose a very very big problem in 40 years time
@JC O’Connachain: It’s mismanaged countries that are having large families
@Tom D: in fairness hope in technology is not a faint hope. Judging by the current population levels, only achieved thanks to technology, we’d be better off putting faith in technology than having say, another mass.
In the last 50 years the animal population has been halved and us humans have more than doubled.It took tens of thousands of years for there to be a billion of us and then only a few decades for us to be approaching ten billion.That can’t be right in way,shape or form.
@Johnny King: 96% of the mass of animals on the planet is humans and our livestock. 96%
Just 4% is everything other living thing.
@Ronan Mc: The figures are correct, however they are relating to the biomass of mammals including human animals, the 4% referring to wild mammals.
Fungi for instance represent a much larger portion of biomass.
@Athena: yeah but fungi aren’t slashing and burning forests and emitting CO2
@Ronan Mc: give them time.
Not everyone is cut out to be a parent. Really, really think about it before you decide to have children. Because your mates are doing it or your parents did it by your age are not reasons to do it. Ditto because celebrities and social media stars are at it.
With all the knowledge and advice in the world available at our fingertips 24/7, take all the time and read all the advice you can before you decide.
@Ronan Mc: Globally, Pewresearch “the average Muslim lives in the biggest household (6.4 people), followed by the average Hindu (5.7), Christian (4.5), Buddhist (3.9), “none” (3.7) and Jew (3.7).”
Pronatlism? Won’t apply to the incelboi Arbour Hill Trumpettes in mammy’s boxroom – unless single socks start gestating. Waaaaaaaah! Mammmy!
The opposite is true? Goodbye western civilisation with our dropping birth rates….that’s the truth.
@N.F. Court: Because Catholics have longer marriages and more children history may repeat itself. In history it was was two Catholic kingdoms and monarchs Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand of Spain that had to preserve western values by driving the Muslim armies out of Europe.
Yet we’re told we need mass immigration because we don’t have enough workers.
@Eric Gaffney: Poland , Hungary and other Eastern European countries are remaining homogeneous and they are surviving just fine . This article deliberately misrepresents the natalism of Musk ,Orban and others . It is about stopping population collapse in the West , not increasing population indefinitely .
So if birthrates continue to fall then eventually the writing is on the wall… Japan & Korea are prime examples.
@Matt D: Applying Darwin’s observations would it be that a weeding out based on breeding out materialism and woke behavior will correct and improve rather than relying on famine and disease.
Civilisation is not at risk of ending from Co2 as this article suggests, enough with the scaremongering. We don’t even know if Co2 poses any specific threat or whether it is simply a feedback mechanism to other climatic factors like solar radiation (which has natural cycles) volcanic activity, water vapour, ocean currents and heat distribution. We also know that the world is not as risk of overpopulation. Back in the 1970s, the same false rhetoric was spread by bestselling books like The Population Bomb. Since then, the number of people in the world has doubled and nothing has happened. The reason why people need to have more children is because pension systems are on the brink of collapse. There’s not enough young people joining the workforce to pay for all the elderly people retiring.
@William Jennings: “since then, the number of people in the world has doubled and nothing has happened”? Nothing has happened except for things like, oh, you know, an increase in food production to keep those people alive requiring more water, more land, more animals, more fertilizer, more methane. More people on the planet who travel in cars, on planes, work, live, consume. More oil, more gas, more fuel. More, more, more, of everything is required and you’re telling us that there’s zero impact from this? Are you high?
@Jason Memail: I stand by my claims and you are simply incorrect. history shows that agricultural advancements consistently outpace population growth. The Green Revolution disproved Malthusian fears and modern farming techniques continue to increase yields while using less land, water and inputs per capita. In the 1960s, one hectare produced around 2 tonnes of wheat. Today it produces over 6 tonnes in developed nations. Food scarcity today is caused by political instability, trade barriers, and poor distribution, not population growth. Countries like the US, Brazil and Australia are food exporters because they produce more than they need, even with growing populations. The claim that “more people means more water” assumes no improvements in water efficiency, which is false.
@Jason Memail: Nations like Israel, Singapore, and the UAE recycle over 90% of their water, eliminating water scarcity concerns. This can easily be replicated across the globe. Drip irrigation reduces agricultural water waste. Old flood irrigation methods wasted 50% of water, modern techniques use a fraction of that and only waste 8%. The claim that more people means more fuel consumption ignores the massive improvements in fuel efficiency. Since the 1990s, airplanes have reduced their fuel consumption by 45%. The idea that methane is dangerous is also misleading. Unlike Co2 which can linger in the atmosphere for centuries, methane has a shorter lifespan, about 10-12 years before it breaks down, mainly into water vapor. Its long-term contribution to the environment is still not clear.
@William Jennings: Make civil servants pay into the pension kitty and remove their privileges. Problem whilst not solved, might be halved.
@Athena: what are the benifits?
@William Jennings: More generalism to mask the true situation. Yes, airplanes have become more efficient since the 1990s, but has the number of planes remained the same? No. 50 fuel efficient planes still require more fuel than 10 older models.
@Jason Memail: It’s the so-called “Jevons Paradox” which states that fuel efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce fuel consumption.
Planes being cheaper to run just leads to more flights and more fuel use. Cars being more fuel efficient has led to bigger cars, houses being energy efficient has just led to bigger houses (at least in the US and other sparsely populated countries like Australia).
@William Jennings: at the same time there are physical limits. It would be better not to encounter them.
@Athena: That will only make a small dent in the overall problem. There’s no avoiding the issue of a lack of people paying into the pension system, no matter how we try to twist arms. When pension systems started in the 1930s, the purpose of them was to provide a bonus for the very few number of people that lived beyond 65 (the average life expectancy across the Western world was only 58 to begin with). There were 160 workers per retiree, meaning that the system conformably stayed solvent. Now that number is down to 2.8 workers per retiree and pension systems are operating like a Ponzi scheme. Current beneficiaries are being paid out of the new money coming into the system. Unless people have more children, we will bankrupt our pension system and no one will get anything that they paid in.
@Jason Memail: Your argument is once again very flawed. What actually matters is the net environmental impact per passenger or per unit of fuel burned and that impact has been decreasing due to massive improvements in fuel efficiency. Airlines are cramming more passengers into each plane, meaning fewer flights are needed to move the same number of people. The core assumption in your argument is that “more planes” automatically means “more fuel burned at an unsustainable rate.” This ignores a number of facts. Direct flight routes reduce unnecessary fuel consumption. Huge improvements in air traffic management cut down on inefficient holding patterns and detours. Aviation has become so efficient that overall emissions from air travel are not growing nearly as fast as the number of flights.
Housing shortages play their part?
“Musk in particular seems to think that we will soon be populating Mars and that will solve the problem of a trashed planet as we move onwards and upwards.”
With respect, no he doesn’t.
The concept of establishing human settlement on Mars or anywhere else is not envisaged as a better alternative to Earth.
Earth faces multiple risks, not just from ourselves. All of our civilisational eggs are in one basket, so to speak. Having a ‘backup’ on Mars is the concept Musk is going for.
Most scientists agree that in terms of humanities long term goals, this is a worthy endeavour. The disagreement concerns when to begin this project and how much to invest in it.
@DAN TEDSON: agreed .. it is 100% certain that the human race will go extinct if it stays only on earth ..100%.
Really it’s all about men being able to command women and sort of implies we should be dumber to be better which is ridiculous, from both ‘sides’.
The ability of CO2 to radiate is inversely logarithmic to its concentration. In other words for every doubling of CO2 the radiation is half of that of the previous doubling.
I love how this is positioned like you are all in one camp or all in another. Both Musk and this author are wrong. The truth is in the middle as it always is.
Population collapse will end the western world as it currently is setup. It’s a ponzi supported by infinite growth and a pension system that is bankrupt .. without more people being added at the bottom it falls over.
The green doomers forget that the environment will be fine. It doesn’t care about us even a little. 95% or all life has died out multiple times in the past without humans .. stop pretending it’s about protecting the environment .. its about our survival as a race.
Musk thinks more people are needed to ensure this .. greens think less people are needed. The goal is the same. One pro life .. the other is terrifying.
have your say