Scientists call for world’s population to be cut in half despite warnings of demographic collapse

A study published last week calls for the earth’s population to halve to four billion to achieve a “sustainable” planet. 

“We show that slowing and gradually reversing population growth to ∼4 billion or less by 2200, while moderating per capita impacts, is the path toward sustainability,” about a dozen co-authors wrote. “Per capita impacts” refers to people’s resource and energy usage.

The authors argued that data shows population growth leads to a decline in wildlife abundance, an increase in CO2 emissions, an increase in energy consumption, a greater ecological footprint, greater freshwater use, mineral extraction, plastics production, and pesticide use.

“Global environmental problems are caused by people, nothing else. The more of us there are, the greater our overall economic demands and the greater the associated environmental problems,” the authors asserted.

- Advertisement -

EXPLORE MORE

Count Binface Is Making A Campaign Promise That Every Sega Fan Can Get Behind

The campaign season is heating up, and by now, you're probably used…

WATCH: The staggering human cost of abortion in Canada since 1969

Priests for Life Canada is encouraging Canadians to share a video from…

ManoMano data breach impacted 38 Million customer accounts

European DIY platform ManoMano suffered a data breach via a third-party provider,…

Judge allows taxpayer-funded abortions to resume in Pennsylvania temporarily

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — Commonwealth Court Judge Matthew Wolf has declined to allow…

ClawJacked flaw exposed OpenClaw users to data theft

“ClawJacked” flaw let malicious sites hijack OpenClaw AI agents to steal data;…

Finnish MP convicted for quoting Bible appeals to top European court

HELSINKI (ADF International) — The Finnish parliamentarian criminally convicted by Finland’s Supreme Court…

They draw the conclusion, therefore, that “in the long run, population growth itself is unsustainable.” 

The study relies on data from the United Nations, which predicts that humanity will continue down a path of massive population growth until the year 2100, peaking at a high of over 11 billion and a low of 9 billion. The current population is about 8 billion. Even according to these projections, population growth will be much slowed this century. Its “high” projection, however, is starkly different from that of other demographers, who point out that the earth’s population is fast approaching below-replacement numbers.

While the authors acknowledge that the rate of population growth has already been slowing, and that as of 2024, the world fertility rate was 2.2, only very slightly above replacement rate, they do not point out the likelihood of impending population collapse.

For example, a demographic study published in The Lancet found that the world is only a few decades away from a sharp and consequential population decline.

According to the authors, the UN population projections mean the earth’s sustainability is intolerably threatened. They, therefore, recommend accelerating toward the ideal of sub-replacement rate population through the provision of “reproductive health services,” which typically involves abortion as well as contraception, and “by improving girls’ educational opportunities, especially in poorer countries.

They also call for consumption levels to be reined in, such as through “long-accepted standards on land use, curbs on pollution, energy efficiency targets, and quotas limiting amounts and means of extraction of resources ranging from fish to forest.” They believe more of such measures, and “sometimes stronger ones,” need to be taken “at the local, national, or international levels.”

The idea that the world’s population must be restrained in order to sustain its existing people is hotly contested, and studies on the earth’s carrying capacity vary widely in their estimates. While 20 studies say it is 8 billion people or less (the current world population is about 8 billion), 14 studies peg the world’s carrying capacity at twice that amount, 16 billion, and 18 other studies notch that number way up, with seven studies estimating the earth can sustain as many as 64 billion people, and one study estimating it at 1,024 billion people.

Dean Spears, an economist at the Population Research Center of the University of Texas, co-authored a paper rare for its estimation of world population projections beyond 2100, showing that in any of three scenarios in which the world population remains below replacement rate, the number of the world’s inhabitants would rapidly plummet to a “very small” number. Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson, authors of the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, have asserted that once global population decline begins in what they say will occur in three decades, “it will never end.”

“Even if below-replacement fertility is sustained only for a few centuries, the size of the global population could become very small,” Spears and his fellow authors maintain. This means that a whole slew of harmful effects to society will follow population decline, likely including a decline in basic services and infrastructure; unemployment; a decline in innovation; insufficient end-of-life care for the elderly; and a decline in mental health.

Even the World Economic Forum (WEF) has admitted that the effects of population collapse will be “severe.” 

Jordan Peterson noted in an interview with podcaster Chris Williamson that “dire predictions” about the state of the world by the year 2000 made by the globalist Club of Rome based on ideas of overpopulation have not only been way off the mark but are the inverse of what actually happened. Peterson explained that the Club of Rome predicted “riots and mass starvation … and all the things you hear about climate change, because there’s too many people on the planet.” 

Peterson continued, “That just didn’t happen at all … it wasn’t just wrong, it was anti-true. It was absolutely wrong. What happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the (poorest) section of the population … got lifted out of poverty.”

Eric Metaxas has noted that such false predictions were built on Thomas Malthus’ “iron law of population,” an idea cited by Charles Darwin that states population increases must of necessity outstrip food production.

According to environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis, history shows that populations have always been sustained that were “well in excess of what a strictly Malthusian calculation would have predicted” due to technology. Ellis maintains that “there is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity” due to existing technologies and that there “really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity.”