Population Bombed! Exploding the link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change

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Thomas Robert Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), claimed that human population grows exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …), while food supplies and other resources grow only arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, …). So he argued that procreation must be controlled intentionally, or else population would suffer repeated crashes caused by disease, famine, and war.
 
In more modern times, the theme has continued, with William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Explosion (1991), and many other books and thousands of articles in scholarly and popular publications.
 
Many people have found such common complaints unpersuasive because of the fairly obvious fact that despite tremendous growth of human population, human flourishing has increased even more. But the prophets of fear haven’t given up. In recent decades, they have expressed their fears in ways that sound more sophisticated:
  

• I = PAT: A formula meaning that environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology, so the more people there are, and the wealthier they are, and the higher their technological level, the greater impact (always negative!) they’ll have on the environment.

• Carrying Capacity: the notion that the earth has a limited carrying capacity and human population has already met or exceeded it, with catastrophic consequences to come.

• Ecological Footprint: the magnitude of a person’s ecological impact (again, always negative), varies positively with his or her affluence. This gave rise to the claim on the Earth Overshoot Day website that by August 2, 2017, humans had already “used more from nature than our planet can renew in a whole year”—a practice that obviously couldn’t be sustained.

• Planetary Boundaries: the belief that there are nine earthly “boundaries” that humans, with our high levels of consumption and pollution, have crossed or soon will.

 
Such ideas are the driving force behind continued demands for abortion-on-demand, forced or highly incentivized sterilization, and tax policies that punish people for having “too many children,” as curbs to population growth.
 
If someone confronted you with these claims, could you explain what’s wrong with them? Not many people could. But Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak do it, brilliantly, in their book Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change.
 
This outstanding book covers a lot more ground, too, and if you read it, you’ll understand more than the vast majority of people, even most scholars, about population, resources, the environment, and how they all relate to climate change. This is a book you’ll want to read carefully and thoroughly yourself—and then pass on, especially to high school or college students you know, or to public school teachers in the social sciences, who desperately need its corrections to widespread myths about population.