Be Fruitful and Multiply

John Locke claimed that “the main intention of nature” is “the increase of mankind and the continuation of the species,” the “preservation of all mankind” being a “law of nature.”[1] Centuries later, Locke’s assumption that an increased population necessarily makes the preservation of the species more likely could be challenged in a way that he could hardly have imagined. The human population reached 8.16 billion at the end of 2023, as compared with only 2 billion of our species having been alive in 1900. The exponential increase of energy-consuming organic hominoids has undoubtedly been a cause of the increased carbon emissions arising from human sources, and therefore of climate change in the Anthropocene. The biblical permission to be fruitful and multiply may have come from an eternal source (i.e., Yahweh), but that the divine decree is to be applied regardless of the size of the population as well as the impact that the human imprint is having on the environment, including the climate, is, I submit, a faulty and foolhardy assumption to make in the twenty-first century. The decree in the biblical narrative could be interpreted as a mandate that the Hebrews, freed from slavery in Egypt, follow to fully occupy the promised land.  Empirically, it may even be time for humanity to take stock of its increased numbers globally.

By suggesting that the human population has grown too much, given the finitude of our planet’s resources, I do not mean that wide swaths of the human population on this planet should be plagued, starved, or blown up. Such a specious ends-justify-the-means rationale for harm is the theme of one of the DaVinci Code movies, wherein the bio-destructive antagonist is clearly crazy. Even the Rev. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), relegated to Nature the clean-up role of using disease, famine, and increased conflict to get the number of humans on Earth back within ecologizing constraints, which is to say, to get human population down to a number that is consistent with the resources on Earth. In the twenty-first century, we might add, and does not ruin the planet in the process. Theoretically stated, a population growth rate that is behaving like a maximizing variable in mathematics, even if the derivative is negative (i.e., the rate of acceleration is decreasing), is a problem because such a variable has no problem piercing an ecosystem’s boundaries. Yet this is not done with impunity from Nature, according to Malthus.

According to one scholar, Malthus’ main theme is that a species’ population “inevitably grows beyond what the food supply can sustain.”[2] I have also read elsewhere that Malthus only claims that a population can grow beyond what the food supply can sustain. Even this throws a wrench into the deist assumption that a divine designer can be inferred from the order in Nature, so Malthus’ claim was controversial in his day.

Mitigating Nature’s devices to restore a population to good measure, Malthus admits that “the discrepancy between food and population spurs” industry, which in turn can enhance food growth and production such that the gap is closed.[3] But with the population at over 8 billion in 2024, I suspect that Malthus would have warned of impending natural limits to resources such as land and water (especially in the midst of climate change) as being something hard that even human enterprise must accept; the planet’s resources are, after all, finite. Furthermore, even if scientific advancement can render one resource more efficiently used and even augment it, another resource could then become a bottleneck, or hard constraint.

Whether as a divine decree or a natural, non-deist process, a larger human population is not necessarily beneficial for the species. Antedating Malthus’s work on population by about a half-century, however, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “invokes the invisible hand in arguing that the earth’s increasing fertility benefits humanity as a whole, despite [economic] inequality and the monopolization of land ownership by a few. The landlord can only eat a tiny portion of his land’s produce, the rest of which feeds the people who provide his luxuries.[4] The rich, despite their ‘natural selfishness and rapacity,’ are thus ‘led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.’[5] The rich man, motivated by ‘luxury and caprice,’ rather than ‘humanity’ or ‘justice,’[6] thus promotes a salutary ‘end which was no part of his intention.’”[7] In other words, industriousness has the unintended presumably beneficial consequences of advancing civilization and increasing the human population. Whereas a civilizing influence is arguably good under any circumstance, Smith’s assumption that increasing the size of the population is not in our day as unqualifiably beneficial as Smith assumed it to be in population growth from prosperity being limited to being in proportion  to its additional largess.

In Wealth of Nations, “Smith argues that the accumulation of capital and the increase of national wealth help ‘the great body of the people’ to ‘thrive,’ and that population growth is ‘the most decisive mark of prosperity.’”[8] This result of thriving is constrained rather than unlimited, for Smith maintains that, “’Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence.’”[9] An increase in population is an unintended beneficial consequence only in some relation to a period’s economic prosperity. But Smith undercuts Malthus’ claim that industriousness can catch food production up to a given population level because the prosperity resulting from the increase in industriousness or productivity causes the population to increase, albeit proportionately rather than maximally. Prosperity begets more people, perhaps to such an extent that the benefits from improved food-production productivity may not be enough to feed the larger population. Admittedly, Smith’s claim that family planning can be used to keep the standard of living up during a period of industriousness—rather than decreasing as the economic benefits of the additional industriousness are spread thin (i.e., decreasing GNP per capita) as the population increases due to the prosperity—could also mean that the proportioned population growth does not outstrip the enhanced food production. Perhaps it can be realistically said, therefore, that closing the gap between food availability and population can be expected to be problematic.

Similar to the idea that a tax cut can “pay for itself” by stimulating economic activity (GNP) and thus generating more tax revenue going into government coffers—a theory that has been empirically disproved since Reagan’s tax cuts in the U.S. in 1981—growing ourselves economically out of a gap between food production and the global population is too idealistic. Once that population reaches a certain level, “hard” constraints in terms of resources, which were not something that Malthus would have considered given the low population of humans on Earth in 1798 relative to the planet’s abundance, can become relevant in functioning like a “brick wall” that even scientific and technological advancement cannot penetrate. Yet Smith had written of an upper-bound, or “full complement,” of “riches” that is “allowed” in a geographical area by “nature,” such as in the soil, there, but this is geographically limited whereas in the twenty-first century, the human impact on the worsening conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could essentially move that brick wall closer in, hence narrowing the distance that human industriousness can go.[10] There is a big difference, in other words, between the limits to industry given the nature of a local ecosystem and running up against the limits of resources globally, such as in having drilled up all of the deposits of oil in the earth.

Unfortunately, reducing the extent, or depth, of the human imprint on the planet, whether in terms of the population or its offshoots such as pollution, warmer oceans (and air), and soil erosion, is an externality as far as markets, whether competitive, oligarchical, or monopolistic, are concerned. The political muscle of large concentrations of private wealth, whether of billionaires or large corporations, can styme government regulatory action to protect the overall good. Plato and Aristotle claimed that a passionate crowd is the downside of a demos (i.e., democracy), but perhaps today plutocracy, or the rule of (privately held) wealth, is the downside or even the inexorable eventual result of representative democracy.

So, where are we as a species if even the unintended beneficial consequence in the efficient allocation of resources, goods, and services in a competitive market is not enough to outweigh the baleful consequences of self-interest not only in terms of maximizing the chances of self-preservation, but also the preservation of one’s genes in offspring? Even in their 80s, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two famous Hollywood actors, became fathers yet again. Lest it be contended that they were selfish in knowingly fathering children that could not be expected to know their respective fathers for many years, the obverse possibility, namely, that science may one day extend the human lifespan even possibly indefinitely, could mean that population size could jump like the burst of new acceleration of a rocket from its second state igniting and adding a jolt of added thrust. No one would seriously contend that economic industriousness could close the gap between such a population size and the natural limits of the planet’s resources.

I submit that countries with low or even declining birth-rates should not feel the need economically or normatively to promote population growth by public policy. Furthermore, China, much of Africa, and especially India should take more seriously the interest of the species in prudently getting its population size down to size while doing so is still possible, and, absent these regions taking an interest in the good of the species, multilateral global governance should be strengthened particularly in terms of enforcement powers in the interest of the species. In this regard, the United Nations is a bad joke—an embarrassment, actually. For the species cannot rely on Smith’s unintended benefits of competitive markets to redress externalities; even Smith recognized the need for government, and he even warned of the likely collusion between business and government at the expense of labor, and, I might add, of the species itself.  For short-term economic prosperity to be more pressing than the longer-term interests of the species can be reckoned as a vulnerability in the very constitution of the human mind itself, and of course corporations like to invest in elected representatives and people tend to vote, both with their wallets and purses in mind.

This writing draws on my multidisciplinary studies that unfortunately kept me out of the much-siloed ivory towers of American provincialism that have been so populated by epistemological and administrative pedestrians of incrementalism. To be sure, seeing connections between seemingly far-ranging academic areas is not much valued by folks whose eyesight has been trained on minute analytical distinctions that fail the “so what” question yet satisfy Adam Smith’s claim that specialization of labor boosts productivity in business. Even so, I have been writing publicly to apply my eighteen years of formal university education and four more of post-doctoral study under a scholar of historical moral, political, and religious thought for the good of humanity in spite of our species’ narrowness and yet paradoxical arrogance that functions as if on stilts during a flood. Why the inclusion of benevolentia universalis in addition to my interest in connecting seemingly unrelatable ideas or theories and making societal (and global) blind-spots transparent is a question that I have not so far been able to answer. From my multidisciplinary perspective, from theology to political economy, I am struck by how interrelated human phenomena are, and by how much flies under the proverbial radar screen at least in societal public discourse. Both the interrelatedness and the societal and global “blind spots” pertain to population and climate change, as well as to ethics and political economy; Smith’s field, after all, was moral philosophy rather than economics, the latter of which, as a field, subsequently materialized in large part because of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Why does anyone seek to contribute to the species in spite of its stubborn, selfish refusal to change—to develop—even for its own good? Entrenched ignorance on stilts during a flood is not a very attractive beneficiary of charitable benevolence, and yet perhaps instinctually we feel the urge to help the human gene pool to persevere. Perhaps my judgment is overly negative or pessimistic. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time. Such creatures tend to dig and travel cognitively, whereas most people remain in their hometowns. Perhaps I have been writing for another and you are along for the ride. Nevertheless, I do hope that my thinking stimulates your own, because I believe our species very much needs new thoughts this century.

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1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, sec. 59 and Second Treatise, sec. 7.
2. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 291n31.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 124. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
5. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
6. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
7. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.9.
8. Ibid., p. 127. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.21-23, 43.
9. Ibid. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.39-40.
10. Ibid., pp. 126-27. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ix.14.

Pope Francis on Families and the Environment

On a trip to Indonesia in early September, 2024, Pope Francis signed a declaration on religious harmony and environmental protection at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta with the mosque’s grand imam. The Pope said that our species was facing a “serious crisis” bought about by war and the destruction of the environment.[1] Of war, the tremendous destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and Gaza that had been taking place was doubtless on the cleric’s mind. Of the environment, climate change was undoubtedly on his mind. In addition to volcanoes and wild fires, human emissions of carbon into the atmosphere were poised to push the global temperature increase above the critical threshold of 2.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. What connects the two problems at the root—the source of the two problems—went unmentioned. In fact, the Pope made a statement that, if acted upon, stood to exacerbate the underlying problem: the exponential explosion of growth of the human population in the twentieth century.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis on Families and the Environment."

1. Joel Guinto, “Pope and Top Indonesian Imam Make Joint Call for Peace,” BBC.com, September 5, 2024.

On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming

Agriculture is a major source of carbon and methane emissions, which in turn are responsible for the general trend of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. In fact, agriculture emits more than all of the cars on the roads. 10 percent of the emissions carbon dioxide and methane in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector. Livestock is the biggest source of methane. Cows, for example, emit methane. Methane from a number or sources, including the thawing permafrost, accounted for 30 percent of global warming in 2023. As global population has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, herds of livestock at farms have expanded, at least in the U.S., due to the increasing demand.[1] We are biological animals, and we too must eat. More people means that more food is needed, and the agricultural lobby in the U.S. is not about to let the governments require every resident to become a vegetarian. Indeed, the economic and political power of the large agribusinesses in the U.S. have effectively staved off federal and state regulations regarding emissions. It comes down to population, capitalism, and plutocracy warping democracy.

In the early 80s, the farm lobby in the U.S. “began to get concerned about environmental regulations” and made sure the FDA would not regulate American farms.[2] The EPA has delegated permits to the States, but they have been “uneven in issuing permits. In 2009, a law barring the EPA from applying clear air regulations to livestock” took effect.[3] The agriculture lobby has thus been “extremely effective.”[4] This has been so even in spite of the Paris Agreement reached in 2016, and the steadily increasing average global temperatures. A U.S. Government-sponsored report admits that increased demand/consumption of meat impacts climate change, which in itself is interesting given all the political donations and lobbying by the agribusiness companies in the U.S., but the report concludes that people in developing countries should eat less meat.[5] Apparently Americans are uniquely privileged to die of heart-disease. Perhaps the hospital lobby wants to encourage more business thanks to third-party payors.

The figures on the political contributions and lobbying by agribusinesses (and oil companies) are mind-blowing. For instance, American agribusiness spent a record $165 million on federal lobbying in 2022.[6] A total of $128 million went to political contributions to campaigns in the 2021-2022 cycle.[7] The sheer amounts spent lend credibility to the claim that wealth rather than votes rule: plutocracy over the veneer of democracy in America. The capture of regulatory agencies by the companies or industries being regulated has existed in the academic literature since at least the 1980s. So too has the strategic use of regulation. For example, the capture of methane at farms through technology qualifies for government subsidies, but only the bigger agribusinesses can afford this technology. Additionally, JP Morgan and other large banks have been lending primarily to large agribusinesses because they are less risky than smaller farms. It is no surprise, when all is said and done, that medium and small farms have been going out of business for decades. I submit that this cannot be explained by economies of scale alone.

To be sure, a lot of agribusinesses have pledged to be more transparent on the emissions from operations, but very few of the businesses report on the bulk of their emissions.[8] Transparency only goes so far until entrenched concentrations of economic wealth (e.g., agribusinesses) find that holding the curtains open too much can hurt business. Moreover, both the political donors and their “elected representatives” both have an interest in maintaining the veneer that the public interest is being served. Adam Smith’s invisible hand only works in a competitive market, whereas neither agribusiness nor the market for political donations in Congress is a competitive market. In Wealth of Nations, Smith does not apply the competitive-market price mechanism to government. In fact, political contributions from businesses can be thought of as a special case of price-fixing.

The encroachments of plutocracy on representative democracy are largely hidden from view, and the corruption does seem to be ineluctable. Given large enough concentrations of private wealth, the buying of political power seems inevitable. Smith wrote as much concerning the use of government by managements outweighing the ability of labor unions to do just that. He predicted the strikes and the one-sided involvement of police and even military troops. The cost of plutocracy at the expense of the public good is much more since public good and the viability of our species came to depend on our baleful impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems.  Even so, the negative impact of a political economy of business is dwarfed by the negative impact from the sheer growth of the human population on this planet since the 1800s. As intractable as the partisan, self-serving, and narrow involvement of business in government is, it would be difficult for a population that has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in the twentieth century to begin to trim the sails by discouraging population growth. For one thing, reducing the number of potential consumers would be bad for business.

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1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Madison McVan, “GRAPHIC: Agribusiness Spent a Record-breaking $165 million on Federal Lobbying Last Year,” Investigate Midwest, February 16, 2023.
7. “Agribusiness Top Contributors,” Open Secrets.
8. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

Energy and Global Population

There is a temptation, especially since the global average temperature reached the 1.5C increase threshold in 2023 much faster than anticipated, to focus narrowly on the progress in renewable energy sources without placing it in perspective relative to the total amount of energy being used globally, the annual increases in energy demand, and the root cause, the explosive growth in human population since the early 20^th century. The strategic geo-political international interests of countries impacted and should thus be considered as well.  

According to Nick Butler, a former advisor at BP, a European oil company, the global use of energy increased 4-fold by 2024 since 1965. The increased use of energy commercially has led to increased trade as supply has become global. The world has thus become even more interdependent, which means that yet another basis for political instability has sprung up. Interruptions in supply led to a political push in the U.S. for energy independence. Even though as of 2024 every country still depended on the global trade in energy, the U.S. was trending towards energy independence and could eventually even be in a position of being able to export energy supplies without importing any. It’s debatable, however, whether exporting energy increases a country’s power. It had not worked for OPEC in managing prices, although the oil shocks in 1974 and 1979 gave the impression that OPEC could have considerable leverage over the U.S. As it turned out, substitution and the development of new supplies undercut OPEC’s higher prices. In contrast, Butler contends, building up sources of energy is a source of wealth, though political instability can also result as fights can break out over the new wealth.[1]

Besides being at odds with efforts to reduce carbon emissions if the stock is exported to be consumed, maximizing stocks of oil, natural gas, and coal as a source of a country’s wealth be wrongheaded. It may suffer from the same fallacy that is in mercantilism. Under that economic policy, a country minimizes imports and maximizes exports in order to accumulate as much silver and gold as possible. According to Adam Smith, “The exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country.”[2] Historically, “the exportation of gold and silver in order to purchase foreign goods, did not always diminish the quantity of those metals in the [British] kingdom. That, to the contrary, [the exportation] might frequently increase that quantity.”[3] This still assumes that increasing the stocks represents an increase in a country’s wealth. Before critiquing that assumption, let’s look at the argument wherein exporting gold and silver to pay for imports actually winds up increasing the domestic supply of those metals to a net-increase.”

How could trading away some of those precious metals that were used as money increase a country’s wealth? If a country has gold and silver in surplus, part of it could be exchanged “for something else, which may satisfy a part of [the domestic] wants, and increase [the people’s] enjoyments” at home.[4] The benefits from the exports of the metals to pay for imports of goods extend back to domestic manufacturers being able to produce more output, given the increased demand, and thus increase the division of labor—Smith’s big thing!—and thereby produce goods more efficiently.  According to Smith, “By means of [the increased demand], the narrowness of the home market does not hinder the division of labour in any particular branch of art or manufacture from being carried to the highest perfection.”[5] The increased division of labor enhances efficiency of production, which in turn makes the pricing of exports more competitive, and thus demand increases. As exports to satisfy the increased foreign demand for the goods rise, the gold and silver that are used abroad to pay for the goods come into the home country and thus increase its supply of the two metals.

As for the need to increase the holdings of gold and silver as much as possible, the assumption that this enhances a country’s ability to fight a war is something else that Smith contests in his text. Regarding the need for stocks of silver and gold from which to be able to send abroad some in order to pay for the home army while it is fighting abroad, “(t)he commodities most proper for being transported to distant countries, in order to purchase there, either the pay and provisions of an army, or some part of the money of the mercantile republick (sic) to be employed in purchasing them, seem to be the finer and more improved manufactures.”[6] These, rather than sending silver and gold, have the benefit of increasing the demand of manufactures. “The enormous expense of the late war,” Smith contends, “must have been chiefly defrayed, not by the exportation of gold and silver, but by that of British commodities of some kind or other.”[7] So the need to accumulate silver and gold by minimize the imports of manufactured goods while maximizing exports—the key tenet of mercantilism—is, according to Smith, less beneficial than free-trade. Moreover, he holds that the market mechanism is much better than government fiat in allocating goods, services, and even metals used as money and wealth.

Similarly, perhaps exporting other commodities than coal, liquified natural gas, and oil might benefit the U.S. more by enhancing the efficiency of domestic producers of other goods (and services), especially if economies of scale exist, and increasing employment since more workers would be required and each could be more efficient and thus valuable to the companies. Additionally, carbon emissions would not be as high were the U.S. to sit on, rather than export, its stockpiles of “dirty” energy sources.

Admittedly, the pressure from unmet energy demand in other countries that are not energy-independent would tempt the U.S. Government and American companies to respectively allow and make more exports of coal, liquified natural gas, and oil because such sales would be lucrative. Behind this pressure is the relationship between a steeply growing global population and the ongoing prevalence of the “dirty” energy sources in meeting the increasing demand from an exponentially growing population. Indeed, because of shale, the US had become the largest exporter of natural gas in the world by 2024.

As of February, the world had 4 billion more people than in 1970. That translates into a 10,000 increase per hour, which in turn means 200 million new customers for commercial energy supplies every year.[8] Along with the increased global population, oil consumption increased by 150% since 1970. Because renewables were still focused on electricity, which was only one fourth of energy demand globally in 2023, the “dirty” sources were still supplying most of the increased demand.[9] Put another way, the increased supply of renewables was not even keeping up with the annual increases in demand for energy. In spite of the carbon-emission targets, oil and gas still accounted for 80% of global energy in early 2024.[10]

Most of the increase in energy demand and all the increase in carbon emissions during the previous 20 years was in Asia Pacific (esp. China).  By 2024, China was importing a lot of energy supplies—even markedly changing the patterns of global trade away from the U.S. being the dominant import market—and accounted for about a third of total global emissions.[11] Crude oil imports doubled from 2013 and 2023.[12]

Unfortunately, forecasts did not include a dramatic reduction in oil and coal use. In China, 300 million poor people in China were projected in 2024 to move into the middle class by 2050. This means more energy use, and thus more oil and gas. Nuclear energy was being developed there, but coal was still a major source of employment in 2023, and fit the Party’s goal of shifting wealth inland. Also, wanting to be the world’s leading industrial power is not in the direction of decreasing the commercial demand for energy.[13]

It is important to include the impact on international relations. As of the start of 2024, China was dependent on imports from Russia and the Middle East. As the U.S. strategic oil-imports interest in policing the Middle East diminishes as the U.S. gets closer to energy independence, the increased interest of China in exercising control in that region meant that a new conflict-zone might open up between the two empires. 

With the world going from over 8 billion people in late 2023 to a projected nearly 10 billion in 1045, we can anticipate more demand for energy, and with it, more international (and domestic) instability. With plenty of oil still in the ground and decreased demand due to substitutes such as electric cars and nuclear energy, the world won’t run out of oil.[14] This is bad news for our species as the planet continues to warm. Even as the press highlights the increase in renewable energy sources, the default is much, much larger and thus diminishing the share of “dirty” sources will not come as quickly as we might think. In short, we are in quite a mess as a species both because it isn’t easy to reduce our sluggish reliance on sluggish oil and invisible gas, and our global population grew so fast and so much in the 20^th century and has continued to increase in the first two decades of the next century that, as biological organisms needing external sources of energy, the energy demand of our species is likely to keep on increasing even if we become more efficient. The expediential increase in population can be so large that its baleful effects outweigh any gain from increased efficiency. Again, the baseline is so massive that changes from greater efficiency merely mitigate the increased harm done. 

Similarly, the large amount of energy consumption from “dirty” sources relative to the increased supply from renewables renders any shift very gradual. The Titanic could not turn fast enough to avoid the iceberg in 1912 because the rudder was too small for the mass, and thus momentum, of the ship. We would like to turn away from “dirty” sources of energy, but our rudder pales in comparison to the magnitude (and proportion) of those sources. We need a bigger rudder, or we too may flounder. The global economy does not “turn on a dime.”

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1. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 4^th edn., R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, ed.s (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1776/1976), sec 9, p. 433.
3. Ibid., sec 7, p. 431.
4. Ibid., sec 31, p. 446.
5. Ibid., sec 31, pp. 446-47.
6. Ibid., sec 29, p. 444.
7.  Ibid., sec 27, p. 443.
8. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
9.  Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.

China's Population: Demographic Imbalances and the Climate Emergency

In his treatise on Understanding, David Hume posits that we don’t know as much about causation as we think we do. Often times, positive correlation (i.e., two or more things present at the same time) is confused with causation (i.e., one thing causing another). That umbrellas tend to be out when it is raining does not mean that umbrellas cause rain (or that rain causes umbrellas). Rain and umbrellas have their own distinct causes, which Hume would say we don’t understand as well as we think we do. It is very difficult, for example, to determine whether climate change caused by methane and CO2 emissions caused October 2019 to the hottest October globally on record; more data-points covering long stretches of time are needed to distinguish even a few outliers from being part of a broader trend. By October of 2019, not only had scientists obtained and analyzed enough samples over a long enough time-frame to be confident (99%) that climate change had been occurring due to human carbon emissions. Not since roughly 60 million years ago had the carbon parts per million in the atmosphere stood at 410 ppm. In having to repeatedly accelerate their forecasts regarding the various impacts, such as sea-level rise due to melting ice (on land, such as Greenland), scientists had demonstrated that our understanding of the causation on the various impacts was still far from perfect. Even so, 11,000 scientists knew enough by November 2019 to declare unequivocally that humanity was facing a climate-change emergency. That is to say, drastic changes in terms of carbon emissions (e.g., energy sources, lifestyles) would have to be quickly made to avoid the worst-case scenario (e.g., mass food shortages, mass migrations from coastal areas and the loss of cities, and disease). This scenario is in line with Mathias’ theory of population ecology wherein a population of a species increasing without reaching an equilibrium maximum faces an increased risk of war, disease, or starvation. Once a species’ population pierces the semi-permeable constraints of the wider ecosystem (i.e., natural environment), Nature has its own ways of arresting the schizogenic growth of a species if it fails to limit its increase. During the twentieth century, the global increase of our species’ population was expediential, going from 1.6 to 6.1 billion. Sadly, even many policy-makers were oblivious to the fact that such a huge change must surely have consequences, at least some day. China’s one-child policy was an exception, making the relatively unconstrained population growths in India and Africa more noticeable as potentially problematic. Why did China need its policy while India, also with a population of over a billion, did not? In fact, the growth mantra generally subscribed to by countries across the globe acted as an incentive to make matters worse! Even a population with a low birth rate was generally taken as a problem. The negative impacts on a labor force and economic growth more broadly gave governments an incentive to increase birth-rates and thus populations (even though immigration served as an alternative). I want to look further into the case of China as a means of assessing how seriously the world was taking the climate emergency.

China’s one-child policy, wherein a couple could only have one child, was instituted in 1980 and abandoned in 2015, when couples could have two children (but not more). With one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, China faced the “prospect of fewer and fewer workers to support retirees amid a rising median age.”[1] In other words, the pressure of a temporary demographic bind had come to outweigh concerns about the population level even though 1.3 billion people was a significant part of the species’ distended population level of 7.5 billion.

Considering that as living beings, humans must consume energy, 1.3 billion people cannot but have a considerable impact on how much energy humanity consumes. Even were fossil fuel sources entirely eliminated in China and abroad, food scarcity would still be strained, especially considering that India’s 1.3 billion people are also consuming energy. This goes back to the point that a huge increase in the species’ population must have significant repercussions concerning energy (including food). 

To their credit, even though China’s policy-makers in 2019 were “well aware that a rising crop of retirees threaten[ed] to drain household savings and derail [economic] growth” and that the population could start to decline in 2030, birth limits remained in effect in the two-child policy.[2] Policy-makers argued that technological advances and automation would increase productivity such that fewer young workers would be needed. I submit that the government could step in to increase funding to retirees to take the financial pressure off of their family members who are working. Even absent immigration, demographic tight-points can be managed such that the overall goal of a smaller population is not compromised. Therefore, it is irresponsible to say that China should abandon its two-child policy, even if China’s demographic pinch would turn out to be worse than expected in 2019 when the global population stood at 7.7 billion, heading in the wrong direction!

Given the climate emergency, the scientists strongly advised the world that drastic measures needed to be taken as soon as possible. Correcting for the incredible increase in our species’ population that occurred in the twentieth century can be considered a necessary part of the drastic measures. The world would be wise to offer China assistance (e.g., knowledge) such that the corrective is successful, and to pressure India to make a similar corrective. In the culture of growth, it is important to point out that an economy can be expected to contract as its population decreases significantly. Productivity advances, however, can mean that a lower quality of life does not go with the contraction. Indeed, economic contraction is itself part of the decreased demand for energy that goes with a smaller population. To sustain itself rather than be cut down by natural processes, our species must decrease its demand overall rather than only shift off fossil fuels. The planet contains limited resources, including habitable (and farmable) land. Overpopulation can trigger war, disease, and starvation, and even changes to the atmosphere that could render the planet itself very uncomfortable or even uninhabitable for humans.

Listening to a talk given by a NASA public-relations person, I was stunned that he admitted that in NASA’s view we can no longer rely “on this rock” for the survival of our species. Hence the plans to colonize the Moon and Mars.  My reaction was that those are artificial environments for us, and thus inherent unstable, whereas we are suited naturally to living on Earth—just not 8 billion of us! Getting back in sync with our natural environment seems to me to be vastly superior to relying on artificial environments. The twentieth century—the bloodiest century ever as of its close—can turn out to be a population bubble or a jump in terms of population. The bubble-effect requires our species to push itself back down, whereas a jump goes to a higher-population plateau. China deserves credit for resisting the temptation to see its population increase unabated in the false assumption that economic growth is most important.

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1. Liyan Qi and Fanfan Wang, “China Left One-Child Policy Behind, but It Still Struggles With a Falling Birth Rate,” The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2019.

2. Ibid.

Melting Permafrost Unleashing Killer Bacteria and Viruses: Climate Change Heats Up

As the Northern climes warm, our species may soon be vulnerable to ancient—even beyond ancient— bacteria and viruses. We are familiar with pathogens to which our species has some immunity, built up from repeated prior contact. As a species, we could lose everything from illnesses in which the modern human body has no experience and thus no built-up defenses.

Researches have encountered complex ancient viruses in the melting permafrost of Siberia. Bacteria and viruses can lie dormant in permafrost until they are reactivated by warming. Scientists have discovered intact Spanish flu viruses in corpses buried in 1918 in the Alaskan tundra. In 2016 in Siberia, 100 people and 2,300 reindeer were infected with anthrax that scientist believe had been trapped in a frozen reindeer carcass that thawed during the particularly hot summer. Unfortunately, permafrost “appears to the among the systems most vulnerable to global warming,” according to researchers in the journal Nature Climate Change.[1] Global warming in turn is vulnerable to the human production of carbon dioxide, such as from our increasing use of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Behind the economics of use or consumption is the exponential increase in the population of our species. As biological beings, we must consume. Generally speaking, the more humans around, the higher the total consumption. Distribution of resources obviously makes a difference—some people get to consume disproportionately more than others can. Even so, the staggering number of over 7 billion people must involve a considerable amount of consumption.

The extraordinary jump in human population is occurring in a very short period of time. How could there not be huge, unforeseen reverberations? 

The upshot is that Nature has its own measures to correct a species’ failure to control its numbers on a planet of finite resources. As great as the human mind is, we have trouble anticipating the secondary systems that are set in motion. Put another way, the astonishing number of 7 billion can be expected to have repercussions that get beyond our ability to anticipate, let alone manage. As permafrost that has been frozen for millennia (also a big number) melts and the methane and bacteria and viruses that have been trapped escape, we face a huge blindside. As systems effect systems effect systems, we can easily get ahead of ourselves.

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[1] Mary Papenfuss, “As Ice Melts, Dangerous Diseases From The Past Could Rise Again,” The Huffington Post, May 5, 2017.

Humanity Getting Ahead of Itself: A Mass-Extinction Event Already Underway

Around 252 million years ago, the “Great Dying” took out 90% of the world’s species. About 66 million years ago, a meteor caused the extinction of three out of four species, including those known to us as dinosaurs.[1] After 1.8 million years of existence, our own species is triggering yet another mass extinction event, according to a study in the journal Science by Stuart Pimm and Clinton Jenkins. According to Pimm, species are now going extinct at about ten times faster than scientists had thought. Prior to the arrival of homo sapiens (i.e., our species), the extinction rate was about 0.1 out of a million species per year; as of 2014, the rate had climbed to 100 to 1000 species per 1 million.[2] Behind this evolutionarily abrupt bump is not only the complicity of our species, but also unforeseen consequences that could easily take homo sapiens out of the equation.

Beyond the positive correlation of our species and the rate increase, Pimm and Jenkins posit a causal relationship, pointing in particular to habitat loss due to the territorially expansive attribute of an expansive human population globally. Climate change and overfishing, both of which are related to the increase in the human population, are also salient factors.

As observable as this leap in the extinction rate is, the implications may elude our cognitive grasp, and thus be especially dangerous for our species. In other words, our collective failure to manage our population level may result ironically in the downfall of the species.

In another study in 2014, Rodolfo Dirzo points to the overexploitation of resources and habitat destruction as examples of human activities responsible for the rise in the extinction rate of species. Since 1500, 322 terrestrial vertebrates had gone extinct, with the remaining species declining in numbers by an average of 25 percent; for invertebrates, the typical decline in population is a whopping 45 percent.[3] With these stark changes naturally come unforeseen consequences. “We tend to think about extinction as loss of a species from the face of the Earth, and that’s very important, but there’s a loss of critical ecosystem functioning in which animals play a central role that we need to pay attention to as well,” Dirzo said in a statement.[4] Even amid all of our advanced technology, we are a species that lives within ecosystems; the collapse of such a system means all bets are off in things like food supply that we take for granted.

For example, “(w)here human density is high,” Dirzo continues, “you get high rates of [animal decline], high incidence of rodents, and thus high levels of pathogens, which increases the risks of disease transmission. It can be a vicious circle.”[5] Rodents and pathogens can of course hit our food sources as well as us. Ironically, our own technological advances can exacerbate the potential harm.

Air transportation, for example, could turn the massive spread of the Ebola virus in Africa during 2014 into a worldwide pandemic. Even as we were congratulating ourselves on finally accepting what climatologists had been telling us for over a decade concerning the harmful impact of our carbon-dioxide emissions on the planet’s temperature, we were blissfully unaware of the contribution being made by methane, a gas with ten-times the “greenhouse” effect as carbon dioxide, through leaks in extracting and distributing natural gas—the “clean” gas—as well as in the melting of the permafrost around the Artic. With the kind of scales to which our technology can be applied, both the unforeseen impacts and the damage can be much greater than we know. Put another way, we have increased the size of our footprint so much as a species that we cannot get our minds around all of the unintended consequences.

In short, we have gotten too big, both in population and the scales in which we chose to operate, for our own good. While our genes are doubtlessly quite pleased with their success in replication, they are clearly not smart enough for their own long-term survival. The human brain seems naturally inclined to assume the absence of unforeseen implications rather than holding as a default that they exist “out there” even if we have not yet detected them. As superior as our species’ brain is, it sports a major flaw in having or adopting a schizogenic (i.e., a variable that maximizes itself without limit) mentality rather than one that is homeostatic, or steady-state (e.g., ecologizing).[6] This explains why we have been so hesitant as a species even to reduce the increases in our carbon footprint, let alone bring it down to a level at which the warming of the planet will allow for the continued survival of our species. In short, we tend to be all about maximizing—even as if it were an end in itself—in line with our greed and hubris rather than valuing the achievement of equilibrium in line with, rather than puncturing, the ecosystems within which we live and breathe.

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[1] Seth Borenstein, “World on Brink of Sixth Great Extinction, Species Disappearing Faster than Ever Before,” The Huffington Post, May 29, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sara Gates, “Earth Is in the Early Days of a New Mass-Extinction Event, Researchers Warn,” The Huffington Post, July 25, 2014.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] On this distinction, see Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.