1. I hate to see good people wasting their time and energy. And there’s perhaps no greater waste of time and energy than seeking to change the trajectory of the human population. It’s not just futile, but also a massive distraction from things we CAN change. This thread seeks to explain why. 🧵1/12 2. This thread is prompted by a bizarre and deeply confused new YouTube film called Greenwashed. It appears to accuse me of advocating for higher population levels. Obviously, I do no such thing. But the point is that it would *make no difference* if I did. 2/12 youtube.com
3. I think I explained to the interviewer the concept of demographic momentum: population will inevitably rise to a peak before falling again, as a result of birthrates several generations ago: ie before *anyone alive today* could have intervened. Conveniently enough, this didn’t make the cut. 3/12 4. What it means is that, short of murdering a billion people or more, there is nothing anyone can do – or could have done in our lifetimes – to alter the broad trajectory. People have devoted their lives to fighting a mathematical function. 4/12
5. Intervention today (or in any recent decades), if it has any effect at all, will instead hasten the depopulation dive on the other side of the peak: a trend that is just as inevitable, whose impacts are brilliantly summarised here by David Runciman: lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk
6. As Runciman points out, “Much of what will happen is already determined, so that even dramatically declining birth rates in some places will have little overall impact [on the residual rise in population]”. 6/12 7. In fact “the depopulation scenario was set in motion a long time ago. The problem of the opportunity costs of parenthood may simply be a function of modernity”. In some places, falling birth rates began in the 16th and 17th centuries. Pro-natalism and anti-natalism are equally pointless. 7/12 8. You might think hastening the dive is positive. But as total fertility rate declines, as it has done massively and globally for several generations, the old begin to outnumber the young, with rising dependency ratios for many generations to come. No one seems to know how to deal with that. 8/12 9. The Trump administration’s “cultivate resistance” memo this week, preposterous and sinister in equal measure, claims that by letting immigrants in, Europe faces “civilisational erasure”. The opposite is true. But, as Runciman points out, “there soon won’t be enough immigrants to go around.” 9/12 10. “Greenwwashed” is desperately clinging to an idea long after the evidence has departed. It includes a radical and comical misreading of my “private sufficiency, public luxury” idea. I’m not promoting this to raise the human population, but to *accommodate* it, today and in the future. 10/12 11. It’s not just that people are wasting their time. "Population concern” also distracts people from things we *can* change. And, in many cases, transfers blame for the huge consumption impacts of wealthy people to Black and Brown people in poorer nations. At worst it’s straight-up racism. 11/12 12. This is why I rail against it. There are things we can do now, which are not prevented by the legacy of those who lived a century ago, eg switching to a plant-based diet or swapping fossil fuels for renewables. Let’s grasp some simple arithmetic, stop shifting blame, and do what we can. 12/12 The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
skywriter.blue