The UN’s Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) believes that lowering the human population should reduce the load we impose on the planet. In 2013, Figueres had a conversation with Climate One founder Greg Dalton regarding “fertility rates in population,” as a contributor to climate change.
Ironically, she is right, but the means she proposes to get to lowered population runs through higher wealth, not lower wealth, and to get to higher wealth, we need to maintain current per capita energy consumption.
Moreover, the total human population numbers will rise to 2050, but fertility is already crashing or in the process of doing so. This is the largest unrealized LARGE FACT in the world today. Everyone seems to think global population will continue to expand, as it did in the aftermath of World War 2. But as fertility (the number of babies per woman) crashes, population cannot continue to increase.
The fact is, women choose to replicate, when they can choose at all, in competition with a mass of other incentives. They will trade the possibility of a fourth child for a sewing machine; and the prospect of a third child for a better home.
The rich have always had fewer children, and now, thanks to energy consumption, we face the same income trade-offs as 18th century aristocrats: more children, less wealth to divide among them. Infowars reports
Populations in developed countries are declining and only in third world countries are they expanding dramatically. Industrialization itself levels out population trends and even despite this world population models routinely show that the earth’s population will level out at 9 billion in 2050 and slowly decline after that. “The population of the most developed countries will remain virtually unchanged at 1.2 billion until 2050,” states a United Nations report. The UN’s support for depopulation policies is in direct contradiction to their own findings.
But keeping wealth concentrated in the countries which are rich now is not the purpose of economic development, nor is it possible. The largest fact is that globalization is allowing wealth in countries that have not experienced it: not just China and India, but Indonesia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, even Africa.
According to the UN Report “World Population Prospects: the 2012 Revision”, whose first finding is:
In July 2013, the world population will reach 7.2 billion, 648 million more than in 2005 or an average gain of 81 million persons annually. Even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline, the world population is still expected to reach 9.6 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100,according to the medium-variant projection.
Under the low variant of fertility, global population starts to decrease after 2050.
The moral is clear: allow people to increase their wealth and keep the products of their labour, and they will solve the population problem (as perceived by leftist planners) by their own actions. Wealth is the key to population control.