This is a topic that drives me insane, and has done for years. Many people are often quick to brush off any attempt to characterise the climate crisis as an overpopulation crisis (which it is). They want to say that population isn’t a problem at all. They insist that if the wealth accumulation of the richest people in the world, and their gargantuan consumption habits were curtailed; then that would be enough to stop the climate crisis getting out of control. I’ll come back to this shortly to discuss why. First, I will briefly cover why promotion of what we could reasonably at this point call traditional climate policies is foolish.
We’re all familiar with talk about recycling, choosing to fly less and make individual decisions. We’ve been told for decades about how small things like these, plus renewable energy and electric powered everything will be enough to bring the raging climate under control; without the vast majority of us having to change our lifestyles at all. These days it seems like they mainly advocate for easy measures like putting solar panels on our roofs and plugging in our private cars rather than filling them with explosive, fossil derived liquid. It’s all very simple stuff. They try to not scare the public.
I’m not going to go to deep into why basic green technology solutions, individual small choices, and maybe vegan diets are not enough by themselves to solve the climate crisis in this article. It’s frankly a boring topic that’s been done to death. I’ve talked a lot previously about why we need to reimagine how we’re going to live in future in every way. Just modifying how we already do things today, but powering the same things with electricity, is obviously not going to cut it. The changes we now need to implement in order to make a dent in the crisis will blow your mind if you haven’t considered this before.
As a very quick recap of my ideas from previous articles, this means ideas along the lines of, for example:
- Smaller homes and communal rather than private land
- A vegetarian (and eventually vegan) food system which takes the individual choice (to buy expensive organic produce) away from citizens, and makes food high quality, delicious, and universally available and affordable.
- No private cars (unless absolutely necessary)
- Less personal stuff and pointless junk
- Items such as tools that are shared in communities and built to last
- Better public transport, but also a focus on less travel; and slower travel when we do go places
- Severely restricted long distance travel (except for family emergencies etc)
- The concept of tourism as we know it being redefined completely
Now that’s out of the way, and we’re clear that only massive changes to our consumption habits are necessary to even touch the sides of this crisis; I want to bring population back in.
Why the population critics are so wrong
Not only do these people and organisations deny that the current global population is a catastrophic problem for the climate; they don’t even acknowledge the need for almost all of us to make massive changes to our consumption habits and way of life.
Anyone who’s placing responsibility for this entire crisis at the feet of the rich, while making everyone else feel excused from having to act, is at best irresponsible, and at worst, downright dangerous. We need as a society and as a world to get serious now about how bad things are; how bad they’re going to get even if we start doing everything right; and then we need to figure out the next practical steps that all of us can take toegther.
I hate the rich as much as anyone. But it’s way too easy to blame them and go about our own overly consumptive lives in blissful ignorance while the world around us goes to shit. That’s the last thing we can afford to do now. We’ve had enough of greed and indivualistic thinking. It’s time for unselfishness and collectivist thinking to take over.
I highly recommend watching GREENWASHED, the excellent film on this subject, released last year by Dr Sofia Pineda Ochoa on YouTube. It gets deep into the statistics and the climate situation (although things will have worsened significantly in the year or so since it was made). It features well known experts on the natural world like Chris Packham, as well as climate, population and economic experts. They did their homework so well that it felt unnecessary for me to do a bunch of my own research for a blog that hardly anyone is going to read anyway. The vast majority of people in 2026 don’t care to read a thoroughly researched piece about an important topic. Let’s be honest. You and me are the odd ones out who still care about this stuff.
One statistic from the film that really amazed me was the calculation by Cambridge University based Ecological economist Partha Dasgupta that the Earth could sustainably carry 3.3 billion people if every single person was on a salary of $20k.
Pretty much anyone should be able to grasp that 3.3 billion people (a bit less than a third of the current global population), each consuming the global average of someone on that kind of low income (from a western perspective), is a very, very long way away from where we currently are. And it’s very obviously not possible to achieve that just by forcing the richest people’s consumption down to the levels of the upper-middle class as it exists now for example.
It requires, as I said earlier, a total reimagining of every element of how we live our lives and how our societies function. Nothing less than total transformation will suffice. Anyone who says anything other than that, is frankly full of shit.
And that’s just people who advocate for what I call the traditional type of climate action I mentioned earlier. The mainstream discourse around population is actually dominated by the false talking point that low birthrates in many countries threaten our existence and our economies. Obviously these types of people want GDP growth for their ideologies and their own personal bank balances. But I’m far from convinced that a lower birthrate will even lead to lower GDP at this point, because of the advance of robotics and AI. Even setting aside immigration. So their obsession with birth rates is probably more down to stupidity and the typical fear associated with the conservative psyche than anything actually real. Also, the idea that a decreasing birthrate would lead to our nationalities ceasing to exist in future is just for the birds. It wasn’t that long ago that the UK population was approximately 20 million less than it is today. According to the ONS, it was 50,381,500 in 1950 (which is impressively specific). No one back then was saying our population was too small to do what we needed to do. No one was worried about the British identity disappearing. No one probably even thought about it.
To sum up – The climate crisis is now so severe that we need to decide to have significantly fewer kids as humanity; and we need to all change the way we live dramatically (but also for the better). Not just the rich. All of us.
Anyone who says anything different is either ignorant, or lying to you. It’s really that simple.
