One of the dark undersides of the extreme environmental movement is its long obsession with population control. Once linked to alleged resource depletion and global famine – human population control is now tied to the assertion that our Earth cannot possibly meet everyone’s aspirations for modern housing, transportation, energy and living standards … without causing irreversible climate change and sustainability disasters.

It is also driven by claims that human populations must be reduced and then limited to some arbitrary “carrying capacity.” President Obama’s Science Adviser John Holdren and Pope Francis’ senior climate change adviser Hans Joachim Schellnhuber both say our planet’s maximum carrying capacity is a mere one billion people. 

Naturally, they are carefully and deliberately vague about exactly HOW we are supposed to “progress” from 7.2 billion men, women and children on our planet today – or a projected 9.6 billion people in 2050 – to just one billion some years from now.

They prefer not to discuss how six to 8.5 billion people are to be removed from the human gene pool … which billions must perish … and who gets to decide. It’s all cloaked in pious, ecological, euphemistic language. However, statements by prominent environmentalists offer solid clues.

Mr. Holdren and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich have written: “We need to de-develop the United States” and other developed countries, “to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” We must then address the “ecologically feasible development of the underdeveloped countries.” [emphasis added – from their Human Ecology book]  

Ehrlich also said: “Giving society cheap energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Even more outrageous, he claimed that the “instant death control” provided by DDT was “responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates” in poor countries. Since those people were not practicing birth control, certainly not at the level he deems necessary, they need to have a “death rate solution” imposed on them.

And so radical environmentalists have waged campaigns against using DDT as a powerful insect repellant to prevent malaria. They oppose modern fertilizers and biotech foods that feed more people from less land, using less water, and even during floods or droughts.

They are also viscerally against all forms of carbon-based and nuclear energy, which yield far more reliable and affordable energy, and far more energy per acre than wind, solar and biofuel alternatives.

These statements and policies make several things abundantly clear.

In the view of population control advocates – mostly less educated, darker skinned people in mostly poor, underdeveloped countries are less desirable, and less worth saving, than people in richer, mostly Caucasian countries. People in the political, ruling classes must be exempt from decisions about population control, resource allocation, housing, travel and living standards. 

And someone must decide how many people, having which skills, will be needed to feed and clothe – and provide energy, raw materials and technologies for – whatever portion of that remaining one billion people are not in those ruling classes.

From my perspective, it is a crime against humanity to impose policies that pretend to protect the world’s most energy-deprived masses from hypothetical, computer-generated climate, resource depletion and other catastrophes decades from now – by perpetuating energy deprivation, poverty, malnutrition and disease that now kill millions of people every year.

These are all fascinating issues. One has to wonder how the vast majority of the world’s people feel about them – and who will ask President Obama, Pope Francis, Ban Ki Moon and UN climate director Christiana Figueres some of these very troubling and inconvenient questions.

Paul Driessen
Senior policy analyst, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality
pkdriessen@gmail.com