Getting Used To The New World Disorder

Over the past 50 years, the effects of a growing global population and a shrinking fertility rate have offset each other, producing linear growth of 1 billion people every 12 years.  This has doubled the world’s population since 1975 while at the same time causing a 70% decline in mammalian wildlife.  Most of us can’t intuit the profound effect this has had on the biosphere when our personal lives don’t reflect its impact, and it is precisely this blindness that contributes to our collective impassivity in the face of a looming catastrophe of existential proportions.

The rate of population growth is now starting to slow.  In 2023 the global population grew by 70 million, which is more than the population of France but adds up to only 840 million over the next 12 years.  The 2023 growth, however, won’t be sustained because climate change is now having the most serious impact in the tropics and subtropics, home to developing countries with the highest fertility rates (mainly Africa).

Fertility rates will continue to decline and, as climate conditions worsen and the cumulative effects of the unrelenting destruction of natural habitat take hold, mortality rates will begin to increase.  As a result, the global population will likely peak between 8.5 and 9.5 billion around 2040 when it will start to decline. This decline will accelerate precipitously as conditions worsen.  Increasing competition for the three vital resources – potable water, food, and energy – will escalate international tensions and the risk of conflict. Deteriorating tropical and subtropical climate conditions will add to the tension by forcing hundreds of millions or even billions to migrate toward the temperate zones.  Governments will become unstable and the risk of border conflicts will rise exponentially.

Assailed by more problems and fewer resources, the U.S. will no longer be able to police the high seas and piracy will combine with worsening weather conditions to decimate international trade.  The global order – the post-World War II Pax Americana – will become a thing of the past. We’ll likely end the century with less than half the 2024 global population and with much of our modern infrastructure destroyed or in decay.  If spreading global tensions results in nuclear war (India/Pakistan is the most likely flash point for this), the consequences will be much worse.

Any hope of avoiding this scenario will require dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  This will necessitate a sudden and rapid reduction in fossil fuel consumption.  There is no evidence that we are willing or able to do this.  We are unwilling because energy is the lifeblood of a nation’s economy and no nation will voluntarily enter a recession.  We are unable because wind, solar, and nuclear power cannot produce enough energy to even keep up with the growing demand.  (Despite the hype over wind and solar, fossil fuels still produce 78% of global energy.)

Less profligate energy consumption by developed countries (notably the US) and more energy efficiency across the board can reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions, but the problem is only solved when they are eliminated.  Because clean energy is unequal to the task, this will only happen when there is an enormous reduction in energy demand, and this will require a correspondingly large reduction in the Earth’s human population.  You can see that the problem is self-correcting, but the correction is unfortunately and chillingly Procrustean.

No one has a crystal ball, but in light of the intransigence of the past 30 years and given our current trajectory this scenario seems plausible.  We should continue the struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and restore natural habitats, but we must be realistic about our prospects.