Population Bomb Still Destroying the Earth
June 25, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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Trump distracts from the big picture

Undeclared war against Iran. Illegal layoffs of federal workers. Federal agencies closed. Immigrants attacked. Tariffs threatening the global economy, maybe tilting the U.S. into another great depression. Reproductive rights crushed. Black people and women fired so incompetent white men can be appointed to their positions. In Trump World II bad things happen fast.

What can a poor boy (or old man) do? Well, I work with a number of organizations. Today I want to share some wisdom from Population Connection, which used to be known as ZPG or Zero Population Growth.

In the June 2025 issue of the group's magazine its president, John Seager, points out that ":Calls to meet the climate crisis by stabilizing population through the expansion of voluntary family planning are met with near-universal, unconscionable silence. Most environmental groups either ignore the subject or paper over it with spurious claims that population concerns are inherently racist."

Well ain't that the truth. If you have been around environmental groups, the Green Party, leftist factions, or even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and haven't noticed, you must be deaf and blind. The same people who will talk about Trump & Company being in denial of global warming due to fossil fuel use will (usually) shy away from the population issue. They don't want to be accused by their fellow travelers of being racist. So you can't say people should be encouraged to having fewer children. This dynamic goes back to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century that did tend to be racist and tried to make sure black and brown skinned people had less children than white people (though they also were against white idiots reproducing). It became an unchallengeable cultural legacy, out of touch with reality. That's humans for you.

In the Editor's Note Marian Starkey quotes New York Times journalist Lydia DePillis: "An agenda That prioritizes large families makes plenty of people queasy. Groups like Population Connection worry that the tactics required to raise birthrates can verge on authoritarianism, and believe that the consequences of population aren't as catastrophic as pronatalists make them out to be."

Indeed. Allow me to repeat what I believe is a fact-based prediction of the future, in case you are not a regular reader. Due mainly to improvements in medicine, the earth was already overpopulated by 1900, and is way, way overpopulated now. True, at any given level of population the negative impacts of the earth will depend on levels of human activity, like fossil fuel use. But it is almost impossible to get people to give up privileges, comforts, or luxuries once they have tried them. So energy use per human is not likely to decline significantly going forward. It is more likely to increase. While birth rates have leveled off in a few nations, notably Italy, South Korea, Japan, China, and even the United States of America, even a slight continuing decline extending to other nations will not put the human population of earth at a sustainable level.

What will happen is that, as the earth continues to heat up, famines will become more frequent. They will be caused mainly by heat domes and drought.

Death through starvation will bring the human population back into balance.

Other scenarios are possible, but a world with 10 billion people or more is only possible if most of those people are on borderline starvation diets.

You can react to these facts with your ideology or personal belief system.

Of the options available to the human race, the least bad is a global one child per family guideline. Even that is not likely to decrease the population fast enough to prevent widespread environmental catastrophe and human misery.

So tell Republicans and Christian Nationalists they can only have one child. They do their best to boss you around, you have a right to boss them back.