Learning to drive scared me as a teenager. There was something terrifying about controlling a two-ton hunk of metal, and my drivers’ education teacher didn’t help by showing a graphic slideshow of injuries we could expect from a brutal car accident. This didn’t bother me much once I moved to the city; with buses, the metro, and bike or scooter shares, there are plenty of other ways to get around.
by Max Kummerow
In Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2019) Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson argue that population decline will bring many social and economic changes—some good, some bad. They assert that “In three decades, give or take…global population starts to decline.”
Note that their title is a bit misleading. World population will probably rise to over 10 billion before the slow decline would begin.
“There’s just too many of us and no one is talking about it.”
—Biologist Patrick Benson in Meera Subramanian’s, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis
It is hard to imagine a growing population supporting a steady state economy. “Jobs” and higher incomes for growing numbers of people anchor the platforms of political candidates and economists worldwide.
But what about a different approach?
As the economy bloats with bigger and bigger bites taken from the biosphere, what’s the 21st century response?
Brent Blackwelder suggests that you don’t have to worry about a solar or wind “spill” contaminating the air, land and water.
Misplaced confidence is preventing us from making decent decisions about our energy supplies.