Amid such hysteria it’s unclear whether we should be encouraging the patter of tiny feet or reducing the reproduction of ginormous carbon footprints. What is clear, however, is that none of this hyperbolic claims-making is really about demography — a complicated and specialist discipline based on the statistical study of human populations. It’s more about doomography — a fatalistic cultural trend that relies on elementary maths about big and small numbers to give a clever-looking veneer to sublimated anxieties about social and economic problems.

In my research field of generational conflict, for example, tensions over housing, pensions, cultural values and a range of other issues are routinely treated as problems arising from having more older people than younger people. This evades the nuanced discussions that need to be addressed in their own terms: inciting kids to “mug Grandma” for her pensioner perks will do nothing to help today’s workers gain a better standard of living now.

Worse, the doomographic mindset evades the very question it pretends to focus on: why have we become turned off reproduction? While acknowledging the problem of demographic determinism, it is surely right to think that a slowdown in population growth represents something significant and potentially troubling, and to consider its potential causes. Sociologically, one trend that stands out, certainly in Western societies, is the discomfort we have with the idea of renewing ourselves.

The study of generations involves engaging with reproduction on three levels: biological, social and cultural. Biological reproduction is common to all species, but for humans, having a baby usually involves the prior decision that this is something you want to do. It’s a personal choice, assisted by modern reproductive technologies but not given by these — birth rates tend to fall as societies develop, regardless of access to contraception or abortion. But like all choices, having a baby is framed by prevailing social and cultural dynamics and relationships. At its most basic, if having a child is seen as a key component of a meaningful life, people will couple up and get on with it; if becoming a parent is regarded as a troublesome burden, couples — or one half of a couple — are likely to dither, delay or decide that it’s all too much bother. And they do so in a context where their peers are wrestling with the same anguished choices.

It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the prevailing sentiment of cultural pessimism in Western societies makes the 2020s an inhospitable time for a baby boom. Yet the narrow instrumentalism of doomographic thinking leads to wishful thinking as well as apocalyptic prophesying. For instance, attempts to explain why young people delay, or avoid, having children as a consequence of purely economic factors often lead to reductive claims about the prohibitive cost of housing or childcare. Now, these factors certainly make it more difficult to start and sustain a family, and policy should address them — but our ancestors managed to create us despite having much less wealth. Focusing only on the factors that frame individual decisions also misses the bigger question, of what drives societies to reproduce themselves in the first place.

Into this confused debate, a major report launched last week by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) — 8 Billion Lives: Infinite Possibilities — was breathlessly upbeat. The report notes that while “climate change, pandemics, conflicts, mass displacement, economic uncertainty and other issues fuel concerns about over and under-population”, in reality, “human reproduction is neither the problem nor the solution”. On paper, I agree with every word of the above — except that I’ve followed the work of UNFPA for years, and I’m suspicious.

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The UN’s report seems to mark an abrupt shift in rhetoric from the organisation that, at the turn of the century, was at the forefront of promoting fears about overpopulation (1999: 6 Billion – A Time for Choices) and the impact of population growth on the environment (2001: Footprints and Milestones — Population and Environmental Change). Though UNFPA has long been careful to acknowledge “the violations that can occur when family planning is used as a tool for ‘population control’”, this has gone hand in hand with its own promotion of “empowerment and autonomous family planning” as a way of controlling the size and shape of populations (2022: Seeing the Unseen — The Case for Action in the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy).

Look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that many of these sentiments have not simply vanished. Instead, UNFPA’s current foregrounding of gender equality, bodily autonomy, and sexual and reproductive health and rights is both a continuation of the “progressive” language of population control that it has been developing for years and a new twist in the doomographic tale. What matters now, says UNFPA, is that nation states stop worrying about reproducing themselves, and instead open themselves up to the possibilities afforded by open borders and the movement of labour. In other words, we should push forth with “solving” the number problems of richer countries by taking workers from poorer nations, and provide more childcare so that all women can work as well.

When the report was launched in Brussels, at an event organised by Friends of Europe, Dubravka Šuica, Vice-President of the European Commission for Democracy and Demography, spoke of the need to protect the rights of women and girls in a world of eight billion, commenting further that “demography transcends borders”. All of which, again, sounds very lovely. But is declining fertility really something that should merely be shrugged off? Where is the future orientation in a society that doesn’t see the need to reproduce? Demography may “transcend borders”, but a society in which children are conceptualised primarily as future workers of wherever they end up is not one that is conducive to actual people having babies.

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This is where the problems of cultural and social reproduction reveal themselves. At the heart of the culture wars consuming many Western societies is a conflict over the relationship between the past and the future. One side sees a generational continuity rooted in the norms and values that have grown up over time and looks to reproduce the relationships and institutions that have given life meaning: hence the tendency to focus on attachments to family, community and nation, and the reaction against disruptive globalising trends. The other side sees a future that can only be made possible by “freeing” people from history, often through the aggressive promotion of a “year zero” ideal that imagines we can cauterise our relationship with the past and start all over again. The cultural legacy of modernity is disclaimed as “problematic”, economic development is decried as “destructive”, and even the sexed body is presented as an impediment to individual self-realisation.

The polarised character of this conflict of course hides a more nuanced reality. The generational transaction has never been a pitched battle between the past and the future: those who derive meaning from the past do not actually live there, nations are always changing, and values and attitudes evolve as society moves on. But the very fact that we are engaged in debates about the problem of who we are and were means that the foundation for reproducing ourselves starts to look rather shaky.

All this insecurity has been sharpened and accelerated by the response to the pandemic, where initial, official excitement about the construction of a “new normal” revealed a nose-pinching distaste for the “old normal” that has been shaped over generations. It turned out, of course, that replacing our battered old society with some kind of disembodied techno-utopia was neither possible nor desirable: the “new normal” is a more fragmented, fractious, unstable and expensive version of what we had before.

But as far as a real, robust community is concerned? It is too convoluted, too dark. It is the provenance of only the most depressed among us. Online spaces for the suicidal have always existed, sometimes barely euphemistically described as “sanctioned suicide”. But, surely, this philosophy runs up against the limits of its own repulsiveness?

A quick Google search suggests this is true. There is a “Daily Negativity” channel on YouTube, which publishes videos with titles such as “Is life worth living?” to just 1,000 subscribers. There is the late Jiwoon Hwang, a philosopher who wrote a paper titled “Why it is always better to cease to exist” and later took his own life. And there is a smattering of posts on obscure blogs. If more promortalists exist, they are not very open about it. But scratch the surface of another philosophy, one you have probably heard of before, and you will find that if you take their stated beliefs to their logical conclusion, the number of promortalists is higher than you’d think. They just call themselves antinatalists.

You’ve probably met an antinatalist. At the very least, you’ve read about them. If you talk to people about their choice to abstain from having children, “childfree” quickly becomes interchangeable with “antinatalism”. It’s about climate change. It’s about environmental degradation. It’s about recognising that life is suffering, and it’s time for that suffering to end with us.

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In the past, a person who identified as “childfree” didn’t necessarily identify as an antinatalist: just because they didn’t have or want to have children didn’t mean they thought other people shouldn’t. Antinatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that it is morally wrong to have kids. From their perspective, life is suffering, and because nobody consented to be born, it is unethical to continue the existence of the human race. There is some possible overlap between the two, but for a long time, they were distinct — both within their respective communities and in the mainstream.

But as Amanda Sukenick, a self-described “antinatalist activist”, explained recently, these movements are increasingly becoming one and the same. This confluence means that the antinatalist community is losing some of its cohesion and philosophical bent. Looked at another way, as more people identify as “antinatalist”, as opposed to just “childfree”, it adds deeper shades of meaning to the decision not to have children.

Historically, organisations and communities geared towards the voluntarily childless did not have a cohesive philosophical or moral foundation, and they certainly didn’t proselytise. They were designed to support people who felt like they lived in a world designed for families — regardless of their reasoning. This bore out online, too. Popular hangout spots, such as the subreddit r/childfree, which today boasts 1.5 million members, and older groups, such as the LiveJournal community, were supposed to offer a place where people could commiserate. Even the more extreme community “cf_hardcore”, a LiveJournal spin-off that was more explicitly critical of “crotch goblins” — the childfree community’s charming moniker for kids — wasn’t antinatalist per se. They just didn’t like children.

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Antinatalism has a more complicated history, though. While philosophers have kicked around the ethics of procreation since Thales of Miletus — and despite de-growth politics experiencing a renaissance following the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which inspired the creation of organisations such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement — antinatalism proper only really emerged in the mid-2000s. Antinatalism, as we know it today, was coined by philosopher David Benatar in 2006. (Around the same time, the Belgian writer Theophile Giraud also came up with a similar idea in his works, The Impertinence of Procreation and The Art of Guillotining Procreators: An anti-natalist manifesto.) For Benatar, existence is harm, and creating sentience is always morally wrong. This idea germinated in the Blogosphere among writers such as Sarah Perry, Jim Crawford, and Thomas Ligotti, but YouTube gave antinatalism its momentum.

In the mid-2000s and early-2010s, YouTube was a very different place. It was a swamp of New Atheism in its more intellectual corners, where weirdo dissidents debated one another about topics considered too controversial for the mainstream. Among those people was Kirk Neville, known online as DerivedEnergy, who, according to Sukenick, introduced antinatalism to YouTube dissidents in a two-part video called “A Defence of Anti-natalism”. YouTubers started to realise that they were antinatalists; they just hadn’t had a term for it. Response videos to DerivedEnergy began to roll in — debating him, agreeing with him — and, eventually, the antinatalism community began to coalesce.

As often happens with fringe beliefs, more extreme iterations of antinatalism also became popularised. Antinatalism led to efilism, a school of thought pioneered by a man known as “Inmendham” on YouTube. Efilists don’t only subscribe to antinatalism but believe all life — animals included — is inherently negative. (Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was inspired by efilism.)

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Amanda Sukenick, arguably the most significant figure in the movement, is an antinatalist and efilist. She has described how she’s had to “talk people off the ledge” of committing acts of violence; yet she’s also been recorded saying that if she knew that all suffering would “literally” end, she would endorse that happening by any means necessary. “Literally” is an important caveat — this is a thought experiment, after all — but the desire for extinction is nonetheless meaningful. And it is here that shades of promortalism start to shine through.

For some, promortalism is a different school of thought altogether. However, Jiwoon Hwang, Rafe McGregor, and Ema Sullivan-Bissett have all persuasively argued that promortalism is the core of antinatalism. In McGregor and Sullivan-Bissett’s paper “Better No Longer to Be”, they summarise their position in a single line: “[If antinatalism argues that] it is better to have never been, then it is better no longer to be.” For all three individuals, if you accept that life is suffering, it is reasonable not only to want to cease the propagation of life but to end life. Sullivan-Bissett and McGregor offer the analogy of smoking — if you think smoking causes harm, you don’t only think people shouldn’t start smoking. You believe that people should stop if they already smoke.

There are other clues, though, about antinatalism’s relationship with promortalism. To start: promortalist thinkers have been beloved in the community; Jiwoon Hwang’s death, for instance, was considered a major loss. Antinatalists are also passionate advocates of the right to die — that is, the right to commit suicide through voluntary euthanasia. Sukenick would say that she’s not unique in her enjoyment of life, but the community often speaks about how life is an imposition. When a Reddit user analysed the browsing habits of people who posted in a thread about antinatalism, he found that one of the biggest crossovers was a subreddit for people who are feeling suicidal.

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They may not use the word, but it’s implicit in their online behaviours and community conversations. Life is suffering. Why continue it? The idea that life is suffering feels particularly salient for our time, especially as “doomerism” becomes increasingly mainstream. From those who are painfully, catatonically anxious about climate change or the economy to online communities who think there is nothing left to do other than to “lay down and rot” (LDAR), not only is hope for the future in short supply, but so is a shared sense that life has been worth it.

Some people laugh it off with nihilistic humour; others rebel against it by finding Christ or embracing the promise of techno-utopianism or transhumanism. But rates of loneliness, suicide and deaths of despair are all up. “Doomerism” is more than a meme word; it’s more than a hypothetical for ordinary people. And this is all kindling for the fire of promortalism to spread. The popularity of childfree-thinking and now antinatalism are not flashes in the pan. They are not signposts that we’re hedonists or too selfish to have children. They are canaries in the coal mine: for many, modern life is despair.

This development is not exactly a surprise, but it has arrived sooner than expected. Overwhelmingly to blame is the plummeting birth rate — something that, you may point out, the Chinese state would once have celebrated. The nation’s One-Child Policy is the stuff of Geography textbooks everywhere. Whereas the Communist lunacy of the Great Leap Forward was relatively easy to reverse, the One-Child Policy — which cruelly persecuted and hounded people who wanted to have two children, never mind three — casts a long shadow.

But to blame it for China’s current demographic crisis is too easy. Egregious though the One-Child Policy was, it is not at the root of the nation’s current problems; it merely brought them on earlier than would otherwise have been the case. In the Seventies, before the policy was introduced, China’s fertility rate fell precipitously, halving from around six to around three children per woman in the course of a decade. It would have continued to nose-dive even without intervention.

The underlying reason for the lack of births in China is fairly obvious. The nation has developed. And urban, wealthy, educated people do not have large families — often choosing not to have children at all. Economic and cultural factors may differ a little between nations, but this is pretty much true the world over. It’s intriguing, then, that young Chinese people blame a lack of prosperity for their reluctance to have children; the Guardian reports one Weibo user posting, “Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive.”

What has really changed is not economics, but expectations. When prosperous professionals have a sixth of the offspring their penurious peasant grandparents produced, lack of funds cannot be the ultimate explanation. The issue here is not material well-being; it is the matter of how one’s affluence compares to what one’s peers are experiencing. In days of old, people had large families in hovels not knowing where the next meal would come from. Today, quite understandably, the new normal is to want a decent home and a degree of financial security.

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The consequences of this demographic shift are already showing, with Chinese factories already reporting a shortage of labour. But we haven’t seen anything yet. The workforce is in free fall. Back in the mid-Eighties, four or five people entered it for everyone who reached retirement age, but the two groups are now roughly equal. Rust-belt cities are losing their life. Regions like Dongbei, once the beating heart of Maoist industrialisation, are now shadows of their former selves. The ballooning number of elderly rely on thinly-stretched single children to look after them — offspring of the One-Child Policy who have no siblings with whom to share the burden. One typical young adult, trying to juggle caring for her parents and working full-time (so that she can pay their medical bills), laments: “It’s a real struggle. Sometimes I just want to quit my job, but now I need the money more than ever.” In just a few decades, there will likely be two people in their early sixties for every person in their early twenties.

The median citizen of the People’s Republic is already in his or her late thirties — similar to the median American and only slightly younger than the median Brit. But while America and the UK will age only moderately, in a generation or two the average Chinese person will be pushing 50. An ageing China might be relatively peaceable and crime-free, but it will lack the dynamism which has vaulted the country up the economic and political ranks over the past 40 years. The crisis is bad enough for Xi Jingping to have vowed to implement policies to boost the birth rate, in an effort to reverse national ageing.

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.

What can be done? Wealthy Western countries can choose to plug a shortage of workers with immigration, but this is not an option for China — for three reasons. First, as a middle-income country it is relatively unattractive to those seeking brighter lights and pavements paved, if not with gold, then at least with tarmac. Second, China is geographically and culturally distant from the parts of the world whose population is still booming, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where French and English are widely spoken, and Paris and London are easier to reach. And third, whereas a country like the UK can meaningfully top up its population with immigrants to ameliorate pinch-points in the labour market, China, with a population more than 20 times ours, would have to hoover up hundreds of millions to make much of a difference.

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China’s demographic decline will impact geopolitics as well as world economics. True, the nation will still have plenty of young men to fill its army’s ranks, but as it ages its politicians may be less inclined to lose them. Parents who have been forced by the Party to have only one child — and who have traditionally valued sons above daughters — will be doubly reluctant to lose them. In Russia in the Eighties, mothers received coffins containing the bodies of their sons who had died in Afghanistan; their protests have been evoked in the nation’s most recent war. Although worries about maternal discontent were not enough to stop Putin invading Ukraine, the precedent may give Xi Jinping pause for thought before he sets out on any military adventures.

And more significantly, there is a country jostling to fill the void that China will leave at the top of the world’s population ranks — a country that has not, historically, been the PRC’s friend. The global balance of power will of course be shifted by the fact that, for the first time in thousands of years, China is about to be eclipsed as the world’s most populous nation by India. India has a very long way to go before its economy catches up with China, but its demography means that it is almost certain to be the faster growing of the two economies over the next 20 years or so.

India has not suffered such absurd policies as China; when vasectomies were forced on men in the Seventies, there was a furious backlash and the policy was dropped. Though the Indian government has long encouraged smaller families — “Ham Do Hamara Do” (“We Two and Our Two”) was the slogan of the day when I first visited in the Eighties — population control has been more persuasive than coercive. Development has also been slower: less urbanisation, less education, less prosperity. It is no surprise, therefore, that India’s fertility rate has been coming down more slowly than China’s.

But it has been coming down nonetheless, from about six children per woman in the mid-Sixties, to just over two today. Still, the population can sustain itself — and besides, India has years of “demographic momentum” ahead of it: the population will continue to grow simply by dint of the large number of young people starting families, even if those families are fairly small, compared to the small number of older people dying. India can look forward to a couple of decades in which it can reap the so-called demographic dividend, with plenty of young people entering the workforce, relatively few leaving it, and the new workers not burdened by a surfeit of children. These are the circumstances which coincided with fantastic economic booms in places like Korea, in the Seventies, and Indonesia, in more recent times.

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Scratch beneath the surface of the national data in India, however, and all is not well. Fertility is still high in the north’s poor Hindi belt, in places such as Uttar Pradesh (which has a population three times that of Britain’s) and Bihar. In those Indian states where the economy is flourishing, however, like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the average woman has a similar number of children to women in the UK. In West Bengal, fertility is closer to the level of Japan. As India plunges headlong into greater prosperity, it is rapidly losing its demographic edge. Indeed, India’s demographic crisis, though a few decades behind China’s, appears to be just as extreme; the first whiff of escaping dire poverty and birth rate seems to collapse. It looks as if India, for reasons that are hard to pin down, having reached replacement level fertility, is going to swiftly plunge below it. Countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, by contrast, have managed to hold steady at around two children per woman for decades. India too will be ageing and waning before long.

Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

Populations grow exponentially, he argued, but food supply grows in a more linear way. And so, at some point there are more people alive than there is food to support them, whereupon there will be some crisis — plague, famine, war — that will reduce the population so that it comes back into line with the amount of food there is to support it. One way of avoiding this is to take preventative measures to reduce the population, including cutting support for the poor so that they are encouraged to have fewer children. As such, Malthus famously opposed the Poor Laws of the 18th century, a primitive form of welfare provision.

Many thought he hadn’t quite got the message of Matthew’s gospel. And the cultural commentators of the 19th century — including, variously, the Romantic poets and, most vociferously of all, Karl Marx — engaged in what we would now call a “pile on”. Malthus was cancelled. But despite the extent of the hostility this mild-mannered clergyman engendered, his views never quite seemed to go away. This week, the modern day Malthusian, 90-year-old biologist Paul Ehrlich, was invited on to the American TV show 60 Minutes, where he expressed views that come straight from Malthus. “The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilisation we’re used to,” he argued. Apparently, humanity is now consuming 175% of what the planet can regenerate.

Ehrlich has a long history of such prognostications. In 1968, he published The Population Bomb, which began: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the Seventies, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” Two million copies of the book were sold. Under his influence, couples decided not to have children and men went out and had vasectomies. But Ehrlich was wrong. In fact, from roughly the time of the book’s publication, the global death rate has declined substantially.

Ehrlich was especially pessimistic about the situation in Asia. “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” In classic Malthusian style, he proposed that countries such as India that refused to implement population control measures should be cut off from aid — in effect, starving them into submission. But from the time his book was published to the early 21st century, India tripled its population from 400 million to 1.2 billion.

And yet the rates of malnourishment and poverty in India have declined. Ehrlich was dismissed as a dangerous crank. Which is why his return on a programme as high-profile as 60 Minutes caused outrage. Jordan Peterson tweeted: “Paul Ehrlich has been famously wrong about everything he has predicted for six decades” — to which Twitter boss Elon Musk replied: “His Population Bomb book might be the most damaging anti-human thing ever written.”

Given well over 200 years of unrelenting hostility, why is it that Malthusian ideas refuse to go away? And equally puzzlingly, why is it that some people get cancelled for expressing them and others don’t? Take national treasure David Attenborough. In 2013, he explained to the Telegraph: “What are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they all about? They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about… We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.” In his 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet, he insisted: “As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology, and we can reduce the growth of our population.”

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The environmental crisis has given Malthus a new lease of life. We now live in the Anthropocene era — and with its consequent focus on the impact humanity has on the planet, Malthus is back on the agenda. As economist Jeffrey Sachs put it, “when [he] trained in economics, Malthusian reasoning was a target of mockery”, but he later came to realise that “the Malthusian spectre is not truly banished — indeed far from it.” Later, in 2008, Sachs published a book with a distinctly Malthusian title, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

The core of the moral case against Malthus is that he blames the poor for their poverty. And not just blames, but proposes that they are punished for it too, with Poor Laws (Malthus) or flour withdrawn (Attenborough) so that the conditions for population expansion are not extended. As many have pointed out, given the location of population hotspots, this is also effectively racist.

Those who want to promote the capitalist economics of continual growth have leapt on these arguments to bash those who argue that we should tread lightly on this planet. Marx may have hated Malthus, seeing in his philosophy a dangerous alternative to Marx’s own desire to upend the mechanics of capitalism. But long-term, Malthus’s idea that the planet provides only a limited supply of resources may be a much more threatening thought to the philosophy of the free market.

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There are two basic ways of thinking about the issues Malthus raised. One is empirical and data-led, with population graphs describing complex demographics. And one major criticism of Malthus was that he wasn’t very good with the numbers. But there is also an underlying philosophical issue behind the numbers. For Malthus the theologian, nature after the Fall was unable to provide an unlimited supply of resources. For the Romantics, by contrast, nature was ever bountiful, supplying a plentiful answer to expanding human need.

Likewise, the new Romantics, as it were, believe that technology is permanently creative, offering new and inventive ways of supporting growing populations. That is a bet that some of us are less than confident in making. Malthus’s dark and morally repugnant prescriptions for the plight he diagnosed do not necessarily invalidate the diagnosis itself. However much we may want to cancel Malthus and his ideas, they just won’t go away. The Anthropocene frames the Anthropos as the problem: will humanity eventually eat itself? It’s a disturbing nightmare that won’t go away.

And yet, for many in the Western intelligentsia and policymaking circles, little Vinice is a harbinger of doom — a reminder of how “overpopulation” is destroying the planet. The prize for the most miserable response predictably goes to the New York Times. The paper used the occasion to offer a platform to Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which calls on people to abstain from reproduction to usher in man’s extinction — the only possible solution to the problems facing the Earth. “Look what we did to this planet. We’re not a good species,” Knight is quoted as saying.

At the very least, by opting out of reproduction, couples will avoid “sentencing their offspring to a rapidly deteriorating quality of life and unimaginably horrible death”, according to the movement’s website. This mixture of misanthropic anti-humanism and Malthusian apocalypticism used to be among the fringiest of fringe theories; today, however, wishing for humanity’s extinction is touted as just another form of benign environmentalism. The reaction of other mainstream outlets was less grotesque, but the message was more or less the same: the growing global population, said CNN, represents a serious “challenge” to the environment.

The idea of “overpopulation” is difficult to talk about seriously, since it is inevitably tied to outlandish conspiracy theories about 5G or Covid vaccines being part of a nefarious plan to depopulate the planet; but it’s clear the elites are concerned about the issue, as the Times piece demonstrates. The argument is one we’ve heard a million times: human activity is destroying the planet’s biodiversity, and outstripping its capacity to replenish natural resources, and more people on the planet means more pressure on nature.

The issue is rarely framed in terms of the need to forcibly reduce the world population — though it is becoming increasingly acceptable to talk of the need for tools of population control, such as one-child policies, regardless of the fact that the population growth rate is falling rapidly. Rather we are told of the need to “change the way we live” by reducing our “ecological footprint”. The most important goal of all, according to governments and international institutions, is Net Zero — the need for the world to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to zero as soon as possible.

This might seem like a sensible idea on paper; there’s no denying that fossil fuels have serious drawbacks in terms of climate alteration and pollution. Yet its practical implementation is a different matter entirely. The pressure on developing nations by institutions such as World Economic Forum, the UN and the World Bank to stop subsidising fossil fuels or to ban fertilisers in food production has already caused chaos, political instability and unrest in dozens of countries: in 2019, there were major protests in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Lebanon, Ecuador, Iraq, Chile, and Iran.

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These protests serve as a reminder that one can be concerned about climate change and the state of the planet while still being sceptical of the idea that these problems can be solved through top-down solutions imposed on nations by the Davos-attending, private jet-flying, corporate-backed (if not corporation-owning) policy-building elites of the world — people at the absolute peak of the global capitalist power pyramid. Yet remarkably, these very elites have found an unlikely ally in the struggle against the evils of anthropogenic activities: radical anti-capitalists known as “degrowthers”.

Degrowthers claim that the problem at the root of humanity’s negative impact on the planet is economic growth itself, which in turn is said to be driven by the logic of the capitalist mode of production. It is, in the words of Jason Hickel, one of the most prominent degrowth advocates, “organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption”. The solution to the many of the world’s problems, according to degrowthers, is therefore to “go beyond growth” — and ultimately capitalism itself.

Once relegated to the political fringes, degrowth theory has been gaining traction in recent years among environmentalists and Leftists. Who, five years ago, would have bet on an academic book about the relationship between capitalism and the planet becoming a bestseller? Well, Capital in the Anthropocene (English translation forthcoming), a book on degrowth from a Marxist perspective written by Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, appears to be on track to do just that, having sold more than half a million copies in Japan since the book was published in 2020.

Saito’s message is simple: capitalism’s drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth communism” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth. Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism.

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But what does this mean in practice? There seems to be some confusion about this, even among degrowth activists. Growth is generally measured using the concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which represents the total value of all the goods and services produced domestically by a nation during a given period, and therefore the size of its economy. If the latter is expanding, we call it economic growth; if it is contracting, we call it a recession or even a depression, depending on the length of the contraction.

Yet while the appeal of turning to GDP seems obvious — a higher GDP tends to be associated with higher incomes and higher standards of living, and studies show it correlates with national happiness — material wealth isn’t everything. Indeed, the concept of GDP has long been criticised as a poor way to measure a country’s well-being. It doesn’t take into account the state of the environment, levels of inequality or human health, or crime rates; neither does it take into account whether a country is growing its GDP by building guns and prisons or by building schools and hospitals. And yes, growth clearly has a negative impact on the natural world — as does any human activity, for that matter.

However, it’s one thing to acknowledge the limitations of economic growth — that is, GDP —  as a measure of national well-being; it’s another to say we should dismiss it altogether, or even that we should “stop growing”, especially when so many countries around the world are striving to industrialise and grow out of poverty. To be fair, degrowthers such as Hickel are keen to note that “degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the [global] economy.” But this is little more than sophistry, as that would almost certainly entail a reduction in GDP.

Hickel says this could be achieved by allowing low-income countries to “increase energy and resource use in order to meet human needs” — which is a welcome distinction from the WEF’s Net Zero-for-all approach — while drastically reducing energy and resource use in high-income countries, by “scal[ing] down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production (i.e. the production of SUVs, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence), while expanding socially important sectors like healthcare, education, care and conviviality”.

I wouldn’t mind living in a society with better parks, schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, and fewer SUVs, Primarks and H&Ms, with good jobs for all in non-polluting industries and sectors. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t the society envisioned by degrowthers. It’s the unintended consequences of their theory. Most obviously, they erroneously conflate energy and resource consumption, but the two are very different. The production of things inevitably entails the use of finite resources, and therefore cannot be expanded indefinitely. But the same doesn’t go for the production of energy: nuclear energy, for instance, could provide bountiful, clean, carbon-free energy, thus allowing us to potentially expand energy use — ideally to power less resource-intensive industries and sectors — while rapidly phasing out fossil fuels once and for all. And yet, most environmentalists and degrowthers are zealously opposed to nuclear energy.

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This highlights the second problem of degrowthism (and environmentalism in general, for that matter): its inescapable Luddite, anti-industrialist bias, which represents a conceptual obstacle to the massive state-sponsored industrial and infrastructure investment that would be needed to make our economies more sustainable — for instance, by rapidly building up nuclear capacity.

And here lies the third problem: even assuming citizens in Western countries did come round to accepting a deliberate reduction in their material wealth in exchange for immaterial benefits, it is highly unlikely they’d consent to the massive expansion of state power that would be required to implement such a programme. The authoritarianism and assault on democracy witnessed during the pandemic has understandably made many fearful of unchecked government power. No programme that requires giving the state even more sweeping powers of intervention in the economy — something which I personally view as necessary — will win the support it needs until we’re able to build a new democratic social contract. This means, among other things, clawing back the only institution that has historically managed to deliver democracy — the nation-state — from the clutches of the globalists and corporate interests that have hijacked it. But this will take time — something degrowthers constantly repeat we don’t have.

This is where the most concerning element of degrowthism and any other form of apocalyptic environmentalism comes in: by constantly engaging in “doomerism” — the idea that either we fix everything or we’re all screwed — they’re effectively saying that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. It’s like Zero Covid on steroids. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, rather ominously, Saito cites the pandemic as proof that “rapid change is possible” — with apparently little concern for the fact that this “change” was achieved by sweeping aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarising societies, cracking down on civil liberties, and implementing unprecedented measures of social control.

In this sense, doomerism offers a political cover to what is ultimately the easiest way to reduce people’s consumption levels: making ordinary people poorer — which indeed seems to be the solution pursued by elites. This highlights probably the main flaw in degrowth theory: the driving force of capitalism is not growth or even profits, but power. Those sitting at the top of the capitalist pyramid are more than happy to have less growth if this means increasing their influence. How else should one understand our ruling classes’ passion for growth-crushing austerity?

This is the ultimate paradox of degrowth communism: its proponents may want to overthrow capitalism, but their ideology is actually empowering the globalist capitalist elites they claim to be fighting.

***

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The thing is, though, that Elon Musk is the future that the brilliant Huxley brothers spent their lives imagining; Aldous most famously in Brave New World (1932) and science-communicator Julian in a thousand books and articles and broadcasts on the quantity and quality of the human race on planet Earth.

Aldous and Julian would wonder why Mars was still so interesting for someone as clever as Musk. Human habitation of proximate planets was already an old idea for their generation. And not just as a science fiction trope. Emigration to the moon and Mars was tossed around all the time as a possible solution to one of the Huxley’s key political discussion points: overpopulation. Expenditure on settling other planets, Julian was convinced, would do nothing to alleviate the poverty that such crowding brought on Earth. His eminent brother Aldous was also firmly earthbound: neither population, nor hunger, nor land problems were going to be addressed by looking outward from Earth to the celestial bodies.

The trio would, inevitably, talk about population. Musk would probably tell them that, any day now, the world’s population will tick over to eight billion. Julian and Aldous would sit back and look at one another, shocked. In their time, they were both A-list speakers and lobbyists on the great post-war problem of overpopulation. But they had only imagined a future of up to four billion or so.

It is impossible to overstate the whole-Earth scale of the population problem in the years after the Second World War. The planetary crisis, then, — one of energy consumption — was not just similar to our own Anthropocene-crisis, but its direct antecedent. Julian and Aldous Huxley’s generation watched regional and global rates of net population growth accelerate in a manner unimaginable even to their grandfather, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. “Darwin’s bulldog”, a fierce supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution, was already worried in the late 19th century.

In 1957, Julian put it in terms of doubling: one billion in the mid-18th century, two billion by the mid-Twenties, and at its Fifties rate, he forecast, four billion by the Eighties. His brother put the same idea differently. “On the first Christmas Day”, Aldous wrote, there were about 250 million humans; this grew only slowly, so that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, there were perhaps 500 million. By the time he wrote Brave New World in 1932 there were almost 2 billion people on the planet. Just 27 years later, when he revisited his dystopia, human numbers were approaching 3 billion. That was the figure that sent the Huxley brothers, like so many others, into intellectual and political overdrive.

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Aldous wrote Brave New World Revisited in 1958, a non-fiction book naming something that was for him far more terrible than the fictional world he had created decades earlier: “The Age of Overpopulation.” For the Huxley brothers, world population growth was leading inexorably toward a catastrophic planetary future.

At my table, Musk might then lean forward and tell the Huxley brothers that as we approach eight billion on planet Earth in 2022, the average fertility rate has declined to 2.3 births per woman. That’s when the dinner party would either fall apart or come alive. For Elon Musk, this fertility rate is one of the great near-future problems. He tweets: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming.” He is not alone. We’ve heard quite a bit about an apparent cataclysm, for example in Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. In the Huxley era, similar catastrophic books were on the shelves, but they sold under titles like “Standing Room Only”, “Overfill” and “The Population Bomb”.

For Aldous and Julian Huxley, the astonishing fertility rate of 2.3 would be a breathtaking achievement. This was everything they had worked for. Planetary catastrophe had been averted! The future of humans on Earth, safe. Immodest Julian would think that the world had been wise, read his thousands of talks and books and papers on the unprecedented disaster that was population growth, and acted. The Huxley brothers simply couldn’t and wouldn’t understand how this decline could possibly be construed as a global problem.

Late in their lives, on this matter, the brothers were twinned: the same arguments, the same catastrophe, the same popular deployment of Huxley science and politics in every register and outlet possible. While Julian was writing articles on overpopulation for Playboy, Aldous was writing the same for Esquire. While Julian was broadcasting on the BBC, Aldous was speaking to ABC on population and world resources. Both used the widely recognised formula of “death control without birth control”. That is, the easily comprehensible idea that the public health control of infectious disease had been implemented across the world with incredible success especially in the reduction of infant mortality, but without any accompanying programs for birth control. The “balance is out”, as Aldous put it.

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In the post-war world, there were a range of reasons for being troubled by world population growth. One was geopolitical, especially as the Cold War unfolded, when population control policies were associated with US-led anti-communism. A higher standard of living, linked to fertility control in then-named third-world economies, was understood to offset hunger and thus political discontent. For the White House, population planning was about ensuring food security and keeping polities this side, not that side, of a communist line. For leaders of newly independent nation-states, not least Jawaharlal Nehru in India, lower fertility rates meant higher standards of living and economic “development”. For any number of economists, lowering fertility rates was a means of averting future wars. For Aldous Huxley, population control was a road to world peace.

For Julian, however, his desire to manage human fertility was largely driven by early environmentalist politics. He sought to save wildlife habitats from encroaching cultivation, all those additional acres turned to the plough to provide grain for ever-growing numbers of humans. He was also driven by a feminist politics of sorts. He argued his whole life that reliable birth control should be available to all women, not just some, and that there was little human freedom for women bearing eight, nine, 10 children out of their worn-out bodies. The good and the bad of population control and family-planning history is well known. Yet we need to recall how recent and unprecedented in human history effective contraception actually is. Julian knew it. His generation and milieu often considered birth control one of the great technological developments of humankind, as significant in the long history of human affairs, he would say, as fire, printing, or electricity: “In time it will change the entire course of history.” It has.

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It is sobering to observe how much more sensitive the Huxleys were to the gender dynamics of population policy than Musk and his ilk today. Women around the world are now opting en masse to have fewer children, and to do so later in life. The reasons are multiple: women are marrying later, retaining employment, getting educated, and accessing contraception. But collectively, this is one of the truly phenomenal changes of modern world history. In the UK, for example, the birth rate fell from 5.63 births per woman in the Huxleys’ grandfather’s time to 1.753 in our own. In India, it fell from at least 6.0 to 2.2 births per woman. But if the pro-natalists had their way, and this global trend towards lower fertility were to be reversed, it would be women bearing the brunt of it. And that would be impossible to justify.

As the planet approaches eight billion, the change in fertility rate since the Huxleys’ time means we need not be alarmed, as they were, by global “overpopulation”. Nor should we worry about an incorrectly named global “depopulation”. What we really need to be alarmed by are crude rationalisations for women to breed more. There lie the truly sinister lessons of history.

For conservatives, it may be tempting to dismiss green activism as a stalking-horse for communism, a movement that has certainly produced enough ideologues in the last century. And it’s true that a great deal of green activism is broadly Left-aligned, while for much of my lifetime, economic and technological growth has been broadly associated with a Right-liberal worldview espoused by Margaret Thatcher. Recently that has roared to life again under the questionable guidance of Liz Truss, with her rants against the “enemies of growth”, a group, in her view, that includes environmentalists.

It seems that defending trees in particular drives many “enemies of growth” to extremes. One famous Left-wing tree hugger and enemy of Thatcherite growth, “Swampy”, was briefly famous in 1997 for living in a tunnel under the Newbury bypass site, to protect ancient woodland from being destroyed.

But despite what Right-liberals say, “tree hugging” — and direct action — is by no means confined to the Left. Once you leave the relatively safe confines of Roger Scruton and promoting land stewardship (like our King), a green movement shorn of Left-wing shibboleths reveals two things.

First, just how much of the moral framework we still inhabit, even in a secularised world, is unreflectingly Christian. And second, that contrary to how it may seem from a glance at the self-styled pagans of Left-leaning green activism, in truth one of the last remaining bulwarks against genuine paganism may be those remnants of Christian thought that persist in the progressive moral framework.

As many recent writers have observed, the roots both of liberalism and its mutant child, progressivism, lie in our Christian heritage. Nor, as thinkers such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford have argued, is it easily possible to separate our extractive relation to technology — the principal driver of climate change — from that heritage.

Nowhere is this revealed more clearly than the points where the green movement overlaps with the far-Right. For where environmentalism is concerned, in truth, Left and Right are obsolete. Instead, the real battles concern deep questions such as our standing relative to other species, the nature and value of progress and technology, the value of human freedom, and the value of humans ourselves. Most of this, whether we like it or not, still takes place within the dying embers of Christianity. And the coming battle over climate policy is fundamentally over which parts of this Christian heritage we’ll end up sacrificing, as we confront the end of cheap energy and never-ending growth.

Two decades before Swampy hit the headlines for burrowing under the Newbury bypass site, one Theodore Kaczynski was roaming the woodlands around his area of rural Montana on a campaign of environmental sabotage. His methods, though, were orders of magnitude more focused and brutal. According to letters he later wrote from prison, Kaczynski spent two decades as a proto-Swampy on steroids: stringing wires across motorbike trails, burning logging machinery, pouring sugar into the tanks of motorised vehicles and smashing up holiday cabins, in a one-man campaign against what he called the “octopus” of technology.

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Kaczynski is better-known as the Unabomber: he sent 16 mail bombs to university and corporate targets, killing three and injuring 23 over a 20-year campaign. He’s also the author of Industrial Society and its Future, a 35,000-word manifesto that attacks Leftism and justifies bombings as an extreme but legitimate start to a necessary revolution against the harms of “industrial society”.

For Kaczynski, the most offensive feature of industrial society is its centralised and impersonal systems of control, from media propaganda to huge corporations: all methods aimed at adapting human nature to fit the needs of the machine. In Kaczynski’s view, “industrial-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of human freedom” which he defines as “being in control […] of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence”, such as food, clothing and shelter, as well as going through “the power process” which is to say setting and attaining meaningful goals via one’s own agency.

“Uncle Ted” has become a cult figure of Gen-Z veneration, but his legacy is an ambivalent one. Some on the green “anarcho-primitivist” subculture celebrate his call to return to simpler ways of life. Meanwhile, “incels” and other political fringe groups are drawn to his willingness to kill in order to get his message out; Kaczynski’s manifesto has been quoted by subsequent terrorist attackers. But he is not the only individual inspired to political extremism by tree felling, or the only environmentalist associated with shady memes on the far-Right.

“Eco-fascist” is used (again, usually by those Right-liberals who are definitely not “enemies of growth”) as an epithet to describe anyone who proposes authoritarian measures to address climate change. “Eco-fascism” proper, though, is an altogether stranger and darker doctrine. Energetically disavowed across the more mainstream environmental movement, it’s a fringe worldview that argues against immigration and for sharp reductions in the human population, sometimes forcibly and (per some proponents) along racist lines.

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In this, it’s not new: some crossover of “green” and nativist thinking goes all the way back to the “Blood and Soil” doctrines of Nazi-era Germany, and informs the thinking of the Nazi occultist and animal-rights campaigner Savitri Devi, whose 1959 The Impeachment of Man argued that humans shouldn’t be set above animals.

But what does characterise this thinking, just like that of Nazism, is its profound repudiation of Christian values. This comes across clearly in the doctrine of deep ecology, which — like Devi’s writing — argues that we shouldn’t grant humans any kind of special value. Rather, deep ecologists argue that we should reserve this reverence for the biosphere as a whole.

This sounds harmless and hippy-ish enough, until you consider its ramifications — notoriously set out by the king of eco-fascist tree-huggers, the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola (1932-2020). Again inspired to activism by the destruction of ancient woodland, much of what’s shocking to mainstream sensibilities in Linkola’s writing comes from his blunt willingness to consider profoundly anti-humanist (which is to say non-Christian) solutions to the ecological crisis.

Every Christian or humanistic value, in Linkola’s view, is not just useless but actively pernicious. Technological progress is the enemy of the natural world, while the idea that there’s something special about humans justifies its exploitation. The belief that we’re all equal and valuable legitimises human multiplication beyond the earth’s carrying capacity, while egalitarian political systems are a disaster because they stop authoritarian political leaders from taking effective action to prevent us careering toward extinction. And human rights are not the foundation of civilisation, but “a death sentence of all Creation”.

In the place of human exceptionalism, Linkola deems diversity and harmony in the biosphere as the highest value: “The whole, the system, the maximum amount of species and diversity is the most sacred thing.” And from this it follows that there’s a natural ceiling on how many of any given species can be supported. In his view, we have long since surpassed that limit, thanks to our use of technology. Therefore, any means which might halt technological development and reduce what he calls “the human flood” are in principle justified.

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For him this includes euthanasia; state control of reproduction, including forced abortions, forced sterilisation and infanticide; and even mass genocide. “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die,” he declares.

Linkola is a fringe figure in environmental thinking, a fact that attests to the hold Christian values still have, for all that observant Christianity has been declining across the West. Inasmuch as they violate these white-labelled forms of Christianity, even relatively dilute descendants of Linkola’s extreme ideas, such as the militant group Deep Green Resistance, get tarred with the “ecofascist” brush.

And Ted Kaczynski also gets cited as an eco-fascist influence — despite the fact that he and Linkola are radically at odds in some respects, such as their views on the moral standing of individual freedom. For Kaczynski, human freedom is a central good: the central problem with industrial civilisation is the way freedom is limited by the demands of industrial life. In contrast, for Linkola, an excess of human freedom is partly to blame for industrial civilisation.

But it would be simplistic to call Kaczynski the more “Christian” thinker here: he has been sharply critical (from prison) of “anarcho-primitivism”, a movement that proposes total abandonment of technology. In Kaczynski’s view, by claiming that this would produce more sex equality and sharing, and less racism and violence, this in practice smuggles “mushy utopianism” — actually a disguised set of Christian-heritage values — into a revolutionary vision that ought to be grounded and practical.

Meanwhile, more conventionally radical Left-wing environmental arguments are often overtly hostile to Christianity, usually (paradoxically) from a vantage-point that places central importance on deeply Christian-inflected tenets such as egalitarianism and the value of love.

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But perhaps the question isn’t “who is the inheritor or rejector of the Christian legacy” as “which bits are being jettisoned, and by whom?”. Overtly post-Christian progressive environmentalists such as the examples linked above, for example, often reject the Christian idea that humans take precedence over the natural world, that the cosmos is ordered hierarchically, or the belief that we’re all born fallen. Green salvation, in this vision, means we need only reject hierarchy and free ourselves from the taint of civilisation for peace and harmony to reign.

Or perhaps we could abandon democracy? It is, after all, increasingly clear that few environmentalists place much faith in democratic politics to address the existential crisis most believe we now face. If Linkola thinks democracy is a disaster, and Deep Green Resistance argue for violent revolutionary eco-vanguardism, recent demands by the otherwise broadly progressive group Extinction Rebellion for a “citizens’ assembly” to address climate change also look, on closer inspection, suspiciously like an extra-democratic body of appointees.

Alternatively, instead of giving up democracy, we could give up our affinities to home and family, in defence of the universal value of human life? Gaia Vince’s 2022 Nomad Century argues for large-scale technocratic efforts to accommodate mass migration driven by climate change, a policy that presupposes the fundamentally Christian idea that all humans have equal value and it’s wrong to prioritise your kin, tribe or nation.

Of course those on Liz Truss’s side will wave away the prospect of hard choices. We can set aside eco-alarmism and go on chopping down trees that took hundreds of years to grow, in the name of growth. But even this, in effect, means choosing the fundamentally Christian faith in progress — at the expense of literally every other Christian value.

And if that seems pagan enough, out where the ashes of Christianity are cold and grey lurk those, like Linkola, who suggest we should retrieve the idea of human stewardship of the natural world — but at the expense of valuing the human full stop. And it’s in these ideas, even more than the barbarous vandalism of the “growth at all costs” cabal, or what Kaczynsky called the “mushy utopianism” of the “anarcho-primitivists”, that we see a glimpse of what a genuinely post-Christian paganism looks like.

Those progressives who cheer on the decline of observant faith in the West, and denounce the Christian Right, would do well to reflect on how much less they’re going to like the post-Christian Right.

And then the whale is gone, and the creatures go back to their lives of crushing pressure, constant darkness, and an eternal knife-edge struggle for survival. As Thomas Malthus had it in his bleak vision: organisms, which increase exponentially in number, will rapidly outgrow their resources, which can only grow arithmetically. So of course, the excess population which has grown up on this brief glut must die off

We are currently living in a time of whalefall, suggests the scientist Vaclav Smil in his new book, How the World Really Works. He doesn’t use the word, of course: credit for the macabre whale metaphor must go to Scott Alexander. But modern humans are animals, products of evolution like any other, and yet we noticeably do not spend every minute of every day struggling to get the material required to survive. Instead, we build cathedrals and watch football, we make art, we waste time on Twitter. And that is because we live on the gigantic, blessed whale carcass that is our fossil fuel inheritance.

For Smil, our discussions about climate and energy are hamstrung, because so few people actually understand how the world really works. Material lands in front of us in pre-packaged, convenient forms — shrink-wrapped pork chops, winter strawberries, lights that turn on when you flick a switch, phones made of plastic and metal. The world is a set of black boxes that we use but, in most cases, do not understand. So when we say “we need to cut back our carbon emissions”, most of us don’t really grasp the implications of doing so.

But somehow, all these incomprehensible processes are keeping us alive, and we should find it astonishing that they are able to do so. The demand for material – for energy and nutrients – is greater than it has ever been. The world’s population has exploded: in 1800, there were about 1 billion humans. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion. Now there are 7.7 billion. In my parents’ lifetime, the number of humans alive has trebled. But amazingly, the amount of material available to each of them has increased even more, and that is in large part because of our use of fossil fuels.

In 1800, almost all the energy used globally was in the form of human and animal muscles, for mechanical work, or plant matter, burned for heat and light. Coal, the first widely used fossil fuel, was just starting to be used in steam engines in the UK, but it was negligible overall. By 1900, fossil fuels were the source for half our energy. By 2000, they were the source of 87%.

And as a result, our lives have been transformed. The amount of energy available to the world has increased 1,500-fold. That is only part of the story, though: increased energy efficiency means that the gain in useful energy is more like 3,500 times. And even though the world’s population has gone up many times, “an average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century”.

But most of us don’t realise how that energy is actually used. A large percentage, for instance, is used to create four materials which are the building blocks of modern society – materials which are so ubiquitous that we barely notice them, even as we depend on them.

Smil identifies these four basic pillars of human civilisation as steel, cement, plastic and ammonia. Producing them takes enormous amounts of fossil fuels. It takes, for instance, 25 gigajoules of energy to produce one ton of steel, roughly twice the amount of energy used by the average UK household per year. In 2019, the world used 1.8 billion tons of steel; its production is responsible for about 8% of the world’s total carbon emissions. But we can’t do without it: the frameworks of our cities are built of it; the pipes we send our water and gas through, too. Our cars, our transporter ships, our knives and cooking pots. Our machines for making all these things. Cement and plastic are similarly vital, and are responsible for comparable amounts of our total carbon output. We can’t do without them, and there’s no easy carbon-free alternative way of making them.

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And then there’s ammonia, which rarely features in any conversation about cutting carbon emissions. Ammonia is a nitrogen atom ringed by four hydrogen atoms. Our atmosphere is 80% nitrogen by mass, but plants – which need it for growth – can’t easily take it out of the air. Instead they need to gather it from the soil. Bacteria that live in the roots of some plants can “fix” it into the soil; animal wastes like manure have relatively high nitrogen content. But those methods can only support a certain amount of growth.

In the beginning of the 20th century, a German chemist called Fritz Haber invented a process for getting nitrogen out of the air by making ammonia. It requires huge amounts of energy, and hydrogen, usually taken from natural gas. We now spread hundreds of millions of tons of ammonia on our fields — about 50% of the total nitrogen going into food production comes from it. Smil quotes an author, writing in 1971: “industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”

This means the world is able to eat. The share of the global population that is underfed has plummeted, even as the actual population has ballooned – about 65% of people could not get enough to eat in 1950, compared to about 9% in 2019. So, “in 1950 the world was able to supply adequate food to about 890 million people,” as Smil puts it: “but by 2019 that had risen to just over 7 billion”. That is not entirely down to ammonia, but ammonia is a large part of the story. If fertiliser were removed, perhaps half the world’s population would starve.

Agriculture, then, depends on the whalefall: the glut of energy provided by fossil fuels. Our deep reliance on fossil fuels, to create materials most of us don’t appreciate we need, is unnerving. Especially when Smil points out that much of the world — notably, sub-Saharan Africa — lives on well below average levels of energy use. Africa uses just 5% of the world’s total ammonia supplies, despite having almost 25% of the population. About 40% of the world — 3.1 billion people — has a per capita energy supply “no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860”. “In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living,” writes Smil, “those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double — but preferably triple — their per capita energy use.”

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Can we do that while also reducing our carbon emissions? Not fast, says Smil. For all the boasts and pledges — all the “government targets for years ending in zero or five”, about which Smil is very sniffy — the world relies too heavily on fossil fuels, for too many things, to rapidly stop using them. Even the International Energy Association’s optimistic “Sustainable Development Scenario” projects that the share of fossil fuels in the world’s energy mix will only drop to 56% in 2040

We can, and need to, replace fossil-fuel energy sources with renewable ones. But there are obstacles, beyond simply the political will. Renewable energy is very good at making electricity. But electrical energy isn’t ideal for making the incredible heat needed for iron and steel production, or cement. The Haber process for making ammonia works much more efficiently with natural gas as the source of hydrogen and energy than it does with water and electricity.

And away from the four pillars, fossil fuels have other huge advantages. It’s very energy-dense: you can store much more energy in a kilogram of kerosene than you can in a kilogram of battery, meaning that transatlantic flights are possible. And it keeps — currently, there is no suitable way of storing electrical energy for more than a few hours or days, so solar energy stored up in summer is no use in winter. A barrel of oil will last indefinitely. Those facts will change, and Smil is more downbeat than I am about how quickly that will happen, but we are definitely going to be relying on fossil fuels for some decades yet.

But unlike the crabs and hagfish that eat the fallen whale, we are clever, and we needn’t simply slink back into the darkness and starve. Smil thinks there are major gains in efficiency which can be had, over and above the enormous gains so far. He points to water use as an example: in 2015, the US only used about 4% more water than it did in 1965, but in the meantime, its population had gone up by two thirds actual per capita water use has dropped by 40%, even while the country has got richer and better fed. Perhaps similar efficiencies can be found with energy and carbon.

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Besides, we are not about to run out of whale, at least not imminently: the raw materials — metals, fuels — that our lifestyle needs are still around in large amounts. But we have grown in numbers and lifestyle well beyond the capacity of the pre-whalefall world. And we don’t want to go back to the lifestyle we had before, even if some romantics and millenarians might disagree. In fact, we want many more people to enjoy the spoils of whalefall. We have used fossil fuels to construct an astonishing world, one that feeds and houses an incredible number of people.

We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and the sooner the better. But it will be a long and difficult job — as Smil demonstrates, they are threaded through our society at every level, entwined like knotweed in the systems that provide our food, our housing, our machinery, our transport. We forget how complex our society is until it stops working in some way — as when supply chains broke down in the pandemic and our hospitals ran out of rubber gloves (an issue Smil talks about in a section on globalisation). As it stands, if we were to reduce fossil fuel consumption by the sort of degrees that some demand, it would lead to disaster, because we haven’t unpicked the threads yet.

And that greed could prove fatal. China’s “civilisation state”, deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, represents the most profound philosophical challenge to liberal values since the end of the Cold War. But our oligarchs choose to ignore this, preferring instead to genuflect to Beijing for financial gain.

The cost of such avarice is slowly coming into focus: China’s economy may surpass the US by as early as 2028, and by some measurements already has. Of course, China deserves credit for its remarkable performance, which is mostly thanks to the efforts of its citizens, in particular its rural migrants, the key fodder for the country’s dominant manufacturing base.

But the Middle Kingdom’s ascendency would not seem as inexorable if not for the efforts of the West’s ‘kowtow crowd’, a group of self-interested cheerleaders and enablers of China’s autocratic state. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened that the USSR would “bury” the West. China’s President Xi can count on the West burying itself.

Some of this can be traced to naivety and an underestimation of Chinese capabilities. Rather than recognising a potential threat, our political and financial elites saw a potential economic partner and huge market. China was still a poor, developing country; when welcomed into the World Trade Organisation 20 years ago, it dutifully supplied cheap products to a welcoming market. In the meantime, it was hoped that exposure to the West would create an increasingly liberal China.

Yet for at least a decade, particularly since Xi Jinping assumed control of the Communist Party, these assumptions have been proven fatally wrong. Xi and the Party have clearly made clear that their ambition is not any old seat at the table, but the one at its head.  

Given what seems a clear and present danger to the West and its East Asian allies, one would expect our ruling class to seek ways to fight back. Donald Trump may have been a blustering fool but at least he saw, and identified, the threat. President Biden, to his credit, has also proposed some steps to reinforce US competitiveness, and there is rare bipartisan consensus, including on the Left, to resist China’s hegemony.

Yet prospects for standing up to China from the White House are limited. As recently as 2019 Biden, a stalwart cog in the Washington consensus, minimised the Chinese threat to our economy, recently claiming, incredibly, that: “you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” More worrisome still has been the Biden family’s close business ties with Beijing. The somewhat dissolute Hunter, in particular, has profited hugely and gained expensive gifts working for the Chinese. Most recently, he helped a Chinese firm to corner the cobalt market, a key component in the administration’s  green energy strategy.

But kowtowing is hardly a partisan phenomenon. Prominent figures from both parties, including former GOP Speaker John Boehner, and many connected Washington think tanks receive funding from Beijing. Even members of the Bush family have cosied up to CCP apparatchiks, including one with strong ties to that country’s rising military.

Europe’s leaders, if anything, are even less committed to confronting the Chinese challenge. Some, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, seek to play the US against the Chinese civilisational challenge by treating them as moral equivalents of their long-time American allies. Meanwhile, Beijing is busily extending its presence on the continent with infrastructure investment to weak European countries such Greece, Hungary, and Romania.

Nowhere is the ineptitude of the Western policy towards China more evident than in climate change. Like its human rights record, China’s environmental footprint should be a source of embarrassment and condemnation. While the West hamstrings itself with its eco-commitments, China, not mandated to reduce its carbon emissions till 2030, continues to build coal plants to maintain its industrial engine. By 2030, when China will be able to shift to nuclear and other alternatives, the West will be effectively de-industrialised, and hopelessly dependent.

But such dependency is nothing new. For decades American companies have been handing Beijing the basis for economic hegemony: since 1990 US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned from under $10 billion annually to $419 billion last year. China’s ratio of imports to exports was four to one in 2018. This has enriched many of our leading manufacturing companies — notably Apple — while costing an estimated 3.4 million job losses in the US since 2001.

Meanwhile, these corporate kowtowers actively promote China’s model. Apple, for instance, props up and profits from China’s ever-expanding surveillance state. Acting as if it were its own country, Apple has essentially negotiated its own $275 billion deal with China, promising to keep production there while assisting with the country’s unhidden goal is to supplant the West as a tech leader.

For its part, Wall Street, even amid the threat of government interference, plays its part the kowtow crowd. Ray Dalio, founder of giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and self-promoting author, has dismissed China’s repression of its Uighur population as the result of a “sacrosanct” desire for sovereignty. Even powerful figures such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan have decided to publicly apologise after upsetting the CCP. It’s in their interest, after all. Xi knows fully well that Western investment bankers and tech companies will do his bidding, as long as they get what Mafia dons may call “a taste”. China may be miffed if US diplomats boycott the 2022 winter games, but they can be sure that the corporations and investment bankers will likely be there, heads bowed on the floor.

All of this is made even more humiliating by the fact that China’s rise may not be as unstoppable as its Western admirers believe. China’s economic growth rate is slowing, its bloated real estate markets are showing signs of implosion, and industrial production has slowed to the lowest level since 2004. Meanwhile, its tech and innovation sector is being pummelled by continued government crackdowns.

More serious still are demographic forces. By 2050, China is projected to have 60 million fewer people under age fifteen, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2050 it will be roughly 20% higher than that of the US; 15 years after that, according to the South China Morning Post, China’s population will be very old and about half its current size.

None of this suggests resisting China will be easy, particularly given the disposition of our rulers. But it does mean it’s possible.

That is the real tragedy of the kowtow crowd. Just as in the Thirties, their prostration only makes their adversary stronger and more confident. Inevitably, it will be the rest of us, and future generations, who pay the price.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.