Contraception is the answer to climate change

When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh. Having pooh-poohed the 1960s ‘population bomb’ alarmism that would have us all balancing on our allotted five square inches of Earth by now, we’ve grown complacent about increasing our 7.7 billion world population by at least a quarter in the next 30 years, and by about half in 2100, when we’re likely to number around 11 billion.

Perhaps it’s forgivable that an outfit called the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ would blame a perilous future food supply on climate change. Yet it’s astounding that in the report’s broad news coverage I never encountered mention of the main driver of agricultural stress. After all, what causes climate change? Even according to the most fervent of climate activists, the culprit is people. More people, more carbon emissions: double duh.

Back when human population was escalating unsustainably worldwide, demography was politically relaxing. We’re all in this together, we all have to have smaller families: the exhortations were high-mindedly globalist. But then fertility in the West plummeted to below replacement rates virtually overnight. Though also subsiding, birth rates still remained concerningly high in what we then called ‘the Third World’.

This was awkward. No one wanted to lecture what Donald Trump calls ‘shit hole countries’ with any hint of condescending colonialism. For decades, therefore, demographic PR ditched preaching contraception and focused on bolstering women’s rights, which correlate conveniently with having fewer children. The great and the good continue to feel uncomfortable about addressing the burdens of the population growth that’s now overwhelmingly located in Africa and the Middle East. It’s far more politically palatable to anguish about climate change.