 The Mises Institute has a new free book for minor issues fans. Dr. Guido Hulsman's How Inflation Destroys Civilization. Learn how inflation isn't only making us poor, it's harming our culture, meant to well-being, and the moral foundations of civilization itself. Get your free copy today at mises.org slash issues free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well, I don't hear much talk about world population these days, the way I did growing up in the 1960s and 70s. People were supposedly starving, dying with tens of millions more sure to die. The problem back then was, well, there was just too many, well, people. Population numbers coming out of China and India were unthinkable and projections indicated many more people were going to be born into this dire situation. There were over 20,000 people in my hometown. And as far as everyone was concerned, that was already enough. People were dying. We were told to eat our broccoli and clean our plate because people, especially children, were starving in China. Everybody knew that that was a stretch in the imagination because everybody knew that Chinese people only ate rice. The book The Population Bomb was published in 1968 by Stanford University's Paul and Ann Ulrich. They wrote that hundreds of millions of people would soon die because of hunger in the next decade. And there was nothing we could do about it. There were just too many people. The first Earth Day was held in April, 1970, in honor of the Earth. We were told we were ruining the Earth. We were overpopulated. We were all going to die. Back then, they told us that we were causing a new ice age. Of course, all the inflammatory predictions of the Ulrich's bestselling book did not come to pass, just like peak oil never came to pass. Just like all the current predictions are not panning out and must regularly be changed to keep people fixated on the global climate change agenda. The problem with people who make such predictions is that they worship the Earth and they want to keep it for themselves and don't want to share it with others. They really want to reduce or eliminate people. They do not care about people or science. Most concerned people have been fooled into these people's agenda. The current crop of depopulationists hide under the cloak of the climate change agenda. Such people as Bill Gates, Senator Kerry, Greta Thunberg, and Klaus Schwab tell us to be terrified of climate change. They want to substitute sustainability policies, or we will all face the man-made consequences that include rising sea levels, scorched land, and all manner of apocalyptic conditions in which we will surely die. They want to sustain the Earth for the Earth's sake. A similar but very different policy is conservationism. This is a set of individual actions that has the aim of conserving the Earth and its resources that are contained for the most valuable uses of humans, present and future generations included. Conservationism is the normal condition that humans live in without respect to government policy. It is driven by how all of us value everything. So that might mean keeping a valley pristine in its natural condition just for the sake of its view or its potential future use. Or it might mean turning the whole thing into a gigantic subdivision to house a multitude of families who want to live there. Here it's the owner's choice. When it's the government's choice, things always go awry. California is a good case in point. The state imposes some of the most far-reaching and draconian land use policies in the world. As a result, only a teeny fraction of land is used for human habitation. It now has some of the worst housing conditions in the country, despite all its wealth and supposedly super smart legislature. Its working class is now impoverished, not by wages or jobs, but by housing costs and commute times. Now back to the environmentalists and the global climate change community. They ask us to accept their demands and that we engage in sustainability by using alternative energy sources and by consuming alternative foods. What is left unsaid is that these alternatives are poor substitutes for the real thing. Alternative energy is both more expensive and less efficient in terms of using up the earth's resources. Alternative foods are also more expensive and less efficient. Cows pooping and farting in the fields produce a better taste and more nutrition than you will get from factory-made artificial chicken strips. Using alternatives or ersatz production of artificial things means higher prices and less production of the two things that modern humans need to live, food and energy. Less food and fuel means fewer humans, plain and simple or more poverty. And they don't wanna talk about poverty and less population, especially in the lesser developed countries. When the Ulrichs published their book more than a half a century ago, there were less than four billion people. Now there are more than eight billion people and thanks to the adoption of free market policies in places like India and China, more than two billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty. We did not do that. People today make good livings doing jobs like social influencer or data analyst, both of which I don't know what they do, but they were both unthinkable back in the day. In a world of eight billion people, things like that are possible. What might be possible in a world of 100 billion people or what problems might we face in the future with the depopulation demographic problems in places like Japan and some European countries? Also a half a century later, none of the alarmist climate predictions have materialized. The world has not frozen over. It has not been turned into a scorching desert. The seas have not risen in a great flood. Climate change has been a total bomb despite all of the TV weathermen in the world best efforts to tell us otherwise.