Population Bombed!: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change

by Pierre Desrochers, Joanna Szurkmak

Many scholars, writers, activists and policy-makers have linked growth in population to environmental degradation, especially catastrophic climate change. In the last few years, however, a number of writers and academics have documented significant improvements in human wellbeing, pointing to longer lifespans, improved health, abundant resources and a general improvement in the environment. Population Bombed! addresses the main shortcomings of arguments advanced by both population control advocates and optimistic writers, explaining how economic prosperity and a cleaner environment are the direct results of both population growth and humanity's increased use of fossil fuels and showing how campaigns against the spread of fossil fuels will cause misery in the developing world, fuel poverty in advanced economies, and will inevitably wreak havoc on the natural world.

259 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2018

Reviews

[MargaretDH · Rating 1 out of 5]

While there is some interesting stuff here about the ways in which human inventiveness as manifested through technology has solved what seemed to be intractable problems, this whole thing is poorly argued and not worth your time.

Desrochers and Szurmak suggest that worry about climate change is the same old alarmist worries about over-population dressed up in a new way. They argue that every time we think we are running up against a limit on how we will feed and support all the people in the world, the market comes up with a technology to fix it. From there, they argue that climate change isn't real, but that if it was, any attempt to mitigate would be limiting freedoms, and that anyone who suggests that we should slow carbon usage is a just an alarmist pessimist. Also probably a person who just hates capitalism.

This is full of slippery slope, red herring and straw man arguments, not to mention a lot of unfounded generalizations. For example, they argue that erosion was touted as an enormous threat by the pessimists, but that that threat never materialized. What they don't mention is that erosion was a threat, but ceased to be as dangerous because of an array of policies, regulations and education programs. They have other examples, and in those examples, environmental threats were identified and mitigated, so disaster was averted. This does not create the logical basis to allow us to ignore climate change. And don't even get me started on the accusation that anyone who would call themselves an environmentalist secretly hates freedom. Would not recommend.

[Nora Chahine · Rating 2 out of 5]

'fuels liberated human labour and brains from subsistence agriculture while simultaneosly reducing pressures on both wild flora and fauna' I don't really agree with this argument, but I mainly agree with the rest of the book!