(LifeSiteNews) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now the richest man in the world and a father of eight, is insisting that not only is the earth not overpopulated, but it could healthily sustain “many times” its current population.
In perhaps his most radically unorthodox claim to date about the so-called overpopulation problem, Musk stated Sunday, “Earth could sustain many times its current human population and the ecosystem would be fine. We definitely don’t have ‘too many people.’”
Mainstream media often promotes the idea that we have already exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity, the idea that there is a maximum population our environment can sustain indefinitely. However, there is in fact a wide range of opinions on what that capacity is, if there is indeed a limit, as shown by studies on the subject compiled by the Australian Academy of Science.
While 20 studies say it is 8 billion people or less (the current world population is now nearly 8 billion), 14 studies peg the world’s carrying capacity at twice that amount, 16 billion, and 18 other studies notch that number way up, with seven studies estimating the earth can sustain as many as 64 billion people, and one study estimating it at 1,024 billion people.
Jordan Peterson has noted that “dire predictions” about the state of the world by the year 2000 made by the globalist Club of Rome based on ideas of overpopulation have been way off the mark. Peterson explained on a recent Chris Williamson podcast that the Club of Rome predicted “riots and mass starvation … and all the things you hear about climate change, because there’s too many people on the planet.”
Peterson continued, “That just didn’t happen at all … it wasn’t just wrong, it was anti-true. It was absolutely wrong. What happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the [poorest] section of the population … got lifted out of poverty.”
READ: Demographic experts warn that the world should fear population collapse and not overpopulation
Eric Metaxas has noted that such false predictions were built on Thomas Malthus’s “iron law of population,” an idea cited by Charles Darwin, which states that population increases must of necessity outstrip food production.
According to environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis, history shows that populations have always been sustained that were “well in excess of what a strictly Malthusian calculation would have predicted,” due to technology. Ellis maintains that “there is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity” due to existing technologies, and that there “really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity.”
Musks’ statement that the earth can support many times its current population was a reply to a tweet in which reporter Emel Akan referenced Musk’s own claim that “the greatest challenge the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.” Akan shared a recent Epoch Times report lending credence to Musk’s stance, highlighting two recent demographic studies predicting population collapse.
The article cites a Gates Foundation-funded study published in the Lancet, which predicts that the global population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064, and then start to decline. “Once global population decline begins, it will probably continue inexorably,” the authors wrote.
By 2100, the researchers anticipate a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.66, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 A staggering 183 out of the world’s 195 countries are “forecasted to have a TFR lower than replacement by 2100,” the researchers wrote.
Stanford University economist Charles I. Jones describes this scenario of population decline as an “Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
READ: Elon Musk challenges ‘overpopulation’ narrative, warns about risks of low birth rate
According to the Lancet study, this trend of declining fertility will be accelerated by increased women’s education and access to contraception, both major missions of the Gates Foundation: “Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth.”
Despite the cultural mores opposing birth control in its targeted nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pushed heavily for years to distribute contraception in developing countries, pumping billions of dollars into its initiatives, under the guise of reducing poverty and helping women.
Despite the “economic” and “geopolitical risks” of population decline, the study authors frame “a decline in total world population in the latter half of the century” as “potentially good news for the global environment,” since “Fewer people on the planet in every year between now and 2100 … would mean less carbon emission, less stress on global food systems, and less likelihood of transgressing planetary boundaries.”
Jordan Peterson remarked to Williamson, “This idea that the planet has too many people on it — there’s no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement.”