In this video, Danny Dorling, a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, discusses the main points of his new book Population 10 Billion...

I read the book last month with the hope that Dorling would provide substance to an idea he briefly expressed at a conference, "Surplus: A Symposium on Wealth, Waste and Excess," at Birbeck University of London. This idea linked the rise of capitalism (around 1851) with the exponential growth of the human population. This link was of great interest to an old socialist like myself because it meant that a decline in the human population would lead to the decline of capitalism—an economic system that's all about, worries about, crashes without growth.

But the book actually had little to say about this link (a page at most) and lot to say about something I had completely missed: Leaders and thinkers in the First World obsess over population growth in the Third World because they do not want address the real problem, which is simply and only the rate of waste and consumption in advanced capitalist societies. Meaning, a baby born in black Africa is not the same as one born in the West. The environmental impact of the former is much, much lower than that of the latter. If humans had an impact that was closer (and not by much) to that of the black African, there would be no climate crisis with even 10 billion humans, the projected leveling point of the global population. So it is not about population but behavior. But those in the West do not want to change how they consume; they instead want to, one, point at problems whose solutions solve nothing and, two, continue practices that actually worsen the situation.