TILAK DOSHI
When Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe rose recently in the House of Lords to speak on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, one could not have anticipated the detour his remarks would take. Instead of focusing solely on the grave ethical questions surrounding assisted dying, Lord Brooke turned his attention to population growth and its supposed role in climate change. In words that startled many in attendance and later provoked widespread commentary, he declared:
…this century’s growth in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion – a 25% increase in 25 years. Just think what the 2025 numbers would be if abortion had not been legalised or there had not been wide-scale usage and advocacy of contraception. Indeed, the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children that we would have had. Had the churches had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have, facing the difficulties we have with climate change.
Some observers were horrified. Nikki da Costa, a former Director of Legislative Affairs at No 10, asked pointedly in a widely viewed and commented upon X post whether Lord Brooke was “advocating for assisted dying as a tool of population control” and noted that it was “an extraordinary contribution suggesting human life be actively sacrificed to prevent climate change”. The Spectator’s Madeleine Grant was even more scathing: “This was without doubt one of the most surreal speeches I have ever heard in my years covering Parliament,” she wrote, adding that “This peer’s Assisted Suicide speech was truly bonkers.”
Yet Ms Grant may be mistaken in dismissing the speech as “truly bonkers”. After all, Lord Brooke’s intervention was not a moment of madness but a faithful expression of a worldview that has haunted the Western imagination for over two centuries. It was Malthus who first planted the seed. The peer’s remarks are best understood as another manifestation of the Malthusian virus – an intellectual contagion that has never ceased to infect the minds of Western elites.
The Ghost of Malthus
The origin of this intellectual affliction lies with Reverend Thomas Malthus, who at the close of the 18th Century published his famous essay predicting that humanity would inevitably outstrip its food supply. Population, he said in his famous formulation, grew geometrically, while food production only arithmetically. Famines, wars and pestilence would be nature’s cruel corrective. History has demonstrated just how wrong he was.
Human ingenuity – expressed through the agricultural revolutions and petrochemical fertilizers, industrialization, and trade – continually confounded his dire predictions. Yet Malthus’s grim worldview survived because it offered the powerful a convenient lens: social ills could be explained not by policy failure, but by the simple fact of “too many people”. It is yet another example of Brandolini’s Law at work: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
The lineage of Malthusian thought is unmistakable. In the 19th Century, Britain’s 1834 Poor Law cut welfare to the indigent on the theory that helping the poor only encouraged them to breed. In the early 20th Century, Malthus’s shadow fell heavily over the eugenics movements in Britain, the United States and Europe, which categorized the poor, disabled and minorities as “unfit”. Nazi Germany gave those ideas their most horrifying expression.
After the war, eugenics became discredited, but the impulse never disappeared; it re-emerged under the banners of “family planning” and “population control”. India’s coercive sterilisations during the Emergency of the 1970s, often carried out with Western aid money, testify to the persistence of this mindset. China’s one-child policy, brutally enforced with forced abortions and sterilizations, is another reminder.
In the West, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) thundered warnings that hundreds of millions would starve – “We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years” – while the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) confidently predicted ecological and economic collapse unless population and resource use were restrained. Both works proved spectacularly wrong. Yet, as is so often the case, bad ideas outlast their refutation. The Malthusian impulse endures precisely because it appeals to the intellectual pretensions of elites. It reassures them that they need to act as philosopher-kings, protecting our “fragile planet” from the growing masses.
A New Mask: Climate and the Green Tyranny
Today, the Malthusian virus has donned a green mask. Its logic permeates much of the rhetoric around climate change. Lord Brooke’s speech is a case in point: a peer in the British Parliament, speaking without embarrassment about population reduction – through abortion, contraception, homosexuality, even assisted dying – as a tool to combat climate change. His words echoed Jane Goodall’s musings at Davos that the world would be better off with a population at the level it was 500 years ago, about half a billion souls. Such sentiments, however shocking when spoken plainly, are widely shared in elite political circles.
The historical record shows where this logic leads. During the 1970s, US policymakers under Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum 200, classified for over a decade, framed population growth in developing countries as a threat to American strategic interests. Aid programs were tied to family planning goals. At the very moment when Indira Gandhi’s government in India was coercing millions of poor men into sterilisation, the flow of international funds for “population programs” continued unabated. In China, the one-child policy, enforced with terror, was applauded by international institutions as enlightened policy. In Africa and South Asia, aggressive campaigns to promote long-acting contraceptives targeted poor women with little regard for informed consent. Behind the rhetoric of choice and progress lay the old Malthusian disdain for the fecundity of the poor openly espoused by the Gates Foundation.
Today, the same mentality drives what Rupert Darwall aptly terms the “Green Tyranny” which exposed the roots of the “totalitarian climate industrial complex”. The World Bank and IMF insist that poor nations adopt anti-fossil fuel policies as conditions for loans. The wealthy West, which built its prosperity on coal, oil and gas, now denies those very tools to countries still mired in poverty. Instead, they are forced to accept unreliable and costly wind and solar projects, locking billions into energy poverty. This is not compassion; it is carbon colonialism. It is Malthus reborn, dressed in the garb of climate virtue.
The Facts Destroy the Myth
What makes this obsession with “too many people” especially perverse is that it bears no relation to the facts. Global fertility rates are falling everywhere. Japan and South Korea are shrinking at alarming rates, with birthrates far below replacement. Europe is greying. Even in India, long the poster child for overpopulation, fertility has dropped sharply and is below replacement levels in many states. The United Nations projects that global population will peak around 2080 at just over ten billion and then begin to decline. Demographers now warn not of an exploding population but of collapsing fertility and the economic, social and geopolitical crises it will unleash.
Elon Musk has called the overpopulation panic “the most nihilistic lie ever told” and he is right. The true risk to civilisation lies in the opposite direction: declining populations, shrinking workforces, imploding welfare states and the loss of dynamism that comes from youthful societies. The old scare about “too many mouths to feed” looks grotesque when confronted with the reality of societies that cannot replace themselves.
Meanwhile, the human record of progress is undeniable. Over the past two centuries, life expectancy has risen dramatically, literacy has spread across continents, infant mortality has plunged and absolute poverty has fallen to historic lows. Famines that once killed millions have been virtually eliminated and food production has grown faster than population. The Club of Rome’s charts and Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation now stand as embarrassing monuments to intellectual hubris. Humanity has flourished, not declined.
Julian Simon, the economist who demolished Ehrlich’s alarmism in their famous wager, explained why. The ultimate resource, Simon argued, is not land, oil, or minerals, but the human mind. Each new person brings the possibility of innovation, invention, and creation. Scarcity is not the enemy but the spur of progress. Human ingenuity multiplies abundance. Simon has been proven right. The prices of raw materials fell, not rose, over time, as technology and free enterprise found substitutes, increased efficiency, and opened new frontiers.
Killing the Virus
Why, then, does the Malthusian virus persist? Why does it resurface in each generation, despite its long record of error? The answer lies in its utility for elites and their useful idiots among Left-wing ideologues in tow. It flatters the elite self-image as enlightened custodians of a supposedly fragile world. It offers simple, moralistic answers to complex problems. And it cloaks their misanthropy in the language of science and virtue. It is not the failures of government planning that are blamed for poverty or environmental stress, but the fertility of the poor and their oppressive weight on the natural world.
Lord Brooke’s intervention in the House of Lords is telling. A former trade unionist who once spoke for working men and women now parrots the prejudices of aristocrats who always saw the poor as surplus mouths to feed. His remarks illustrate how deeply entrenched the Malthusian mindset is, even among those who should know better. He, like many in the intelligentsia, has imbibed the idea that fewer people equal a better world. In doing so, he betrays not only his own origins but also the fundamental duty of politics: to serve human flourishing, not human diminishment.
The antidote is clear. We must expose the long history of failed Malthusian predictions. We must resist policies that treat people as problems to be managed rather than possibilities to be embraced. We must insist that development, energy abundance and human creativity are the true paths to environmental stewardship and prosperity. And above all, we must defend a moral framework that prizes human flourishing. As Alex Epstein argues, the goal is not to minimise human impact on an untouched pristine nature, but to maximise human well-being through the intelligent use of resources and good stewardship of the environment.
Julian Simon’s insight should be our compass. People are the solution, not the problem. More minds mean more ideas. More ideas mean better technologies, richer cultures and deeper prosperity. Human flourishing is not the enemy of nature but the highest expression of it. We are stewards, yes, but also creators. To fear humanity is to deny what makes us unique.
Lord Brooke’s words are not just eccentric ramblings. They are a symptom of a deeper sickness that has haunted the Western mind since Malthus. The virus keeps mutating and spinning off new variants – from famine to climate, from eugenics to green ideology – but its core remains the same: the belief that humanity is a plague on the Earth. It must be challenged at every turn. Malthus was wrong in 1798, wrong in 1968 and wrong today. The future belongs not to the prophets of doom, but to those who believe in humanity’s creative potential to solve problems and to build a better world. Lord Brooke should be ashamed of himself.
This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic ( https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/29/lord-brooke-and-the-malthusian-mind-virus-in-our-time/ )
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
This article (Lord Brooke and the Malthusian Mind Virus in Our Time) was created and published by Tilak Doshi and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: John Martin’s “The Great Day of His Wrath”
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