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One way around this is to accept that population control must be authoritarian, as the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt appears to do in writing approvingly about China’s one-child policy, which he calls “the biggest single CO2 abatement achievement since Kyoto.”6 Population enthusiasts like Porritt also tend to ignore the fact that the biggest driver of increasing human numbers has been better life expectancies thanks to economic progress and modern medical science. Should we therefore seek to restore death rates to their higher levels of yesteryear? Of course not. And of course, as well, we can all agree that access to family planning and female education—which tend to reduce birthrates in developing countries in advance of the demographic transition—are desirable in and of themselves. But they are desirable because they increase people’s choices, not limit them. No one should be forced to have an unwanted child. But neither should anyone be forced not to have a wanted child—as has happened in China, where an intrusive state has intervened in the family-planning decisions of a billion people. The same goes for more gentle moral pressure too. I would never ask individuals, as Porritt does, to “do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children—or even no children.”7 To do so is an objectionable political intrusion into a highly individual private sphere. To be judged by Greens like Porritt on the basis of how many children one has is as personally insulting as it is counterproductive for the environmental movement.

As well as population, another frequently heard objection I have come up against is that the planetary boundaries do not deal with resource constraints, which were central to earlier thinking about ecological limits like the Club of Rome’s groundbreaking 1972 report Limits to Growth. Again, this is to misunderstand the physical and ecological nature of the proposed boundaries: It makes no difference to the biosphere if humans run out of iron, for example. Nor does it make any difference if we use up all the cheaply extractable oil—as has recently become the concern of the “peak oil” crowd—except to the extent that humanity’s response to declining oil supplies, like burning more coal or extracting more tar sands, will negatively affect real planetary boundaries like climate change. But peak oil might also be a good thing if it adds to rising prices of fossil fuels sufficiently to encourage the faster uptake of low-and zero-carbon alternatives. Either way, the planetary boundaries are the metric by which humanity’s response to resource crunches should be judged—they are not concerned with resource shortages in and of themselves.

Third, to the biggest and most central concern of all: economic growth. Throughout this book I have referred approvingly to growth, technology, and innovation as ways to solve pressing environmental challenges. But won’t growth go on to cause even more problems than it solves? And is ever-increasing consumption even possible on a physically limited planet? De-growth, on the other hand, can be environmentally beneficial: Industrialized countries saw declines in carbon emissions following the economic recession that began in 2008. These are strong arguments, and need to be looked at carefully. But I believe my pro-growth perspective holds up to the challenge, for several equally strong reasons.

First, growth in consumption, like growth in population, tends to top out once a certain level is achieved. After all, there is only so much that any one person can eat—and once your fridge is already groaning with fresh and tempting produce from around the globe, a second and third equally well-stocked fridge is not particularly desirable. In economics language, there is a declining “marginal utility” applying to further consumption. The same trend can be seen in any area: In China, vehicle ownership is exploding—but in the more prosperous U.S., a saturated car market cannot grow much more now that households on average already have two cars. Moreover, once a certain level of