The cyclicality of bad ideas, especially those of environmentalists, is extraordinary. Like monsters in some horror movie they keep coming back..

Shades of Paul Ehrlich*. One can trace the cycles back to Parson Malthus. It was wrong then; Ehrlich was wrong ( the Green Revolution started just about then and increased capacity for food production ) and one can guess that it's just the same simplistic and wrong policy brought out of the closet, dusted off and the previous contexts forgotten. At least Ehrlich had the decency to get a vasectomy and remove himself  from further pollution of the gene pool. Actually, vasectomies/sterilizations  for environmentalists might not be a bad idea.

*The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation. History proved Ehrlich wrong, as the mass starvations predicted for the 1970s and 1980s never occurred.

The Ultimate Layoff
After the communists crushed a 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Bertolt Brecht made a sardonic observation in a poem called "The Solution":

. . . Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

With Britain's Labour Party struggling, a top adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown is proposing dissolving the people and not electing another, the Times of London reports:

Jonathon Porritt, one of Gordon Brown's leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt's call will come at this week's annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.  ****The arrogance is amazing: we are told by experts what is the "optimum" population and what is the "optimum" temperature. It is further compounded by the fact that it is usually whatever the number is NOW. This, of course, obviates the need for any calculations ( with assumptions and logic spelled out.) ****

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably. . . .

Britain's population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction.

They don't seem to be volunteering to go first, however.

**** But wait! When you're running a Ponzi scheme like the U.S. Social Security System and most retirement plans in countries around the world, Malthus, Ehrlich, Porritt and Chicken Little, might have it all wrong.

The high cost of shrinking populations

Phillip Longman
USA Today

“There are just too many people in the world.” It’s an impression that’s widely shared, said Phillip Longman, as we all fight over parking spaces and beachfront property, and ponder the terrible prospect of global warming. But though it’s counterintuitive, the greater concern facing the human race is not overpopulation—it’s depopulation, caused by dramatically falling birthrates.

In Europe, Russia, China, and Brazil, the average couple is now having fewer than two children, and the population is shrinking. In the U.S., 20 percent of baby boomers had no children at all. Birth rates are also falling rapidly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as modern values spread and couples learn to see children as an “avoidable liability.”

Why is that attitude dangerous? As the world’s existing population grows old, there will be fewer children to keep the economy humming, and to pay for senior citizens’ medical care, pensions, and other benefits. In China, for example, each child moving into the workforce will soon have to support two parents and four grandparents. Children are not just a burden; they’re an investment in the future. With too few of them, our species’ future will be grim.

****It's not merely a bookkeeping problem. While demands on resources increase with population, so too does the productive capacity, at least for sentient beings. Unlike deer and caribou, who can exhaust their ecosystem's ability to sustain them, humans in the aggregate have so far increased production faster than demand albeit not for those individuals whose productive days are over. There is also the consideration that there are "fast-growing" groups who have multiple wives, whose women are excluded from the workforce and devoted to production of children, and have an ethos which impels them to outpopulate everyone else if they cannot otherwise achieve their goal of dominating the world.****