Does Peak Population Mean Peak Energy?

I have recently joined a group of columnists over at the the weekly Dispatch Energy newsletter, and my perspective appears monthly. All columns at Dispatch Energy are un-paywalled and draw on a wide range of expertise. I learn something from each of my colleagues every week — Rory Johnson’s most recent column iss particularly good: Can Trump Take Credit for Lower Oil Prices? So please consider subscribing.

All my columns there will be republished here and your comments, as always, are invited. My goal over at The Dispatch is to bring some of the ideas and arguments that we discuss and sharpen together here at THB to a broader audience. Below is the full text of my latest at Dispatch Energy, in which I explore what peak population might mean for energy supply and demand. Peak population is something I’ll be writing more about here at THB.

One of the biggest issues of the 21^st century, yet to capture widespread attention, is rapidly changing expert projections of the global population over the coming decades. Not so long ago, conventional wisdom held that the world was headed for an overpopulation crisis marked by resource shortages and addressable only through strict population controls.

But the world may soon face the opposite problem: potentially rapid declines in fertility leading to peak global population much sooner than even recent projections anticipated, and in some extreme scenarios, a global population collapse. Today, I take a look at what such emerging views on global population might mean for global energy supply and demand and offer three (perhaps provocative) perspectives.

A smaller population does not necessarily mean less energy consumption.

One way to get a glimpse of the future is to look at places where it may already have arrived. Japan is one such place, having experienced a gradual population decline since 2010. Over that same period, Japan also experienced a corresponding drop in both overall energy consumption and energy consumption per capita.

The number of other large countries that have experienced demographically-driven population declines over more than a decade—including Russia, Poland, Romania—is very small, and to date there are no examples of countries that have experienced a population decline and an