Climate Change Puts Humanity on The Clock for Radical Change [KKF read]

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.

There are two competing discourses on global warming in the public sphere: “We’re all going to die” and “We’ll figure something out.” They are not mutually exclusive: even while fully aware of the threat to human habitat and much of the current life on Earth from anthropogenic climate change, one can also recognize that even a worst-case scenario like 4°C by 2100 won’t literally wipe out all of humanity, and one can expect that even in a battered state, people will still figure something out. Historically, a battered state has been the most reliable aid to help people get serious about the problem.

But between doomerism and optimism there is another, probably the most probable, and perhaps the most terrifying option: of course, climate change may not lead to the extinction of all people—but it can supercharge all existing social and international contradictions to the point where the disintegration of existing social institutions and economic relations will make them unsuitable for the necessary collective action, and the current level of socio-technological development, which now allows for the further progress of civilization, will begin to degrade—and take with it the possibility of further progress, thereby depriving humanity, even when most of it is still here, of a future.

We are being gaslit about depopulation…

Concerns about fertility and population size—and the resulting worries about sperm counts and testosterone levels in men, and women’s reproductive rights—have become commonplace in Western discourse. Yet, despite intense gaslighting in media and “new media,” the planet’s population has been growing and continues to grow, reaching 8 billion in November 2022, and around 8.26 billion as of late 2025. According to UN projections (World Population Prospects 2024), humanity will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.3 billion, then stabilize near 10.2 billion by 2100—promising 2 billion more humans than today for those who already feel short on people.

Having said that, there is no such thing as an inherently good or bad change in human population: as long as everyone can afford as many children as they want, no one is forced to have children against their will, and every child is provided with a happy childhood by society, then whichever direction the human population goes and at what number the Earth’s population stabilizes—9 or 11, 5 ...