We no longer have the climate for “FDR-style change.” Humanity has mere decades left to end capitalism before capitalism becomes where humanity ends

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 or 15 billion—is simply a fact of reality. And, taking this thought further, I can’t think of a single example, barring China’s one-child policy, of anxiety about population size and fertility as such that wouldn’t be fundamentally racist in its origin and basic assumptions.

A far more important and relevant question regarding the size of humanity is the issue of feeding everyone.

…while ignoring millions we kill with malnutrition every year

Westerners seem to have resigned themselves, as part of capitalist realism, to the fact that, with the victory of capitalism everywhere but the communist five (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba), around 673–757 million people worldwide suffer from chronic undernourishment annually, which kills 9 million people every year—primarily children under 5, where undernutrition contributes to ~3 million deaths annually—despite global food surplus.

And with climate change, now that 1.5°C is a given, on a catastrophic trajectory of 2–4°C warming by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report (aka IPCC AR6, finalized by 2023), we are facing significant declines in agricultural yields (10–25% in many models) in regions of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America before the end of this century.

The good news is that only under the unlikely combination of the highest fertility demographics and the worst-case climate scenario will the planet’s agricultural capacity fall below what is needed to feed its population. This would require maintaining the current, still generally high fertility rate worldwide, contrary to its tendency to eventually decline everywhere, so that the Earth’s population would exceed 11 billion; and no mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, to increase them by 2-3 times from the current 41-42 billion tons emitted into the atmosphere annually to 100-120 billion tons, accelerating global warming to ~4-5°C by 2100. Otherwise we’re good: for all other cases, recent studies show that global agricultural capacity will remain sufficient for the projected ~10 billion people by 2100 even under strong warming scenarios, assuming continued technological progress and adaptation.

The bad news is that:

• Even today, with production for 10–11 billion and a population of ~8.3 billion, somehow 673–757 million remain undernourished.
• Around 7 million migrants from Africa and the Middle East over the 10 years since 2015 were enough to collapse the political spectrum of the more than 500 million-strong European Union and Britain into far-right dominance
• Regimes like Israel could attempt to starve 2 million people in Gaza to death in full view of the world—and at the same time, Islamophobia would only grow in the political regimes of the US, EU and UK.

In other words, this time the West demonstrated not only its complete readiness to repeat the entire arsenal of Nazi Germany, but also that it no longer needed time to warm up: Hitler’s path to the “final solution” took nine years and required the start of World War II. Today, with the ultimate goal already known, the West is ready to move on to the Holocaust and death camps—even without World War III.

In other words, even in today’s utterly rosy conditions—with surplus food and favorable climate, a purely organizational issue—the system, imposed on humanity by the West, starves millions. Now imagine how this system will react when climate change-impaired crop yields in different regions of the Earth trigger a sharp increase in climate migration (predicted to reach tens and hundreds of millions of people by 2050–2100)?

If, under the current—supposedly the most effective that we could dream of—Western capitalist world order, the West itself is fully ready to goose-step from a minor (compared to its size) influx of migration, while incessantly complaining about how its population disappears into thin air, what will the reality of truly massive migration—tens or hundreds of times higher than currently each year—do to them?

It’s impossible to even imagine what new dimensions of the Holocaust the European mind will discover then. But civilization is unlikely to survive this—they will drag humanity down with them.

Capitalism as the final boss of humanity

The current moment, in a sense, is a repeat of a XX century history lesson that was not learned the first time around in the West: first, people began to notice the eerie similarities of how today’s rampant inequality resembles the 1920s in economics, and then how today’s rising fascism in politics resembles the 1930s. Only this is anything but coincidence: the neoliberal reforms launched by Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, and Boris Yeltsin were not meant to build anything new, but simply rolled back the regulatory and institutional changes that had been made as a result of—or in response to—the 1917 revolution in Russia, be it Soviet socialism, the New Deal in the United States, or the welfare state in Europe. What could come of the consistent rollback of economic and political reforms over the previous 50 years since the 1970s? A return of economic conditions—and with them, the policies they determined—to 50 years ago, to the 1920s. Which is exactly what happened. In a hundred years, history has come full circle:

The rollback of regulations introduced after the Great Depression did the only thing it could do: it returned the conditions of capitalism to the very state that led to the rise of fascism and the Great Depression in the 1920s.
How to Save the World from a Fascist Takeover

The lesson of the XX century is that the problem of capitalism cannot be partially addressed: capitalism that is not abolished in its roots inevitably pushes to the restoration of the unlimited, uncontested power of capital, until it regains it. This is why “generational FDR-style change” isn’t enough this time. The last time the generational FDR change was undone in just 50 years. And humanity will be in a very different world in 50 years: in the world that, matched with another capitalism restoration, instead of just being hostile to people it will be deadly.

It would be a betrayal of the following generations to waste this century on yet another attempt to convince capitalism to be normal, hoping for a different result, only to achieve by the XXII century a return to the beginning of the XX century once again. But climate change takes away the opportunity to learn a lesson the second time. There won’t be another hundred years for that.

We don’t even have 75 years, or even 50, before the increase in climate migration within overall migration becomes significant enough that the corresponding surge in ecofascism will make it virtually impossible to turn the spiraling war-of-all-against-all world around. A system that is unable to provide food for everyone on the planet under conditions of a still-favorable climate, agricultural revolution, and the resulting surplus food production has no safety margin in the event of a deterioration in each of these variables.

In fact, this system is already hostile to the 700–800 million chronically undernourished people—a fact self-evident from allowing this to continue. It’s just that as long as the destructive impact is felt only by one side, while the well-fed world can afford to ignore the hungry, this hostility remains latent. But if the well-fed continue to deny their hostility toward the hungry of the world up until global warming escalates the malnutrition crisis into famine, affecting hundreds of millions more people, at that point, latent hostility will turn into open fear before they even realize it, making it impossible to respond constructively and overcome the crisis.

Humanity must realize that almost 10% of the world being constantly undernourished, killing millions of people per year, is not the problem of those who do not have enough food, but of everybody—because the system itself is anti-human, i.e., by definition a danger to everyone—and it is only a matter of when somebody’s turn comes to experience this for themselves.

In the next 20–40 years, before the global food situation begins to deteriorate significantly, humanity must reorganize itself in such a way that no one anywhere in the world would have to starve ever again—much less die from it. If this system is created by mid-century, it can be easily scaled up as the climate situation worsens, and thus, by 2100, there will be no hundreds of millions of climate migrants fleeing hunger.

If, however, we allow a system that produces billionaires while starving millions of people a year to death to persist, then even the super-rich—obsessed with their fear of death and desire to live forever—will only live long enough to see the effects of the civilization corrupted for the sake of their greed collapse. And there is a cruel irony in the fact that, because of how sheltered and detached their lives are, when they feel the collapse, it is almost complete, but nobody will be around to appreciate it.

• All my articles are free to read. Please support my work on Patreon:EgorKotkin

• Bitcoin donations: bc1q2hvwy7vms6ykpwg5s4980kycz4u9dgjueep78y