#replacementtheory

Last December, one of the world’s wealthiest men, with public pretensions to being an intellectual, took the stage at a hard-right festival in Rome named after a character from a 1980s children’s fantasy film, and delivered an astounding streak of falsehoods.

The world’s population will be “one tenth of its current size” within three generations, he claimed. In fact, it is predicted to rise to ten billion. The birth rate, he said, “is maybe half the replacement rate”. Actually, it is above replacement globally. “Farming and cows do not have any meaningful effect on the environment,” he said. “Objectively, this is true.” Objectively, it is not. Methane is the second-biggest anthropogenic greenhouse gas and cows account for about 15 per cent of it. More than once, the host stopped Elon Musk to ask if he meant what he was saying. When he said the low birth rate meant there might not be “enough people to work” in a company in Italy, the host pointed out this was in 50 or 60 years at the earliest. “I think it’s even sooner than that,” replied Musk.

After a display as loose with the facts as this, it would seem a good thing that the Tesla billionaire’s philanthropic foundation – the Musk Foundation – has made one of its largest commitments yet to a demographic research centre at the flagship campus of the University of Texas at Austin. But it seems this centre is the omphalos of Musk’s garbled apocalypticism.

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Because of the lack of cicadas so far...