ROSS DOUTHAT ON OUR AGING WORLD:

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.

That kind of column opener is a hostage to fortune. If I’m wrong, it might be quoted grimly or mockingly in future histories written with New York underwater and Texas uninhabitable.

But it’s important for the weird people more obsessed with demography than climate to keep hammering away, because whatever the true balance of risk between the two, the relative balance is changing. Over the last 15 years, some of the worst-case scenarios for climate change have become less likely than before. At the same time, various forces, the Covid crisis especially, have pushed birthrates lower faster, bringing the old-age era forward rapidly.

The latest evidence is the news from China this week that its population declined for the first time since the Great Leap Forward, over 60 years ago. A tip into decline was long anticipated, but until recently it wasn’t expected to arrive until the 2030s — yet here it is early, with the Chinese birthrate hitting an all-time recorded low in 2022.

But it’s not just China. Also, climate change is mostly bunk, and the demographics is indisputable fact.