No.

Here is the web of devastating problems the world faces:

To much carbon dioxide in the air

Not enough water to drink

Can’t produce enough food on land

Rapidly disappearing food sources in the sea.

There are two different “causations.” There are “proximate” causes, the ones that seem to be the immediate cause of a problem; and there “ultimate” causes–sometimes called “causes-in-fact.” These are the real causes behind the proximate causes.

It’s easy for the media and politicians to blame oil companies and big agribusiness and rampant overfishing for the four main problems above. That’s because they are totally gutless and will dwell forever on proximate causes instead of ultimate causes.

The ultimate cause of all our major problems on earth is overpopulation. Overpopulation is the reason we have too much carbon dioxide in the air which leads global warming which leads to drought, crop failures, and destruction of the ocean food chain.

We like to blame coal and oil industries, but they give us exactly what we all want–heat in the winter, cool in the summer, and fuel to get us wherever we want to go whenever we want to go.

It takes, according to environmental scientists like Jessica Tuchman Mathews and other like her, about 30 years for what we burn today to have its full impact on the atmosphere. So imagine this: what if in 1950 the world had decided to freeze population growth, We only had about 2.5 billion people in the world then. Now we have about 7.3 billion. We’ve added almost 5 billion people who want to eat, drink, be warm in the winter and cold in the summer, and transport themselves around.

From the industrial revolution on CO2 levels have steadily risen, BUT, from the beginning of the Industrial revolution until 1950, it only rose from about 280ppm (parts per million) to about 300ppm. From 1950 to now, its gone from 300 to 400. So in the first 100 years, it went up only 20ppm; in the second, it went up 100ppm. At the same time, world population roughly doubled between 1850 and 1950, then it almost tripled from 1950 to 2015, a mere 65 years.

So let’s hold off on blaming the energy industry for now, and look at who the real villains are. You’re not going to like what comes next.