Reddit reviews Population Bomb

Your position is trivially true on a long enough time scale. As long as the Earth remains a basically closed source of resources and we remain exclusively on Earth, any waste means eventual depletion of resources. However, on human scales this is not necessarily true.

In general Malthusian Catastrophe scenarios fail to adequately take into account human ingenuity. The greater the population the greater the number of people who can contribute to the solution.

Take a look at the first and second Simon-Ehrlich wagers. Paul Ehrlich famously wrote The Population Bomb and believed that the growing population was going to quickly result in all kinds of resource scarcity. Julian Simon, on the other hand, believed that the greater available man power and innovation would counteract that scarcity for the foreseeable future. Simon won the first bet and declined the second on the grounds that the proposed measures were too specific and limiting. For instance, the scarcity of rice might not matter much if rice eating countries switch to flour.

And Simon appears to have been correct. While Ehrlich's specific predictions in the second wager mostly were correct, looking at most of them with a broader viewpoint shows that they measure something that in general has improved in the world, rather than gotten worse, except those related directly to global warming. For example, while per capita cropland and soil have decreased, yields have increased so per capita available calories has increased. Ocean harvests have decreased, but fish farming as increased so that per capita available fish has increased. Per capita firewood has decreased, but per capita energy availability has increased.

The greatest limiting factor to all of this is global warming. Global warming has the capacity to disrupt this trend as the changes are more catastrophic in the mathematical sense. That is why there is an emphasis on renewable energy and the need to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

For a longer discussion of this issue, I encourage you to listen to the Economics Detective podcast, specifically the episode dealing with the wagers: The Second Ehrlich-Simon Wager with Joanna Szurmak