Ken Knowlton

"What the world needs is a massive consortium from science, math, social sciences, history, philosophy, religion, economics, business, politics -- to devise downsizing schemes, justified by world systems simulations, leading to safeguards, stockpiles, backups, plans-B, austerity triages, etc. The effort would need to be vastly multi-disciplinary and international."

To say this is "not likely to happen", as he does in the next sentence, is an understatement. Not only won't it happen, it wouldn't work if it did.

I can't think of any case in the past 2500 years when anything resembling this kind of "change everything" top-down command scheme has been tried and has not resulted in unmitigated disaster. This kind of approach has failed whenever it is tried, from Alexander's empire to the Crusades to the Soviet Union to the modern social-environment movement. Huge sweeping changes, driven from the top, that resulted in failure, war, starvation and suffering.

The Malthusian argument that even though everything has been getting better for hundreds of years, everything is about to get much, much worse also requires extraordinary evidence at this point, given it has failed so many times as to be counted as an extraordinary claim.

Might there be a grindingly ugly end to global civilization in the next few hundred years? Sure. It could happen.

Can it be prevented by any kind of massive top-down command scheme? On the overwhelming bulk of the historical evidence, probably not.

Could it be prevented by increased urbanization, empowering women, and technological improvements? Quite possibly, as those things are the drivers of so much good over the past several decades. They have the advantage of not being known to fail for pretty well-understood reasons, unlike massive top-down command schemes.