Prominent Club of Rome member, Dennis Meadows, hopes the “necessary” depopulation of Planet Earth, down to one billion—an 87.5% reduction from today’s population—can “occur in a civil way”.

“The planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want to have. If you want more liberty, and more consumption, you have to have fewer people. And conversely, you can have more people. I mean, we could even have eight or nine billion, probably if we have a very strong dictatorship.”