12. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

11. Without immigration, there will, within generations, be no Europe and no UK. Today’s racist obsessions will look incomprehensible to our ageing descendants, desperate for young people to look after them & keep their country running. Before long, we’ll be fighting to attract people from overseas

10. Switching to a plant-based diet or from fossil fuels to renewables, by contrast to altering the size of the human population, are things we can do immediately, humanely and effectively. But blaming other people requires no change, and no confrontation with power.

9/ Population growth is a highly convenient scapegoat for, and distraction from, the impacts of consumption: wealthy people in the global north can blame much poorer Black and Brown people in the global south for the environmental crises they themselves have caused.

8/ Ironically, the person who might have caused the greatest depopulation is the self-professed pronatalist Elon Musk, whose dismantling of USAID could, according to an estimate in the Lancet, cause 14M deaths. He wants to see more children born, but appears to care little about whether they survive

7/ As a UN report explains, “Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations.”

6/ Once the fertility rate falls below 2.1, it keeps falling, and the slide towards zero looks inexorable. This doesn’t mean I’ve become a “pronatalist” (wanting to see rising birthrates).

5/ Of course, the Trump administration appears to see “civilisation” as a white and western property, threatened by Black and Brown people, regardless of whether they were born here or have recently arrived.

4/ The maths doesn’t care what you think. TheTrump administration claims that immigration, among other factors, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.

3/ I know what “civilisational erasure” looks like. The European Commission published a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. The EU rate appears to be declining once more, and now stands at 1.38. The UK’s is 1.44. A population’s replacement rate is 2.1.