Pop pseudo-intellectual and China fetishist Tom Friedman apparently went somewhere and had a thought, as he is wont to do. This time, in a column titled, “The Earth is Full,” he has determined that there’s too many plebes and they’re fouling up his precious Gaia (Hat-tip: NewsBusters).

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

…We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

As if Tom Friedman wasn’t insufferable enough already, now he’s dabbling in the Malthusian claptrap, too? No Tom, the Earth is not full, and the world’s population is not a problem. In most developed countries, birth rates are below replacement level, and elsewhere in the world they are declining as well. Estimates suggest the world population will peak around 2050 at 9 billion or so, then begin to decline. Meanwhile, the entire population of the world today could fit in the state of Texas and it would about as dense as New York City today.

As for resources, there’s considerable capacity currently not being used (see American government paying people not to farm), or being used stupidly (see ethanol). Moreover, technological development will continue to allow us to provide more for less, as it has done throughout history. Simply put, this is Paul Erlich level nonsense.

The economics is also head-smackingly stupid. We do not build factories to create jobs, we build factories to meet demand. Moreover, as productivity has increased (he managed to get one thing right), workers have moved into the service sector and work in other industries, such as health care. On the other hand, technological development, while increasing productivity, also reduced pollution.  There’s a reason why the developing nations have much worse environments than developed nations, and that reason is prosperity. Wealth is cleaner than poverty.

“And why do you people want so much crap, anyway?” wonders the man with the multi-million dollar mansion. Hey Tom, Al Gore’s calling, and he wants his hypocrisy back.