The United Nations released a report this week warning that the “global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years and is accelerating.” The report further notes that if some “transformative change” is not enacted soon, an estimated one million animal species are at risk of extinction. And who, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), is to blame for this? Modern man, of course.

And the solution to this problem? The IPBES’s recommended “transformative changes” include shrinking the human population, ending “overconsumption,” and “addressing inequalities, especially regarding income and gender, which undermine capacity for sustainability.” In other words, population control and socialism on a global scale.

However, as with anthropogenic climate change, the “science” behind the IPBES’s report is dubious at best. And the recommended socioeconomic solutions are flat nonsense. In fact, the solutions would likely increase the threat to these species rather than mitigate it. The reality is that under greater capitalism and free trade, efficiency standards have increased as the environmental impact has lessened. As Tim Worstall observes in the Washington Examiner, the UN report “insists upon efficient resource use by being inefficient.”

Ronald Bailey’s assessment at Reason is more pointed: “The IPBES report falls in a long line of apocalyptic extinction predictions. For example, S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution predicted in 1970 that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct. That is, 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals alive in 1970 would be extinct by 1995. Fortunately, Ripley was wrong then and it is likely that the IPBES is wrong now.”

But by all means, we must adopt the ecofascists’ solutions or we stand accused of wanting one million species to die.