Population growth plays a role in environmental damage and climate change. But addressing climate change through either reducing or reversing growth in population raises difficult moral questions that most people would prefer to avoid having to answer. He argued that increases in food production improved human wellbeing only temporarily. The population would respond to greater wellbeing by having more children, increasing population growth and eventually over-running the food supply, leading to famine. But his essay could not have been timed worse, coming near the beginning of the longest period of sustained global population growth in history. This was driven in part by vast improvements in agricultural productivity over time.