SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Last year Bill Gates said if he had “one wish to improve humanity’s lot over the next 50 years” he would pick an “energy miracle,” some magical “new technology that produced energy at half the price of coal with no carbon-dioxide emissions,” says CNN editor Fareed Zakaria in the New York Times.

And he said “he’d rather have this wish than a new vaccine or medicine or even choose the next several American presidents.”

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Energy miracle? But that’s not where he’s giving his billions. In fact, since 1994 the Gates Foundation has spent over $26 billion on philanthropic projects, ventures and innovations, lots in vaccines and medicines that extend life, increase mortality rates and encourage population growth.

Yes, all good stuff, but ultimately undermining the possibility of discovering a magical energy miracle.

Worse, if that energy miracle is discovered anywhere its value could easily be wiped out by the world’s out-of-control population growth, forecast to reach 10 billion by 2050 from 7 billion today, one brief generation.

So why is Gates not focusing solely in his energy miracle? Better yet, why is he ignoring what he agrees is the world’s biggest problem? Even undermining the solution?

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What happened to Gates and his $26 billion mission? When Warren Buffett added more than $30 billion to Gates’s foundation a few years back, Buffett said: “Don’t just go for safe projects. Take on the really tough problems.”

Well, to put it bluntly folks, the Gates Foundation is not spending the money on the “really tough problems.” It is indeed playing it safe.

So what does Gates see as the world’s other “biggest problem?” Not global warming. Nor poverty. Not peak oil. The absolute biggest? One like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb? One that could throw a monkey wrench into global economic growth, end capitalism, even destroy civilization? The one that if not solved soon renders all efforts to solve all the other global problems — including global warming, poverty and fossil fuel depletion — irrelevant, futile and impossible ever to solve?

Overpopulation. That was the consensus “biggest problem” when a group of billionaires that included Gates got together at a secret meeting in Manhattan a couple of years ago.

Get it? Out-of-control population is the world’s No. 1 problem. Yet, governments with their $65 trillion global GDP aren’t even trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. They’re clueless. Can these philanthropists and their billions stop the coming disaster? No. In fact, their billions are accelerating the problem.

So what will shock the world awake? A catastrophe. Only a major disaster, a massive global collapse bigger than anything in world history is needed to alter the inevitable.

2 billion past Peak Population

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s natural resources can reasonably support about 5 billion people. We already have 7 billion. Get it? We’re 2 billion over Earth’s carrying capacity. Plus we’re racing headlong to 10 billion by 2050, adding over 50 million more each month.

Simple math, high school economics and minimal psychological common sense tells us we’re deep in denial and headed into a disaster.

And still, no adults are dealing with overpopulation, the “toughest of all problems.” Instead, they’re dealing with “safe projects” that make them feel good in the moment, short-term solutions that ironically make the long-term problem worse not better.

The truth is that Gates and his billionaire buddies are in denial, trapped in what Mother Jones columnist Julia Whitty calls “The Last Taboo.” She says population is hidden in a “conspiracy of silence” that “unites the Vatican, lefties, conservatives and scientists” and now the world’s richest philanthropists have joined this “conspiracy of silence.”

Scientific American also warned that population is “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Politicians ignore this “last taboo,” denying the fact that if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths just to survive today.

Check the math: First World citizens now consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World. Now they want what we have.

By 2050, with a population of 10 billion, including 1.4 billion each in China and India, we are in effect committing suicide.

How Gates efforts ripple, undermining the future of the planet

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist and author of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Many “share a sharp curve of decline,” that often begins “only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”

Some warn: “It’s already too late.” “We’re past the point of no return.”

Gates billionaire buddies should reexamine the effect of the world’s out-of-control population problem as it ripples through the lens of Diamond’s “collapse equation.” It’s very simple: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth.”

So take a moment and ask yourself how the world’s explosive population growth from seven to 10 billion in one short generation, plus their increasing demand for more resources per capita, will ripple through Diamond’s other 10 key variables:

1. Energy

Oil, natural gas, coal: They’re all near or past their tipping points. With costs accelerating, new technologies and alternatives, biofuels, solar, nuclear power, will never be enough. Unfortunately, by 2050 demand for fossil fuels will still be 80% for 10 billion.

2. Food

Two billion global poor live on $2 a day, depend on fish and wild foods that are dying off for protein. Increasing food prices make matters worse. Green revolution failing: United Nations study says new production technologies have not improved food access.

3. Water

Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: Today a million lack safe drinking water. By 2015 two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries.

4. Farmland

Water, wind eroding crop soils many times faster than new formation.

5. Forests

We’re losing rain forests and protective timber reserves at accelerating rates.

6. Chemicals

Our air, soil, oceans, lakes and rivers are dying from toxic chemicals.

7. Solar energy

Sunlight’s limited. By 2050 we’ll use 100% photosynthetic capacity.

8. Ozone layer

Our CO2 is destroying our ozone protection, reducing solar energy.

9. Diversity

Wild species, populations, genetic diversity, lost, rest out of balance.

10. Alien species

Transferring species to new lands destroying native species.

Diamond’s historical research tells us that leaders are myopic, motivated more by self-interest, expediency and money than by courage, convictions and long-term thinking. They fail to act in time. Unprepared, their worlds crumble fast. They may respond to a catastrophe. But in the end, history tells us over and over that most leaders live in denial, avoiding timely decisions, failing even in time of crises, till it’s too little, too late.

Gates’s Billionaire Philanthropist Club probably knows in their hearts the truth. They’re not in denial. They’ve given up. The problem will never be solved. So they’re not even trying to fix the overpopulation problem, instead, focusing on short-term feel-good efforts, knowing that in the not-too-distant future the planet, our civilization and the human species will fade to black.

Let’s pray that Uncle Warren gets back into the game demanding they “don’t just go for safe projects. Take on the really tough problems.”