I just noticed how often biologist Paul Ehrlich uses the word idiot. And the irony is overwhelming. Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. - Paul Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich calls UN chief Ban Ki Moon a ‘joyful idiot’ for celebrating humanity when world population reached 7 billion Paul Ehrlich calls Australians ‘IDIOTS’ for repealing ineffective, costly CO2 tax Paul Ehrlich is the doomsaying biologist who wrote the bestseller, The Population Bomb, in 1968. His Malthusian ideas on population and scarcity led him to some of the most ridiculous predictions imaginable. Ehrlich predicted: The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. In 1969, he added, By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earths population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people. The same year, he predicted in an article entitled Eco-Catastrophe! that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million. In the mid-seventies, with the release of his The End of Affluence, Ehrlich incorporated drama into his dire prophesies. He envisioned the President dissolving Congress during the food riots of the 1980s, followed by the United States suffering a nuclear attack for its mass use of insecticides. Thats right, Ehrlich thought that the United States would get nuked in retaliation for killing bugs. - There were no food riots of 1980 - Congress stayed in session - the Third World consumes 27 percent more calories per person per day than it did in 1963 - India is now exporting food - Deaths from famine, starvation, and malnutrition are fewer than ever before. - During the 1980s thirty-three of thirty-five common minerals fell in price. - By 1990, unexploited reserves of oil amounted to 900 billion barrels, 350 billion more than the total oil reserves of the 1970s, when Paul Ehrlich asked poignantly, What will we do when the pumps run dry? Seems odd that this guy would ever call anyone an idiot. Unless he was looking in a mirror, of course. Old article on the anti-Nostradamus in the Stanford Review (if you were amused by the excerpts above): junksciencearchive/news2/ehrlich.html
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 01:02:29 +0000
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