60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich's Failed Doomsaying One More Time

Reason ^ | 1.3.2023 | Ronald Bailey

[hinckley buzzard]

Ehrlich and his colleagues have been thinking the same things for over 50 years. And so far they have thought wrong.

[Mastador1]

This guy is an idiot, a highly educated idiot but an idiot all the same. I remember well his fearmongering well, and Johnny Carson helping to promote it on his show. Interesting that despite Ehrlich’s doom and gloom and gloom about mass starvation and death because dear Gaia just couldn’t support even the number of souls when he he wrote his marvel of bullshit, here we are with even higher global population who have been fed and the only reason people do go hungry and starve is because of local and global corruption.

[oldguy1776]

There is no Earth...we are all living an illusion projected by the galactic overlords from Alpha Beta. UFO’s are their observation probes.

[SamAdams76]

Can't believe this guy is still around. Elon Musk was roasting this loser on Twitter the other day.

I remember reading "The Population Bomb" as a child in the early 1970s. My mother was always the alarmist type and so had plenty of "gloom and doom" books on the shelves. Depressed the hell out of me though as I was naive enough back then to take it all serously.

[SpaceBar]

When an individual predicts the calamitous end of society they are labeled a crackpot.

When an entire religion does it, it’s called faith and prophesy.

[Redmen4ever]

Paul Erlich isn’t a scientist, at least not any longer. He has transitioned to a religious fanatic.

What he called the population explosion, and what is today called climate change is a pseudo-science. It’s based on a limited understanding of the way the world works, extrapolated far out of sample. That it has been completely refuted by subsequent history is of no consequence to true believers, because they are mystics.

They insulate themselves from reality with a veneer of “common sense.” For example, common sense tells you that there’s the earth has a limited ability to sustain life. No, the earth doesn’t have a limited. We human beings change the earth. We have no idea how powerful we will become. We can irrigate deserts and farm the oceans. We may one day be able to tap into the energy within the earth and in the Sun. As far as we have come since the start of the industrial revolution about two hundred years ago, we can go as far in the next several hundred years.

[Steely Tom]

I too remember the wall-to-wall promotion that was given this book, in the 1967-68 time period. Not only was it in the display window of the local bookstore, but big posters were displayed in the window too. It was all the buzz among the chattering class at that time, on TV, in Newsweek and Time (I think each of those very influential magazines gave it cover-story treatment).

The book gave a great accelerative kick to the birth control and ZPG movements, which were already well underway and funded by many governments, including ours.

Western countries took these policy suggestions to heart, with family sizes falling to close to or below the replacement rate. Of course, the third-world countries paid no attention.

Then, the switcheroo. When the first-world countries realized that their populations weren't growing fast enough to sustain the debt load that were the result of their deficit spending policies, their governments started saying "we've got to import more workers to replace the ones that we've lost!"

Guess where they started getting the replacement workers from?

[SamAdams76]

Younger people today stressing about silly things like global warming should know that these doom and gloom grifters have been around for over a half century. Below is another book from that era that my mother had a copy of. I was 13 in 1975 and yet here I am. I guess I'm a survivor. I even survived my mother's baloney and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Of which there was always plenty.

I found the opening paragraph to "Population Bomb", for everybody's entertainment...this was written in 1968. If I wrote something so ridiculously wrong like that, I would be embarrassed to go outside in public.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole...

[Lurker]

No one ever talks about Julian Simon. He handed Erlich his ass quite publicly over this nonsense.

L

[SeekAndFind]

Ehrlich is 90 years old.

You can’t teach an old dog news tricks.

[Mr. K]

They are bringing it out now because THEY WANT TO DEPOPULATE the planet.

There are actually nutballs who WANT it to happen.

[GOPJ]

60 Minutes needs to focus on the United States first... we can assist with the solution IF illegals don’t sink us first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muw22wTePqQ

Gumballs: Immigrants by the numbers.

[nickcarraway]

I'll take my chances with the dog.

Interestingly, his name means honest. He probably really does believe this stuff.

[rxh4n1]

“It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That’s what mass extinction looks like.”

I look at my window and there aren’t any birds cause it’s mid-winter. They’re smarter than this idiot. They like global warming.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

I was big in the environmental movement in our high school at that time. I found $20 and bought the screed with it. To me it was gospel. I was a card-carrying member of about 14 environmental groups, including ZPG. … I eventually met Jesus — or I should say He found me — and everything changed.

Many here won’t like this, but I foresee that eventually solar and other power sources combined with domicile battery storage will be normal. There will then be extra power available that can be used for desalinization, vastly reducing the worldwide water shortage and turning desserts into highly productive farmland.

This assumes we are delivered from hell-bent depopulation overlords.

[Organic Panic]

“In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”

I remember teachers trying to scare the hell out of us with the “Coming Ice Age.” But then came acid rain and the OZONE hole from our hair spray in the 80s.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

If someone ever creates a “Museum of Wrong,” Erlich’s statue belongs in the atrium.

[roadcat]

Depressed the hell out of me though as I was naive enough back then to take it all serously.

I also remember reading "The Population Bomb" in the early 1970s. My girlfriend's sister declared that no one should birth a baby in such a world. I married my girlfriend and we had our first baby in the late 1970s, and more later. Her sister eventually had a child in the early 1990s as a 40-year-old; I guess she finally gave up on the doom and gloom predictions.

[Glenmore]

But eventually they will be right; unlimited growth against finite resources is not possible.