Free Republic

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle...

After Words with Paul Sabin Paul Sabin talked about his book, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future, in which he analyzes a bet made between economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich. More than 30 years ago, Mr. Simon made a bet with Mr. Ehrlich on the future prices of five metals, asserting that technological change and a booming market would keep the country prosperous. But Mr. Ehrlich predicted that rising populations would lead to overconsumption, taxed resources, and famine. Mr. Sabin argued that the opposing perspectives of the bettors - faith in free...

I worry too much. You do, too. And no wonder: you can’t watch the news or read a newspaper or click on a website without seeing or reading a report about something horrifying. Often, the risk as reported in the media is grossly out of proportion with the actual risk you face. Given that we have limited time and energy, there are some things people worry about that get far too much attention relative to the risks they pose. It seems like there are terrifying possibilities around every corner, and unfortunately there is an entire “industry”—government—that feeds on and fuels...

More than 40 years ago, American biologist Paul Ehrlich sketched a doomsday scenario for planet Earth in his book The Population Bomb. Adding more people to the planet would inevitably lead to mass starvation and ecological disaster. Since the publication of the book, the global population has nearly doubled but most of its gloomy predictions have not come true. However, this has not stopped its author from campaigning against further population growth, this time in Australia. As he prepared for a series of lectures to the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, Ehrlich warned that Australia was full. As...

Predicted calamities are always the worst; until the future comes. Then, they don't show up, or they shrink to ordinary. Overpopulation is a prime example. Calamity resulting from too many of us has been the subject of countless prophecies, but those never came true. More humans are living on the planet now than ever and living better, rather than being starved and desperate.

I enjoy my subscription to The New Scientist in large part for seeing to what lengths they are willing to go to support global warming orthodoxy. This week's issue, for example, describes a hitherto unobserved and completely unexplained phenomenon involving sudden changes in the temperature of the stratosphere associated with agitation of the wind speed and direction of the ionosphere: No process known to atmospheric physics would allow a specific local phenomenon like the stratwarm to propagate all the way from the stratosphere above the North Pole to the ionosphere above the equator...Some speculate that this trend is a product...

Leadership: Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling. In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich,...

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to...

The president of Estonia goes on national TV to urge his countrymen to have more children. Russian President Vladimir Putin warns his parliament about "a serious crisis threatening Russia's survival": the nation's low birth rate. The government of Singapore is trying to reverse that country's birth dearth by sponsoring a massive taxpayer-funded matchmaking service. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, panicking the world with dire predictions of a population explosion. By the year 2000, he predicted, the world would be so crowded that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. Although Mr. Ehrlich's prophecies have turned out to...

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues. Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or...

By Alan Caruba If you do an Internet search for "oil reserves", you get a ton of information, much of it announcements by various nations saying they have discovered vast potential new fields of crude oil and are, not surprisingly, eager to tap them. Then why are being told that we have to cut back consumption? The answer is political, not geological. The most casual look at the UN Kyoto Climate Control Treaty reveals the economic devastation that would occur if this and other industrialized nations were forced to cut back to 1990 levels of energy use. Economists warn ...

"The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that 'If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000' - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with 'a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run... If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose...

It was a tenet of the late great economist Julian Simon that we'll never run out of any commodity. That's because before we do the increasing scarcity of that resource will drive up the price and force us to adopt alternatives. For example, as firewood grew scarce people turned to coal, and as the whale oil supply dwindled 'twas petroleum that saved the whales. Now we're told we're running out of petroleum. The "proof" is the high prices at the pump. In fact, oil cost about 50% more per barrel in 1979-80 than now when adjusted for inflation. Yet it's...

Daniel Flynn's "Intellectual Morons" serves as a clarion call warning about the dangers of ideology. Flynn won ders why so many public intellectuals embarrass themselves by promoting foolish theories and opinions. The reason is simple, most of these individuals have abandoned rational argument in favor of ideology. According to Flynn, this blind adherence to ideology has led many scholars and activists to embrace ideas that are, at best, foolish and, at worst, dangerous. Each chapter chronicles the background and debunks the ideas of a prominent public intellectual.... Flynn is at his best when dealing with public intellectuals who are famous...

<p>APOLLO BEACH, Florida (AP) -- The Tampa Bay area's burgeoning population of nearly 2 million people is tapping a new source for its drinking water -- salty Tampa Bay itself.</p> <p>The nation's first sea water desalination plant built to serve as a primary source of drinking water is providing water to Tampa, St. Petersburg, New Port Richey and surrounding cities.</p>

<p>A couple of years ago, the late economist and eternal optimist Julian Simon co-authored a book, It’s Getting Better All the Time, with Steve Moore, now of the Club for Growth.</p> <p>The book consists of about 100 charts, graphs and trends that showed how life in America had improved dramatically over the past century by pretty much any criteria you can conceive of to measure.</p>