Paul Ehrlich proves the prophets of doom are wrong once again
Recently, that venerable TV news magazine. 60 Minutes, had 90-year-old Paul Ehrlich on to tell its audience that we are all doomed. Dr. Ehrlich has been performing this shtick for over 50 years, ever since he published his monster best seller “The Population Bomb” in 1968, the year before men first walked on the moon. He was wrong then and he is wrong now.
Ehrlich’s book predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die from famines starting in the 1970s. His premise was that the increase in human population would shortly outstrip our ability to grow food. However, the Green Revolution, which occurred shortly after the publication of “The Population Bomb” ended the prospect of famines, barring some volcanic disaster, forever. The joke is that obesity is a greater threat than starvation in the modern world.
Food was not the only commodity that the world was going to run out of. The oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many people that fossil fuels would soon become scarce. Later, engineers developed an oil and gas extraction technique called fracking. Suddenly, fossil fuels, at least for a time, become plentiful.
The 1970s prophets of doom caused a lot of bad policy and worse culture. The prospect of overpopulation persuaded the rulers of China to impose the One Child Policy, which resulted in a demographic train wreck that features a mismatch between men and women and an aging population with too few young people to take care of them.
Movies like “Soylent Green” and “Blade Runner” depicted dystopian futures in which overpopulation, pollution, and scarcity combined to create a hell on Earth for all but the elites. Long before the Green New Deal, public policy experts and purveyors of popular culture combined to convince people that the future would be bleak, if a future would happen at all. Many people believed that the Cold War would end in a nuclear conflict.
The reality of 2023 does not resemble in the slightest the fantasy that the 1970s-era prophets of doom predicted. Problems exist, but not because of a scarcity of resources, but because of human folly. The United States and Europe are enduring a minor energy crisis, largely because of resistance to fossil fuels and nuclear power brought about by Green New Dealers. Some people in the developing world are malnourished, not because of a shortage of food, but because of corrupt governments and armed conflicts.
Ehrlich, having been proven wrong about famines caused by overpopulation, has moved on to his next doom prophecy. Now humans are going to cause mass extinctions of wildlife by encroaching on their habitats. However, Ronald Bailey, writing for Reason, has debunked Ehrlich’s latest prediction. Human ingenuity, especially in agriculture, as well as other trends will return much of the land’s surface to the wild, hence preventing mass extinctions.
Undaunted, Ehrlich has recently released his autobiography, “Life: A Journey through Science and Politics,” in which by all accounts, he is unapologetic about getting it wrong in “The Population Bomb.” Besides animal extinction he has signed on to the climate change is going to kill all of us trope.
New energy technology will ensure human prosperity while decreasing human impacts on the modern world. Carbon capture and new, safer nuclear reactors will alleviate the threat of climate change. The recent fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore points the way to even greater energy abundance using the same process that powers the sun.
Thanks to Project Artemis, humans are returning to the moon for the first time in decades. Since private businessmen such as Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk are participating in the effort, the prospect of economically developing the moon and Earth approaching asteroids will become reality. All the resources that civilization needs to not only sustain itself but to grow reside in space.
Jeff Bezos gets a lot of grief, some of it deserved, much of it scurrilous. But his vision of a space-based future is a compelling one, including mining the moon and asteroids, moving most industries from Earth to space, and building free-flying space colonies, each containing a million people. Earth would become a garden and a tourist attraction, preserved from the ravages of heavy industry and resource extraction. His vision is similar to Elon Musk’s dream of Mars colonies.
Love or hate Bezos, but his future is a lot more attractive than the one presented by Paul Ehrlich and his heirs in the Green New Deal.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and energy policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.
