When it comes to being consistently, ludicrously wrong over decades, can any contender seriously hope to ever displace reigning champeen of the breed, the loathsome Lefty buffoon Paul Ehrlich?<\/p>\n
\u201860 Minutes\u2019 Exhumes Enviro Cult Leader For A New Round Of Scaremongering<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n
Earth is headed for a sixth extinction, warned<\/a>\u00a0biologist Paul Ehrlich on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d this Sunday. And since Ehrlich has predicted about 20 extinctions over the past 60 years, he\u2019s a leading expert on the issue.<\/p>\n
Couldn\u2019t \u201c60 Minutes\u201d find a fresh-faced, yet-to-be-discredited neo-Malthusian to hyperventilate about the end of the world? Why didn\u2019t producers invite a single guest to push back against theories that have been reliably debunked by reality? Because the media is staffed by environmental pessimists and doomsayers who need to believe the world is in constant peril due to the excesses of capitalism. And Ehrlich is perhaps our greatest alarmist.<\/p>\n
His 1968 book, \u201cThe Population\u00a0<\/a>Bomb<\/a>,\u201d is among the most destructive of the 20th century. The long screed not only made Ehrlich a\u00a0celebrity<\/a>, but gave end-of-day alarmists a patina of scientific legitimacy, popularized alarmism as a political tool, and normalized authoritarian and anti-humanist policies as a cure. Ehrlich\u2019s progeny are other media-favored hysterics by other antihumanists, such as Al Gore or Eric Holthaus or Greta Thunberg, who skipped learning history and science because she also believes we are on the precipice of \u201cmass extinction.\u201d And none of this is to mention the thousands of other Little Ehrlichs nudging you to eat insects,\u00a0gluing<\/a>\u00a0themselves to roads, and demanding you surrender the most basic conveniences and necessities of modernity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe battle to feed all of humanity is over,\u201d the opening line of \u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d reads. \u201cIn the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,\u201d Ehrlich wrote. It was likely, he went on, that the oceans would be without life by 1979 and the United States would see its population plummet to 23 million by 1999 due to pesticides. \u201cThe death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,\u201d he famously\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Mademoiselle in 1970.<\/p>\n
When Julian Simon offered the biologist his famous\u00a0wager<\/a>, Ehrlich responded by\u00a0saying<\/a>, \u201cIf I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.\u201d Instead, Ehrlich picked five natural resources he believed would experience shortages due to human consumption. He lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for those commodities, copper and chromium and so on, fell by more than 40 percent, despite there being 800 million new people during that time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not merely that Ehrlich is always spectacularly wrong about the future but that he remains unrepentant. In 2009, Ehrlich argued that \u201cperhaps the most serious flaw\u201d in \u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d was that it was \u201cmuch too optimistic\u201d about the future. \u201cWe will soon be asking: is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead because we\u2019re all so hungry?\u201d Ehrlich\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0in 2014.<\/em>\u00a0One year later, there were 200 million\u00a0fewer people<\/a>\u00a0suffering from hunger than in 1990, despite there being 2 billion more people inhabiting the Earth.<\/p>\n
It would take a lot of work to point to any tangible factor that\u2019s worsened for humans since the 1970s. There is\u00a0less<\/a>\u00a0war, terrorism, poverty, hunger, child mortality, genocide, death due to weather, illiteracy, etc. By nearly every quantifiable measure the environment is\u00a0also better<\/a>\u00a0now than it was 55 years ago \u2014 which is why contemporary alarmists have learned to prophesy \u201cclimate\u201d catastrophes 30 or 40 years out. Perhaps Ehrlich\u2019s biggest mistake was living long enough to be proven wrong dozens of times. (Then again, in 1932, the year he was born, a man could\u00a0expect<\/a>\u00a0to live to 61. Today they will likely live to be 77. Dr. Doom is 90.)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What a shame. So do us all a favor and drop dead already, you pathetic cretin. Happily, my boy Elon knows how best to deal with “people” like him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n \nEhrlich despises humanity. Nothing he says should be given the slightest credibility.<\/p>\n
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n