Population Doomster Paul Ehrlich’s New Eco-Scare: ‘Biological Annihilation’

Dr. Ehrlich, who rose to prominence in the 1960s after he wrote “The Population Bomb,” a book that predicted the imminent collapse of humanity because of overpopulation, said he saw a similar phenomenon in the animal world as a result of human activity. “There is only one overall solution, and that is to reduce the scale of the human enterprise,” he said. “Population growth and increasing consumption among the rich are driving it.” – The New York Times, 11 July 2017

One of the study’s authors is Stanford University biology professor Paul Ehrlich, who penned the 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million [it’s now 326 million]. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: ‘If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’ Today Ehrlich says about mass-extinction episodes, “We are now moving into another one of these events that could easily, easily ruin the lives of everybody on the planet.” Question: Would you take investment advice from someone with a history of losing stock predictions? Why is anyone still listening to this man? –Selwyn Duke, The New American, 13 July 2017

This is not the first time the alarms of mass extinction has been raised. In 1970, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, predicted that between 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals would be extinct by 1995. In 1979, the Oxford biologist Norman Myers suggested that the world could “lose one-quarter of all species by the year 2000.” Also in 1979, the Heinz Center biologist Thomas Lovejoy chimed in, estimating that between a seventh and a fifth of global diversity would become extinct by 2000. None of those dire predictions came true. –Ron Bailey, Reason Online, 12 July 2017