Ehrlich, Paul

root of 3 forks?

11 21 target bogeyman punching bag

see alarmist, gloom

wrong predictions

August 26, 2016

Doug Domenech appeared on the Bill Martinez show where he talked about global warming and environmentalism. Domenech’s talk was titled “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” [23], [24]

“The essence of the way environmental people think, when you really boil it down, is that the way we can protect our kids is not to have them in the first place,” Domenech told Martinez.[23]

Referring to professor Travis N. Rieder from John Hopkins University, Domenech said Rieder was lecturing students and claiming that “for us to protect ourselves from global warming, and especially to protect kids and people in Africa, that we should have fewer kids in America.”

Domenech said this was “a complete turning over of the principle that people are our most important resource.” [23]

Bill Martinez went on to discuss abortion, which said was eliminating “some 56 million plus of our labour force [..] because of the eugenics movement, Margaret Sanger, and Planned Parenthood.” Martinez asks, “Is this the same type of philosophy, just in a different shape and form?” to which Domenech replies: [23]

“Well, it is. And you might remember Paul Ehrlich, he’s a noted environmental guy, wrote The Population Bomb. And as well as Margaret Sanger and her eugenics. And Lester Brown is another name—he’s just written a book called Full Planet, Empty Plate. […] The essence of the philosophy of these people is that we need to return the Earth to its pre-human state, and that’s the only thing that’s going to satisfy them.” [23]

Domenech lumps global warming in with a list of supposed non-problems, including global cooling, mass starvation, resource depletion, and species extinctions: [23]

“Back in the 70s, one of the great failed environmental predictions wasglobal cooling,” he said. “In the mid 1700s we were still in the midst of alittle ice age, and cooling was a very significant problem, and it remains a big problem. And, of course, that led us to talking about overpopulation—that has not really been a problem.” [23]

He says another “non-problem” is mass starvation, as “our food production is bigger than ever.” [23]

Talking about resource depletion, Domenech pointed to fracking as the reason why “we’ve got more oil and gas than ever.” [23]

“Mass extinction of species – and that has really not happened,” he said. [23]

“That, of course, leads us to global warming, where we are today. These are all these big constructs that we need to worry about, and this is just the latest.” [23]

Domenech had written an article covering similar issues a day prior in RealClear Energy titled “Your Damn Children are Killing the Planet.” [25]

https://www.alternet.org**/2021**/01/ecological-collapse/

no lnx twet

'Ecological Ponzi scheme': Dire scientific assessment warns humanity in denial of looming 'collapse of civilization'

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams January 13, 2021

In an example to the rest of the scientific community and an effort to wake up people—particularly policymakers—worldwide, 17 scientists penned a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the planet and what the future could hold due to biodiversity loss, climate disruption, human consumption, and population growth.

"Ours is not a call to surrender—we aim to provide leaders with a realistic 'cold shower' of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future," according to the perspective paper, co-authored by experts across Australia, Mexico, and the United States, and published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Co-author Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology—who has raised alarm about overpopulation for decades—told Common Dreams his colleagues "are all scared" about what's to come.

"Scientists have to learn to be communicators," said Ehrlich, citing James Hansen's warning about the consequences of "scientific reticence." Hansen, a professor at Columbia University's Earth Institute and former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to Congress about the climate crisis in 1988.

Ehrlich was straightforward about how "extremely dangerous things are" now and the necessity of a "World War II-type mobilization" to prevent predictions detailed in the paper: "a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations [anlo Mex tree planting deal Earth day 2021]), and resource conflicts."

"What we are saying might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But we need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future," said co-author Daniel T. Blumstein of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement about the paper.

"By scientists' telling it like it is, we hope to empower politicians to work to represent their citizen, not corporate, constituents," he said in an email to Common Dreams.

The paper, Ehrlich and Blumstein pointed out, comes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic—which, according to Johns Hopkins University, has killed nearly two million people. Over the past year, the Covid-19 crisis has provoked calls for humanity to end its destruction of the natural world to prevent future public health catastrophes.

"We're all seeing the shocks to our global systems now from Covid and the rise of authoritarian leaders," Blumstein said. "Because our current ways of life are ecologically unsustainable (we're living in an ecological Ponzi scheme), we fully anticipate more—and more deadly—pandemics in the future. We expect civil unrest, wars, and famines. We are all shaken by the likelihood of the collapse of civilization as we know it."

The new warning from scientists, Blumstein noted, cites over 150 other papers "documenting the diverse and shocking decline in biodiversity and planetary 'health' and their consequences." Among the cited sources is a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report that in September revealed an "average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish between 1970 and 2016."

"In the midst of a global pandemic, it is now more important than ever to take unprecedented and coordinated global action to halt and start to reverse the loss of biodiversity and wildlife populations across the globe by the end of the decade, and protect our future health and livelihoods," WWF International director general Marco Lambertini said at the time.

The co-authors—including William J. Ripple of Oregon State University, who last year led thousands of scientists in declaring a climate emergency and earlier this month led a call for "a massive-scale mobilization to address the climate crisis"—echoed Lambertini's message while also underscoring the importance of increasing awareness about what's actually needed.

"Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization," the paper says.

"In fact, the scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms is so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts," said lead author Corey Bradshaw of Australia's Flinders University in a statement. "The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymieing the action that is crucial for survival."

The paper explains that "while suggested solutions abound, the current scale of their implementation does not match the relentless progression of biodiversity loss and other existential threats tied to the continuous expansion of the human enterprise." According to its authors, "That we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now scientifically undeniable."

"With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined,"the paper explains. Consequences include "reduced carbon sequestration, reduced pollination, soil degradation, poorer water and air quality, more frequent and intense flooding and fires, and compromised human health."

Highlighting estimates that the human population will near 10 billion by 2050, the scientists lay out how "large population size and continued growth are implicated in many societal problems," from food insecurity, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and an increased chance of pandemics, to crowding, joblessness, deteriorating infrastructure, and bad governance.

The paper also details the planetary impacts of dirty energy and carbon-intensive food production, and says that "while climate change demands a full exit from fossil fuel use well before 2050, pressures on the biosphere are likely to mount prior to decarbonization as humanity brings energy alternatives online."

A section on failed international goals declares that "stopping biodiversity loss is nowhere close to the top of any country's priorities, trailing far behind other concerns such as employment, healthcare, economic growth, or currency stability."

"The dangerous effects of climate change are much more evident to people than those of biodiversity loss, [covid, ebola? from wet mkt?] but society is still finding it difficult to deal with them effectively," the scientists note, while decrying "utterly inadequate" efforts by governments to even try to meet the targets of the landmark Paris climate agreement.

They further decry the recent rise of right-wing, anti-environment agendas in countries including Australia, Brazil, and the United States—which recently denied President Donald Trump a second term. Ehrlich expressed hope that President-elect Joe Biden will work to deliver on the climate promises he made as a candidate.

Biden's vow to rejoin the Paris agreement "is positive news," but "it is a minuscule gesture given the scale of the challenge," Ehrlich said in a statement.

The president-elect "is moving in the right direction," Ehrlich told Common Dreams, pointing to the selection of former Secretary of State John Kerry as his climate envoy. However, "the Paris goals are increasingly looking inadequate," and "Biden's political opportunities to do anything major may be greatly constrained," he added.

Blumstein stressed that "recycling, using less plastic, eating less meat, taking public transportation, and flying less, while all important, will simply not create the rapid change we need now to save much of the Earth's biodiversity and our lives."

According to Blumstein, "We need rapid political change."

He urged voters to elect leaders who will end fossil fuel use as well as "eliminate perpetual economic growth and properly price externalities so that the environmental costs are built into the price of a product." He also emphasized the importance of access to education and reproductive control, and the need to rein in corporate lobbying and enact campaign finance reform so politicians serve citizens' needs.

"Ultimately," Blumstein added, "we must focus on making equity and well-being society's goals—not the constant accumulation of more junk."

In their paper, the UCLA scientist and his 16 co-authors "contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future."

It is "incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges, ahead and 'tell it like it is,'" they conclude. "Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst."

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After Rio (1992) climate and energy again was covered heavily in the press, Moonie funded Values allied with SEPP? and also funded the Washington Times, where Singer had a regular column, often devoted to climate denial eg., "Climate Claims Wither under the Luminous Lights of Science".

This may be genesis of the doubt the models meme in which Singer left out important data (such as the warming in the 80's, the warmest decade to date);he was challenged by the Ehrlichs, who stated that if the work had been done correctly, remarkably accurate (122).Scheuering?

idea simple: planet finite, a system, use resources, dump chems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/us/the-unrealized-horrors-of-population-explosion.html

no lnx

The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion

12:56

TRANSCRIPT

The Population Bomb?

In the 1960s, fears of overpopulation sparked campaigns for population control. But whatever became of the population bomb?

Video]

By Clyde Haberman

May 31, 2015

The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind. In1966,for example, a writer named Harry Harrison came out with a science fiction novel titled “Make Room! Make Room!” Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for too few resources, the book became the basis for a 1973 film about a hellish future, “Soylent Green.” In 1969, the pop duo Zager and Evans reached the top of the charts with a number called “In the Year 2525,” which postulated that humans were on a clear path to doom.

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson’s on “The Tonight Show.” How the apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth is the focus of this installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining significant news stories of the past and their aftermath.

After the passage of 47 years, Dr. Ehrlich offers little in the way of a mea culpa. Quite the contrary. Timetables for disaster like those he once offered have no significance, he told Retro Report, because to someone in his field they mean something “very, very different” from what they do to the average person. The end is still nigh, he asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse “various forms of coercion” like eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children.” Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

Dr. Ehrlich’s ominous declarations cause head-shaking among some who were once his allies, people who four decades ago shared his fears about overpopulation. One of them is Stewart Brand, founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. On this topic, Mr. Brand may be deemed a Keynesian, in the sense of an observation often attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind, sir. What do you do?” Mr. Brand’s formulation for Retro Report was to ask, “How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”

One thing that happened on the road to doom was that the world figured out how to feed itself despite its rising numbers. No small measure of thanks belonged to Norman E. Borlaug, an American plant scientist whose breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops led to the agricultural savior known as the Green Revolution. While shortages persisted in some regions, they were often more a function of government incompetence, corruption or civil strife than of an absolute lack of food.

Some preternaturally optimistic analysts concluded that humans would always find their way out of tough spots. Among them was Julian L. Simon, an economist who established himself as the anti-Ehrlich,arguing that “humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way.” In 1997, a year before he died, Mr. Simon told Wired magazine that “whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.”

Somewhere on the spectrum between Dr. Ehrlich the doomsayer and Mr. Simon the doomslayer (as Wired called him) lies Fred Pearce, a British writer who specializes in global population. His concern is not that the world has too many people. In fact, birthrates are now below long-term replacement levels, or nearly so, across much of Earth, not just in the industrialized West and Japan but also in India, China, much of Southeast Asia, Latin America — just about everywhere except Africa, although even there the continentwide rates are declining. “Girls that are never born cannot have babies,” Mr. Pearce wrote in a 2010 book, “The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future” (Beacon Press).

Because of improved health standards, birthing many children is not the survival imperative for families that it once was. In cramped cities, large families are not the blessing they were in the agricultural past. And women in many societies are ever more independent, socially and economically; they no longer accept that their fate is to be endlessly pregnant. If anything, the worry in many countries is that their populations are aging and that national vitality is ebbing.

Still, enough people are already around to ensure that the world’s population will keep rising. But for how long? That is a devilishly difficult question. One frequently cited demographic model by the United Nations envisions a peak of about nine billion around 2050. Other forecasts are for continued growth into the next century. Still others say the population will begin to drop before the middle of this century. The trickiness of numbers is underscored by a look at population density. It is generally assumed that having too many people crammed into a small territory is a recipe for poverty and other social ills. Yet according to the United Nations, the three places with the highest density are Monaco, Macao and Singapore. Not one of them remotely qualifies as a desperate case.

In Mr. Pearce’s view, the villain is not overpopulation but, rather, overconsumption. “We can survive massive demographic change,” he said in 2011. But he is less sanguine about the overuse of available resources and its effects on climate change (although worries about the planet’s well-being could be a motivator for finding solutions, much as demographic fears may have helped defuse the population bomb).

“Rising consumption today far outstrips the rising head count as a threat to the planet,” Mr. Pearce wrote in Prospect, a British magazine, in 2010. “And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet.”

“Let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions, the biggest current concern because of climate change,” he continued. “The world’s richest half billion people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent of the population are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.” [but aspiration/AC ]

To some extent, worrying about an overcrowded planet has fallen off the international agenda. It is overshadowed, as Mr. Pearce suggests, by climate change and related concerns. The phrase “zero population growth,” once a movement battle cry, is not frequently heard these days; it has, for instance, appeared in only three articles in this newspaper over the last seven years.

But Dr. Ehrlich, now 83, is not retreating from his bleak prophesies. He would not echo everything that he once wrote, he says. But his intention back then was to raise awareness of a menacing situation, he says, and he accomplished that. He remains convinced that doom lurks around the corner, not some distant prospect for the year 2525 and beyond. What he wrote in the 1960s was comparatively mild, he suggested, telling Retro Report: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

guk 6/20

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/01/sixth-mass-extinction-of-wildlife-accelerating-scientists-warn

no lnx

Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn

Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century

The age of extinction is supported by

About this content

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington

Mon 1 Jun 2020 Mon 1 Jun 2020

The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation.

More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In comparison, the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Without the human destruction of nature, even this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years, the scientists said.

The land vertebrates on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 1,000 individuals left, include the Sumatran rhino, the Clarión wren, the Española giant tortoise and the harlequin frog. Historic data was available for 77 of the species and the scientists found these had lost 94% of their populations.

The researchers also warned of a domino effect, with the loss of one species tipping others that depend on it over the edge. “Extinction breeds extinctions,” they said, noting that unlike other environmental problems extinction is irreversible.

Humanity relies on biodiversity for its health and wellbeing, scientists said, with the coronavirus pandemic an extreme example of the dangers of ravaging the natural world. Rising human population, destruction of habitats, the wildlife trade, pollution and the climate crisis must all be urgently tackled, they said.

Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life

Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments

Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian

https://theconversation.com/a-long-fuse-the-population-bomb-is-still-ticking-50-years-after-its-publication-96090

utah pop cncl

:{Derek Hoff:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)"):}:

Associate Professor, Lecturer in Business and Humanities, University of Utah

no lnx graf vid

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Stanford biologist and ecologist Paul Erhlich declared on the first page of his 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb.” Because the “stork had passed the plow,” he predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

Ehrlich’s book identified dramatically accelerating world population growth as the central underlying cause of myriad problems, from a food crisis in India to the Vietnam War to smog and urban riots in the United States. It sold more than 2 million copies and went through 20 reprints by 1971. Ehrlich appeared more than 20 times on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”, and became the first president of Zero Population Growth, a Washington D.C.–based advocacy organization, while remaining a professor at Stanford.

“The Population Bomb” created more space to hold radical views on population matters, but its impact was fleeting, and maybe even harmful to the population movement. By the early 1970s, many critics were savaging Ehrlich and the larger goal of achieving zero population growth.And the politics of “morning in America” in the 1980s successfully marginalized Erhlich as a doomsdayer.

However, as a historian who has studied debates about population growth throughout U.S. history, I believe that Ehrlich’s warnings deserve a new and less hysterical hearing. While Ehrlich has acknowledged significant errors, he was correct that lowering birth rates was – and remains – a crucial plank in addressing global environmental crises.

A Malthusian warning

Ehrlich drew on nearly 200 years of thinking inspired by British pastor and political economist Robert Thomas Malthus. In his 1798 study, “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus famously predicted that “geometric” population growth would overwhelm “arithmetic” gains in agricultural production, leading to wars, famines and societal collapse.

Fears of the potentially dangerous social and ecological effects of population growth intensified after World War II. Global population surged as public health improved greatly in developing nations, increasing life expectancy. At the same time, the new science of ecology demonstrated the fragility of Earth’s interconnected systems. And the Cold War promoted worries that population-induced poverty would breed communism.

Mainstream advocates of arresting population growth emphasized better access to family planning and education, but Ehrlich had no use for such baby steps. “Well-spaced children will starve, vaporize in thermonuclear war, or die of plague just as well as unplanned children,” he wrote.

It took 200,000 years for Earth’s human population to reach 1 billion – and only 200 years to reach 7 billion.

But growth has begun slowing as fertility rates decline.

Technological optimists pointed to the “Green Revolution” in agriculture, which had vastly increased crop yields up until the late 1960s. But Erhlich, echoing a growing chorus of farmers and agricultural scientists, warned that pesticides ruined the environment and would eventually backfire as weeds and pests developed resistance.

Erhlich never called population the only variable. With physicist John Holdren, he proposed the I = P x A x T formula, which describes human impact as the product of population, affluence (the effects of consumption) and technology.

Nonetheless, Ehrlich believed that population was the key multiplier and massive reductions in global population were critical for human survival.He hoped that a combination of policy carrots and sticks would reduce fertility sufficiently and preserve voluntary family planning. But he held out the possibility that coercive measures, including compulsory sterilizations, might be needed.

Backlash and a new population politics

Millions of Americans shared Ehrlich’s anxieties in 1968. Concerns about the ecological impact of global population growth had helped birth modern American environmentalism. Feminists cited overpopulation to buttress the case for reproductive and abortion rights. Politicians on both sides of the aisle urged action to lower birth rates, and Republican President Richard Nixon signed into law a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.

But the “culture wars” of the 1970s subsumed and reconfigured population issues. On the right, the “pro-life” movement that crystallized in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision considered any talk of population reduction anathema.

China’s one-child policy, launched around 1980, led to serious human rights abuses that allowed anti–family planning conservatives to paint all population programs in a negative light. Conservatives subsequently ignored China’s significant reforms to the policy, as well as research indicating that slowing population growth contributed to China’s economic miracle.

Moreover, newly ascendant anti-Keynesian economists rejected an older consensus that slowing population growth would yield economic benefits. These market-oriented economists asserted that denser populations created economies of scale, and that individual fertility decisions would adjust to any temporary population problems. President Ronald Reagan, who once had dabbled with Malthusianism, tellingly labeled advocates who worried about scarce resources “Doomsday prophets.”

As nations develop economically, couples have fewer children and fertility rates decline. ]

After Congress eliminated national-origin immigration quotas in 1965, immigration rose steadily and accounted for a growing share of population growth in the U.S. In this context, white liberals increasingly risked being branded racist for supporting population reduction.

By the late 1970s, both liberals and conservatives had bought into exaggerated talk of an “aging crisis” – too few workers to pay for the bulge of baby boomers headed toward retirement. This perspective bolstered calls for higher birth rates and further reduced the sting of the overpopulation critique.

An unsolved equation

Today Ehrlich is a largely forgotten prophet, although some small population-centric organizations continue to tilt at windmills and the mainstream press occasionally dips its toes in the water. After some very public rifts over immigration policy, mainstream environmental groups generally avoid or downplay the issue. Meanwhile, the Right continues to dismiss talk of population problems.

Looking back with the benefit of time, it’s clear Ehrlich was wrong to view population as all-encompassing. In addition, the global total fertility rate has declined more than he anticipated – although the development and modernization that has helped lower birth rates, a process known as the demographic transition, comes at great environmental cost.

Ehrlich underestimated human ingenuity. And for now, one can reasonably argue that food insecurity remains primarily political rather than technological.In Ehrlich’s own words, the book’s weaknesses were “not [focusing] enough on overconsumption and equity issues.”

The demographic transition is a pattern in which countries tend to transition from high birth and death rates to lower birth and death rates as they industrialize.]

But he got much right, even if many details and his timing were off. Global population has increased at a remarkably steady rate since 1968, and the United Nations projects that it will reach 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.Scientists continue to extend his prescient warnings that efforts to feed all these people through pesticide-intensive monoculture may backfire. And although Ehrlich exaggerated the threat of mass starvation, about 8,500 young children die from malnutrition every day.

Human-driven climate change is an overriding threat, and is unambiguously worsened by population growth. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that limiting warming in this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) would require cutting global greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 70 percent by 2050 and nearly eliminating them by 2100. “Globally, economic and population growth continue to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion,” the panel observes.

There lies an enduring flaw in Ehrlich’s approach. If impact equals people times affluence times technology, then reducing population alone is not sufficient to solve our ecological crises. But reducing affluence is neither possible nor desirable, since it would condemn millions to lifelong poverty. Ultimately, “The Population Bomb” offered no road map for transitioning away from capitalism without causing human ruin as serious as the environmental ruin that seems to be our destiny. grn blk death BS?

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist and educator who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.^[2] By training he is an entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera(butterflies), and published a landmark paper about the evolution of plants and insects.^[3]

He is also a prominent ecologist and demographer. Ehrlich is best known for his dire warnings about population growth^[4] and limited resources. Ehrlich became well-known after publication of his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb.^[5][6] In years since, some his predictions have developed in a less alarming way than he had predicted, with population growth rates slowing and new technologies of food production implemented. However, he stands by his general thesis that the human population is too large and is a direct threat to human survival and the environment of the planet.

Early life and education

Over-population debate

Graph of human population from 10,000 BC–AD 2000, showing the immense population growth since the 19th century

A lecture that Dr. Ehrlich gave on the topic of overpopulation at the Commonwealth Club was broadcast on the radio in April 1967.^[10] The success of the lecture led to further publicity, and the suggestion from David Brower the executive director of the environmentalist**Sierra Club**,and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books to write a book on the topic. Anne and Paul both collaborated on the book, The Population Bomb but the publisher insisted that a single author be credited.^[11]

Although Ehrlich was not the first to raise the alarm about population issues – concern had been widespread in the 1950s and 1960s – his charismatic and media-savvy approach brought the issue to a new level of media prominence.^[12]

The Population Bomb

The original edition of The Population Bomb began with this statement: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s 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 ...^[13] Ehrlich argued that the human population was too high already, and that while the level of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation. However, he argued that societies must take strong action to curb population growth in order to mitigate future disasters both ecological and social.

In the book Ehrlich presented a number of "scenarios" detailing possible future events, some of which have been held up as examples of errors in the years since. Of these scenarios, Ehrlich has said that although, "we clearly stated that they were not predictions and that 'we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,’ (p. 72) – their failure to occur is often cited as a failure of prediction. In honesty, the scenarios were way off, especially in their timing (we underestimated the resilience of the world system). But they did deal with future issues that people in 1968 should have been thinking about." Ehrlich further states that he stands behind the central thesis of the book, and that its message is as apt today as it was in 1968.^[11]

Ehrlich's views on the situation have evolved over time, and he has presented a number of different proposed solutions. However, he always has been a strong advocate of government intervention into population control.[

^...^

^critic

Critics have disputed Ehrlich's central thesis about overpopulation and its effects on the environment and human society, his solutions, as well as some of his specific predictions made since the late 1960s. One criticism focuses on Ehrlich's allegedly alarmisttone and sensational statements and "predictions" that have turned out to be false. Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine has called him an "irrepressible doomster ... who, as far as I can tell, has never been right in any of his forecasts of imminent catastrophe."^[21] On the first Earth Day in 1970, he warned that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."^[21]

In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."^[21] When this scenario did not come to pass, he responded that "When you predict the future, you get things wrong. How wrong is another question. I would have lost if I had had taken the bet. However, if you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems, just like everybody else."^[21] Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb that, "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."^[13]

A common reply to this criticism is that it was precisely the alarmist rhetoric that prevented the catastrophes he warned of. Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau has said, "It makes no sense that Ehrlich is now criticized as being alarmist because his dire warnings did not, in the main, come true. But it was because of such warnings from Ehrlich and others that countries took action to avoid potential disaster."^[22] In the 1960s and 70s when Ehrlich made his most alarming warnings, there was a widespread belief among experts that population growth presented an extremely serious threat to the future of human civilization, although differences existed regarding the severity of the situation, and how to approach it.^[12][23]...

Simon-Ehrlich wager

Main article: Simon-Ehrlich wager

Julian Lincoln Simon, a Cornucopian economist has argued that overpopulation is not a problem in itself, and that humanity will adapt to changing conditions. Simon argued that in the long run, human creativity would constantly improve living standards, and that the Earth's resources were, in effect, infinite.^[27] Ehrlich called Simon the leader of a "space-age cargo cult" of economists convinced that new resources would miraculously appear and re-asserted the idea that population growth was outstripping the earth's supplies of food, fresh water and minerals.^[6] This exchange led to the Simon-Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for certain metals that he made in 1980 with, and lost to, Julian Simon.^[6] Economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year-periods over the last century.^[28][29]

Response

Ehrlich has argued that humanity has simply deferred the moment of disasterthrough the use of more intensive agricultural techniques, such as those introduced during the Green Revolution. Ehrlich holds that increasing populations and affluence are putting more and more pressure on the global environment in many different fields, from loss of biodiversity, overfishing, global warming, to urbanization, chemical pollution and competition for raw materials.^[30] He maintains that in light of growing global incomes, reducing consumption and human population is critical to protecting the environment and maintaining living standards, and that current rates of growth are still too high for a sustainable future.^{[31][32][33][34]}

Other activities

Ehrlich was one of the founders of the group Zero Population Growth during 1968, along with Richard Bowers and Charles Remington. He and his wife Anne were on the board of advisers of the Federation for American Immigration Reform until 2003. He is currently a patron of Population Matters, (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust).

Ehrlich has spoken at conferences in Israel on the issue of desertification. He has argued that "True Zionists should have small families".^[35]

Charles Lee Remington (January 19, 1922 – May 31, 2007), an entomologist known for studies of butterflies and moths, was a Yale University professor, and is considered the father of modern lepidoptery.^[1] He established a Periodical Cicada preserve in Hamden, Connecticut. He developed the insect collection at the Peabody Museum of Natural History.^[2]

Biography

He was born to Pardon Sheldon and Maud Remington in Reedville, Virginia, on January 19, 1922. His family then moved to St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up collecting butterflies with his father. He did his undergraduate studies at Principia College, where he received a B.S. in 1943. During his military service in World War II, he served as a medical entomologist, throughout the Pacific, researching insect-borne diseases and centipede bites in the Philippines.^[3]

After the war, Remington studied for his doctorate at Harvard. He founded the Lepidopterists' Society with Harry Clench. Remington also started a friendship with Vladimir Nabokov who was a keen amateur butterfly collector.^[3]

He started teaching at Yale University in 1948. He proposed that there were geographic regions which he called suture zones where species tended to hybridize with close relatives.^[3]

With Richard Bowers and Paul R. Ehrlich he founded Zero Population Growth. He served on the board of advisors of the Carrying Capacity Network [1], which supportsimmigration reduction.

tom worstall forbes

Paul Ehrlich has predicted that we humans will turn to cannibalism in the not too distant future as the only way to stop ourselves being hungry. I would take this as evidence that Paul Ehrlich has finally and irretrievably lost the plot. He’s been known for 50 years now as one of the great voices crying in the wilderness about the perils of overpopulation.

The problem is that absolutely none of his predictions have come to pass. And the reason for that is that he’s reasoning from the wrong evidence base. He is, by original training, an entomologist: someone who studies insects. And human beings are not insects: we have agency for a start, as well as intelligence. A far better predictor of what is, has and will, happen about human population can be found in the work of Gary Becker, the economist, than in Ehrlich, the entomologist. The reason being that economists do attempt to explain how humans act in contrast to the entomologists who are trying to describe how insects act.

The comments about cannibalism came atHuffPo Live. A partial transcript is here.

Host John Zepps asked Ehrlich if in the decades and centuries to come, we will need to change the way we use and consume animals. Not to worry, Ehrlich said.

“I don’t think there’s going to be the centuries to come with our kind of civilizations and with the kind of ethical issues that at least some people (Republicans) in our civilization are concerned with,” he said, chuckling. “I think the issues are more likely to be “is it perfectly OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry.”

Seemingly taken aback, Zepps asked, “Really? We’ll get that bad?”

“Oh,” Ehrlich said. “It’s moving in that direction with ridiculous speed.”

There’s one obvious problem with this: which is that a human being’s cadaver would feed another human being for about a month, tops. So there’s not actually enough dead bodies around, nor can there be, to support any significant number of people. It might sound rather callous to point this out but human beings are simply too slow growing to become a reasonable food source for other human beings. We need something that’s rather faster to put on weight than ourselves.

But that trivia aside the mistake that Ehrlich is making is to think that we humans do in fact breed like insects. Or as the Reverend Malthus thought we did. Which is to say that when the food supply increases then more people survive. Thus we always expand the population to the limits of the possible food supply. Given that Ehrlich thinks that the methods we use to expand this supply (fertilisers, irrigation, industrialised farming) cannot be maintained for very long therefore there’s going to be starvation and a mass population crash. But this isn’t actually the way that human beings work.

As Gary Becker pointed out in his economic study of the family as our income (or wealth, choose whichever you prefer) rises then we tend to have fewer children, not more. And this has been happening in every single human society as it gets richer. So much so that we expect to see the peak of human population in about 30 years’ time. For we expect just about everywhere to go through that wealth (or income) level where fertility declines in the next few years. So much so that even the UN, not normally all that up to date on these sorts of things, is predicting that human population in 2100 will be lower than it will be in 2050, or even than it is today. And historically the UN has rather overestimated population numbers.

What further damages Ehrlich’s case is that the shortages of all of those things that make up industrialised farming aren’t about to happen either. Even climate change is expected to increase agricultural yields up to about 2080.

Ehrlich’s predictions have always been a little wild, not one of them has ever actually come true, but this idea that we’re imminently about to start eating the dead is proof of little more than that he’s ever further from the plot, irretrievably lost in the nonsense of his own misunderstandings of the world around him.

other forbes pos: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltobias/2013/01/16/the-ehrlich-factor-a-brief-history-of-the-fate-of-humanity-with-dr-paul-r-ehrlich/

ch 5

First Woodlands Conference:

Limits to Growth, 1975 The first Woodlands Conference was held in October 1975. The conference title reflected Mitchell’s desire to restate the original message by the Club of Rome: “Limits to Growth: The First Biennial Assessment of Alternatives to Growth,” which meant, in short, “Limits, but . . .” Mitchell was intimately involved in preparing the conference, more so than in later events. The problem “concerned me,” he said. “Therefore I took the time to try to think out what in the world was happening.” 10 Dennis Meadows and John Naisbitt, then president of the Urban Research Corporation, served as conference directors. 11 The conference, held at the just-opened Woodlands Conference Center, was an enormous success, with five hundred attendees, large press coverage,

and the excitement generated at the event. Molly Ivins, coeditor of the Texas Observer, said in her review of what she called the “Doom Conference”: “I have seen the future, and I can tell you it is polysyllabic.” 12 The conference started from the premise that limits not only existed but were already having a negative effect on the global quality of life. Most participants agreed that there were some limits to be faced. They attempted to formulate a response: (1) Transition to steady state would have positive consequences for society provided action was taken in time; (2) Limits would have serious negative consequences if they were ignored so long that they began to intrude on social development; and (3) Growth had to be redirected by better balancing of economic, social, and environmental goals. 13 There were forty panelists and speakers, including Jay Forrester (who had designed the computer program that was used in the Limits to Growth study); the British economist E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful); World Watch Institute presidentLester Brown; Herman Kahn, founding director of the Hudson Institute; Dr. JonasSalk, developer of the polio vaccine; Limits to Growth authors Donella and Dennis Meadows; and Ian McHarg, author of Design with Nature and planner of The Woodlands. Other prominent speakers at the 1975 conference included Sico Mansholt (European Common Market), Amory Lovins (United Nations Environment Program), Elise Boulding (University of Colorado), U.S. senator Jacob Javits, Herman E. Daly(Louisiana State University), and Hazel Henderson (Princeton University). Many of the conference speakers became prominent in the field of sustainability studies in the years that followed. Reminiscing, George Mitchell described the highlight of the conference: a heated debate between Dennis Meadows and Herman Kahn. Kahn, a former staff member of the rand Corporation and founder of the Hudson Institute on future studies, spoke on the topic “Growth Is Good for You.” He disagreed vehemently with the limits-to-growth thesis. Mitchell summarized Kahn’s position: “Just develop everything and technology will take care of everything.” 14 In Mitchell’s view Meadows had the better arguments in the debate that followed Kahn’s presentation, but he faced a formidable debater. Meadows put it this way: “Kahn’s viewpoint, which is shared by many other people, is that there are no limits. If something like a limit starts to show up, the market and technology will finesse it and let you keep going.”

Schmandt, Jurgen. George P. Mitchell and the Idea of Sustainability.

College Station, TX, USA: Texas A&M University Press, 2010.

ebrary collections. 25 May. 2014