Paul Ehrlich to Congress in 1974: ‘If bad weather continues in the Midwest this year, and if the monsoon should fail this year in India, as it might, then I think you’re going to see the age of scarcity and many of the changes I’m talking about coming on next winter’
'I think that the thing you can say with absolute assurance is, considering the magnitude of the changes, if we have 20 years-which I wouldn't put a nickel on-but if we have 20 years, we're already 10 years too late in starting to do something about it. We're not going to change the political and economic structure of the United States overnight. And for that reason, I think that any feeling of urgency that you can generate—one of the big problems is how do you generate a feeling of urgency...'
Analysis: People like Ehrlich and Holdren have made careers of being wrong and frightening people. Today Ehrlich bangs the drum for anthropogenic global warming, and Holdren helps the Obama administration mess things up in America and around the world.
Here is areview from Amazon.com by Glenn Gallagher that typifies the book’s reviews:
I read the Population Bomb when it first came out, and believed it. Paul Ehrlich envisioned a horrific future with mass starvation of millions, if not billions of people by 1995. As we now know, Ehrlich was a Malthusian of the worst order, and almost single-handedly gave environmentalists a bad name. He is the epitome of an alarmist who has significantly harmed the ability of reasonable environmentalists to be taken seriously (The Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome). I’m sure Dr. Ehrlich meant well, but boy, was he wrong. This book should rest in peace, never to be read again. Or, perhaps it could be read as a lesson learned in how to avoid making extremist statements that make you and your colleagues look stupid.
