VIA GrowthBusters podcast Interview:
http://www.growthbusters.org/ehrlich-earth-day-2020/
PAUL EHRLICH – UNCENSORED ON EARTH DAY 50TH ANNIVERSARY (PODCAST EPISODE 43)
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Interview with Emeritus Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich – April 22, 2020
On his 1968 book, The Population Bomb (49: 00 min)
Ehrlich: “People seem to think that a scientist always believes exactly what he or she said 50 years before. And that, of course, isn’t true. There are a lot of things I would do differently.”
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“The worst mistake we made was to put in scenarios. which are little stories to help you think about the future. But every reviewer treated them as if they were predictions. And I would not do that again. But overall the book did what [the Sierra club asked us to do it] hoped it would do, it brought the population movement into the environmental movement when it was more or less starting up big time after Rachel Carson.”
5420: Ehrlich: “Even people as smart as Obama won’t say we have too many people, we are growing too fast.”
Question: What will it take for people to actually have the courage say something about it.
Ehrlich: “You want the truth? I don’t think there is a chance in hell that we will get the changes we need to keep civilization going. I hate to tell you that. But I don’t see any sign. I can’t be optimistic.”
Societal Collapse is inevitable: 57:30: Ehrlich: “I had great hopes I would die before the collapse really got going, but I missed. The smartest thing I ever did was to be born in 1932.” …
“My daughter lives near Washington DC and I think the odds of me ever seeing her again are very, very small. I don’t think that in my lifetime I will want to fly on a commercial airliner. My lifetime being 32 minutes or something at the moment. But Remember, I am a notorious pessimist.”
On COVID Lockdowns: 40:30 Ehrlich: “In the short term, in the situation that we have gotten ourselves into. I don’t know a single person, virologist, epidemiologist on — I know a lot of them — I trust them all. Everybody says the same thing. We desperately need a national shutdown, and ordered from the top.” …
“If you think the health problems of this virus pandemic are serious. They are nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the health threat of climate change. There is no chance as far as we can tell that this particular coronavirus will kill everybody, but climate disruption can kill everybody. And we have very little time to act. And instead of acting in the right direction, this moronic imbecile (Trump) is working very hard to kill Americans and other human beings in the future for his personal gain and profit.”
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Related:
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German Climate Advisor Hans Schellnhuber: Carrying Capacity Of The Planet Is Less Than A Billion – According to the New York Times, Schellnhuber also said at a plenary session at the international climate change conference in Copenhagen (emphasis added): “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something –- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people.”
Monbiot nails the root of the overpopulation fears: “So why do so many people in the rich world (the great majority of whom, in my experience, are male, white and quite affluent) insist, often furiously, that the ‘real’ global issue, the ‘elephant in the room’, is population growth?”
Monbiot’s answer: “What we see is white people pointing the finger at black and brown people, saying “It’s not us. It’s Them”… The answer to my question – ‘why do so many people in rich nations claim that the biggest environmental problem is population growth?’ – is…Racism.”
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Morano responds to Monbiot. Spot on! It is important to note that it is not conservatives who espouse this, it is typically white male liberals who worry about “overpopulation” in countries with people of color. One of the loudest cheerleaders of reducing African nations’ population has been Al Gore. Below is what Gore said at a Bill Gates event in 2014.
Flashback 2014: Gore: ‘Fertility management’ is needed to reduce the number of Africans to help ‘control the proliferation of unusual weather’ – Gore: ‘Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available so women can choose how many children and the spacing of children — is crucial to the future shape of human civilization. Africa is projected to have more people than China and India by mid-century. More than China and India combined by the end of the century. And this is one of the causal factors that must be addressed’
Paul Ehrlich’s Epic Fail: Why The ‘Population Bomb’ Never Exploded
Ehrlich 1980: ‘Do we really want to threaten to blow up the world over a resource which we know damn well is going to be gone in 20 or 30 years anyway?’
‘Every country is now overpopulated.’
‘There is a finite pie. The more mice you have nibbling at it the smaller every mouses’ share.’
Earlier this month, the biologist Paul Ehrlich used a similar defense after co-authoring a study that warned of a coming “annihilation” of vertebrates. “I am an alarmist,” Ehrlich told the Washington Post. “My colleagues are alarmists. We’re alarmed, and we’re frightened. And there’s no other way to put it.”
Flashback WaPo: Earth is on its way to the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs, scientists warn – Ehrlich said the point of the research is exactly that — to cause alarm. “I am an alarmist. My colleagues are alarmists. We’re alarmed, and we’re frightened. And there’s no other way to put it,” he said. “It’s largely a political and economic problem. We have a government that’s doing everything they can to push these things in the wrong direction. We have economists who think they can actually grow forever in a finite planet.”
NYT: ‘In the 1960s, fears of overpopulation sparked campaigns for population control. But whatever became of the population bomb?’ …’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.’
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‘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”.
In 1974, Paul Ehrlich told the U.S. Senate he wouldn’t bet a nickel U.S. still around in 1994
Ehrlich to U.S. Senate 1974: ‘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.’ – ‘One of the big problems is how do you generate a feeling of urgency…’
‘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.’
John Holdren 1974: ‘I find myself firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp’
NYT says world needs fewer people in order to control the weather – Paging Paul Ehrlich
Overpopulation Guru Paul Ehrlich: ‘Climate Change’ Will Force Humans To ‘Eat Bodies of Dead’
Ehrlich predicts: Humans must soon begin contemplating “eat[ing] the bodies of your dead” after resources are depleted.
Ehrlich claimed that scarcity of resources will get so bad that humans will need to drastically change our eating habits and agriculture. Instead, we will soon begin asking “is it perfectly okay to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry?” He added that humanity is “moving in that direction with a ridiculous speed.” And clearly, this man knows “ridiculous.”
