Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is a Stanford University professor and a renowned entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies). He is the author of the best-selling but controversial book The Population Bomb (published 1968) and other books which apply the lessons of population zoology to economic issues such as resource use and population growth. For his multiple predictions of impending mass famine and economic catastrophe some have compared him to Thomas Malthus.
His predictions of massive global starvation and resource depletion are controversial. Ehrlich was also loser of the famous wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. It was perhaps this that led Jonah Goldberg to call him "a charter member of our Most Overrated People list and a man who has never made a prediction that came true" .
With Stephen Schneider and two other authors, he critiqued Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Quotes
- "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s 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..."
- "a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century" (emphasis in the original).
- "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (said in 1969)
- "We've already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." - Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet (1990)
- "Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992
