In the world of prophets of doom, CBS could literally have chosen anyone they wanted for their first gloomcast of 2023. Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, Anthony Fauci, Michael Mann – all are people that not only have a glass half empty outlook on life, they believe the little water that’s actually in the glass is toxic, and the glass came from corpse of a dolphin that choked to death trying to swallow it while escaping the continent of floating trash at sea. But at least most people alive today have heard of these people. Is that who CBS chose to feature? Nah.

Enter Paul Ehrlich. At 89 years old, Ehrlich is among the elders of the movement to rid the world of humanity. In 1968, he penned The Population Bomb, which famously led with this opening paragraph.

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 …”

 

Again, this is the opening paragraph to what was widely regarded as a serious book. What does the scoreboard say?

Tufts University has a chart that shows famine deaths by decade globally since 1870. Not only did hundreds of millions of people not starve to death in 1970, famine-related deaths were on a steep decline that decade and have been a decreasing cause of death worldwide all the way to the last data available to chart in 2015. His prediction was wildly inaccurate. Modernity and technological advances have greatly increased both the production of food worldwide and the distribution system to get it to places where it’s needed. And that’s with a growing population. In 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. By 1980, the last year of Ehrlich’s window of food doom, Earth had just shy of 4.5 billion residents.

You’d think Ehrlich would have been laughed off the stage after he wrote that in 1968. He wasn’t. He gave a speech on Earth Day in 1970 and made another bold prediction. “In 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.”

Notice he didn’t say some important sea life. He said all. That means by 1980, whales, dolphins, sharks, squids, octopi, shrimp, clams, lobsters, crabs, fish of all shapes, sizes and colors, all of it extinct. Think about it. In Paul Ehrlich’s predicted future, Finding Nemo would never have been made in 2003, because fish would have been extinct for the past 23 years and no child alive the film was marketed to would have a working knowledge of what a fish even was.

As for the large areas of coastline having to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish, let me tell you what I was fortunate enough to do on Christmas Eve, 2022. My step-son turned 19 that day, and so we all went to Sea World in San Diego. Had a lovely day – rode rides, stuck my hand in the tank so the fish could eat the dead skin cells off my hand, got to pet the rays and sharks, saw the dolphin show, sea lion and otter show, petted and fed a two-toed sloth (yes, very slowly). And do you know what the common denominator was? Dead fish. I saw a lot of dead fish all day long, but it didn’t stink at all.  That’s because the fish was on ice, and were constantly being fed to all of the species of sea life that were not only not extinct, they were the attraction for people spending hundreds of dollars to travel and see them in person.

I’ll give you another Ehrlich pearl of prophetic prose from another speech he gave in 1971 at the British Institute for Biology. He said, “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.”

In 2000, Queen Elizabeth was only two-thirds of the way through her eventual 70-year reign on the throne as sovereign. The UK is on its 7^th prime minister since Ehrlich predicted it would become Lord of the Flies with tea. The last two prime ministers weren’t even born yet when he made this prediction. In 1970 at the time of the speech, the UK had a population of around 55 million people. In 2000, Ehrlich’s doomsday window, almost 59 people called the UK home. It’s hovering around 68 million now. Whatever problems the UK faces with the fallout of Brexit or political turmoil caused by inflation and too much government spending, starving Britons is not one of them.

So when Scott Pelley props up the near-90-year old in a chair and gets him to reflect on what he frets about now that the nations have not followed his dire warnings up to now, Ehrlich responds by saying, “The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”





Sorry, what was that again? I was having a hard time hearing you over the commotion of 8 billion people celebrating the New Year.

Ehrlich’s big thing is depopulating the planet. He’s been trying to cull the proverbial herd for virtually his entire life, which is a ridiculous tenet to hold. Even at 8 billion people, you could put 4 people to a house, about 2,000 square feet per house, probably make it a townhouse so there’s not much of a yard, but you could house Earth’s population in Texas. Obviously, you’d still need roads, stores, schools, infrastructure and the like, but that’s what Oklahoma could be for. You still could technically fit the entire Earth’s population in with relative ease inside of one U.S. state. The idea that the world has too many people and we’re all doomed just hasn’t panned out. Are there distribution problems with food? Sure. Are there political problems leading to distribution problems of food in places? You betcha. But the Earth can and is supporting the amount of people on it right now. And it can hold more.

There was a school of thought decades ago that we’d reach peak oil, and that there’d no more left one day soon. We’d run out entirely, and then we’d really be screwed. Except we haven’t run out. Every time some egghead comes out with a new timeline of when we’re going to run out of the black energy sauce, another story comes out about a geological find of an untapped ocean of the stuff where we hadn’t discovered it before. The Earth seems to still be in the business of making oil, apparently.

Look, now that we’re into 2023, I have a few resolutions I intend to keep. I lost 50 pounds this last year. I intend to keep that weight off. I intend to work harder than ever before to keep Democrats away from the levers of power at all levels of government. They’re simply a menace. And with every fiber of my being, I intend on mocking alarmists of all stripes whenever they open their pieholes with another prediction of our impending demise. Mockery serves many purposes. It’s the next logical step to take with a person that’s been repeatedly proven to be a fraud and yet continues to be given a platform by other frauds in media. Mockery is also therapeutic. It allows you to feel better about your own situation if you find yourself down in the dumps. You can always look to people like Professor Ehrlich peddling the same nonsense this many years on and admit to yourself that at least you aren’t as bad off as he is…right up to the point the Sweet Meteor of Death hits us like a bank shot off the side cushion and kills us all.

Happy New Year!