Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Serial failed futurist Paul Ehrlich has warned that Australia will become a third world country, if we Australians don’t abandon one of our main sources of national income.
According to The Guardian;
Q&A: mining will turn Australia into a third-world country, says ecologist Paul Ehrlich
Ehrlich warns ‘you are destroying your life support systems here’ and says his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation will collapse in 50 years is based on ‘gut feeling’
Australia is “working to become a third-world country” through its economic dependence on mining natural resources for export and reliance on coalmining, according to doomsday ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
Ehrlich made the prediction on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, after dismissing the views of other panellists on the question of whether Australia was overpopulated as “mostly nonsense, unfortunately,” and before praising the economic theories of electronics retailer Dick Smith.
“Talk to your ecologist,” Ehrlich said. “You are destroying your life support systems here. You are working at it really hard. You are also working to become a third-world country, because your specialisation of course is to take your raw materials, like your coal, which will destroy the world of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and ship of as much of it unprocessed as you possibly can out to the rest of the world.”
Ehrlich told host Tony Jones, who seemed to be struggling to manage the octogenarian academic, that his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation would collapse in 50 years was based on a “gut feeling”, and freely admitted that a number of his predictions, such as the prediction the United Kingdom would be a small group of impoverished islands occupied by 70 million hungry people by the year 2000, hadn’t quite borne out.
Its good that Ehrlich is researching whether the rumbling of his digestive tract is a more reliable predictor of future events, than whatever he used to do. In fact, I must commend Ehrlich on choosing to study his own gut, rather than the entrails of slaughtered animals, to produce his forecasts – Ehrlich’s method seems a lot tidier and less wasteful than the ancient Roman method of fortune telling, and will in all likelihood produce predictions which are at least as reliable as an IPCC climate projection.
Back in days of yore. people knew how to deal with such people:
Whipped cream pie in the face in public.
Humiliation therapy.
One could argue that Australia is already a third world country.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/31/julie-bishop-wants-to-co-chair-green-climate-fund-derided-by-tony-abbott
Martin writes: “One could argue that Australia is already a third world country.”
A lousy 33 minutes too late to make this observation.
You only found one ?
He won’t be around to see it anyway will he.
I have an idea.
Let’s all just stop using the resources we have have around us.
Then we can have true economic equality.
We”ll all be living in a third-world world!
(Well, maybe not ALL of us will still be living.)
That will require a few other accessories, like huge murals with forward leaning green leaders, patriotic music, and designated evil ones to poke sticks at and brand as traitors, while preparing the next round of purges.
Paul Ehrlich is the author of the cheap paperback The Population Bomb.
An entire generation read this book and adopted a false morality based on overpopulation theory.
This was convenient at the time because of the sex-drugs-occult cultural revolution which popularized mechanical and pharmaceutical culling of the next generation. Very very convenient at the time.
If the topic of this thread were overpopulation, the tone would be entirely different. Most here would repeat what they read in Ehrlich’s book 40 years ago by rote. Again, so very very convenient at the time.
I guess being from the Cannabis Generation means never having to say you are sorry. Or to recognize the true nature of your cultural makers, which is now being revealed. No personal decisions should have ever been made based on this evil man’s philosophies, and yet I see no genuine regret here. But there is an opportunity to look back and see mistakes, be sorry, repent, and remember more kindly the people who loved you and tried to warn you what you were doing back in the 60’s.
…or remembering you have something you should be sorry about?
I know Gunga Din! (: Everyone here read Ehrlich but didn’t inhale!
You are very clearly insane Paul. You need to seek some professional counselling.
Define “insane”.
Even better, talk your way out of insane asylum.
Ehrlich like Suzuki is a completely failed prophet. Whatever they say is always false, and the opposite will come to pass. In 1973 Suzuki said much the same about Canada. It was wrong too. I feel a lot more confident about the future of Australia, now that Ehrlich has spoken out.
The Kardashians won’t go away either.
I don’t know about the UK being “70 million hungry people by the year 2000”, but the way energy prices are being driven up by the green fanaticism of renewables subsidies, there’s an increasing number of people having to choose between “heat” and “eat”.
He always was a nutter. Unlike good wine he hasn’t aged well. I think he’s corked.
Just how many failed predictions is Ehrlich allowed? Oh, those protective walls of
Academia. In a Hammurabi world of actions have consequences, they’d come
crushing down on him.
What’s up with these freakin (socio- ) Biology elitists!!
Ehrich.. Loves butterfies and hates humanity. Operates by gut feel.
E.O. Wilson.. Ant lover and disdain for humanity
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664385
Don’t Listen to E.O. Wilson
Math can help you in almost any career. There’s no reason to fear it.
E.O. Wilson is an eminent Harvard biologist and best-selling author. I salute him for his accomplishments. But he couldn’t be more wrong in his recent piece in the Wall Street Journal (adapted from his new book Letters to a Young Scientist), in which he tells aspiring scientists that they don’t need mathematics to thrive. He starts out by saying: “Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate … I speak as an authority on this subject because I myself am an extreme case.” This would have been fine if he had followed with: “But you, young scientists, don’t have to be like me, so let’s see if I can help you overcome your fear of math.” Alas, the octogenarian authority on social insects takes the opposite tack. Turns out he actually believes not only that the fear is justified, but that most scientists don’t need math. “I got by, and so can you” is his attitude. Sadly, it’s clear from the article that the reason Wilson makes these errors is that, based on his own limited experience, he does not understand what mathematics is and how it is used in science.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/04/e_o_wilson_is_wrong_about_math_and_science.html
Erlich was very fashionable among the academic community when I was working at a university in the 1970s. Some realists saw him as a something of publicity-seeker who was promoting himself as much as his causes – I tended to agree with them and have learnt nothing that convinces me of his veracity or accuracy in the years since. Much of Australia is ‘wasteland’ but it does have an amazing array and abundance of mineral wealth – I can see no good reason not to mine whatever is needed.
Yea, better abondon all mining now and become poor, than waiting to the mines are empty.
Does these guys ever think that their comfortable lives are based on most of what they dislike.
It’s dangerously foolish to dismiss Paul Ehrlich as a fool, a nutter, or an imbecile. I don’t know what motivates him and other intelligent educated people to propose policies that would collapse national and global economies and reduce civilized life to a daily grind of unending taboos around every aspect of living.- a police state run by the green version of the Khmer Rouge. Aliens from outer space are holding his loved ones to ransom, perhaps?
I do agree with his original tenet that human overpopulation would become a threat to the continued existence of civilization. We continue to crawl out further and further onto a branch that can’t support our weight indefinitely, and meanwhile, any major global or perhaps even just hemispheric or continent-wide disruption of our food or energy distribution systems threatens a death spiral from which we may never recover.
This is the inevitable effect of recklessly unfettered globalization and “just-in-time” production and distribution – the Alfed E. Neuman “What me worry?” approach to prosperity.
Fortunately, a prediction by Ehrlich of Oz becoming 3rd World is a safe bet to be totally wrong. I think I will invest long term in the Oz mining industry!! On second thought, he could be right for the wrong reasons. Oz is busy trying to destroy its economy and has peopled its universities with useful fools.
@Gary Young Pearse November 4, 2015 at 2:02 pm
Fortunately, a prediction by Ehrlich of Oz becoming 3rd World is a safe bet to be totally wrong.
Absolutley right Gary.
This person (Paul Uhrlich) thinks that be experting goods Australia will become a third world economy. He needs to be protected or give a larger level of medication. Check this!
Ehrlich told host Tony Jones, who seemed to be struggling to manage the octogenarian academic, that his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation would collapse in 50 years was based on a “gut feeling”, and freely admitted that a number of his predictions, such as the prediction the United Kingdom would be a small group of impoverished islands occupied by 70 million hungry people by the year 2000, hadn’t quite borne out.
______
Thanks to Angela Merkel, Ehrlich may have just been wrong in his timing and his prediction may still come true for the UK and Western Europe. Of course, not for the reasons Ehrlich imagined in his fevered brain.
Paul E. Anything he claims is likely to BOMB. Oh wait, the “Population Bomb”. Yeah Paul, lots of massive starvation going on RIGHT NOW. NOT! NOT! NOT!